Vanessa Galarneau

Vanessa Galarneau is Co-Founder and CFO of Pluvo, the Decision Intelligence Platform that's redefining how mid-market and growth-stage companies approach financial planning and forecasting. With over 1,000 conversations with CFOs and finance leaders across industries and continents, Galarneau has become a leading voice on the evolution of finance in the AI era. 

Before launching Pluvo, Galarneau identified a critical gap in the Canadian government’s Impact Assessment Agency: disconnected budgeting systems left departments without a voice, and leadership without real-time visibility. She then brought AI and machine learning to the major law firm Norton Rose Fulbright, where she was one of the youngest female managers in the firm’s history. She led AI-driven ERP before the generative AI era started, and ran a global team handling billions of dollars in throughput. These experiences sparked her mission to democratize access to enterprise-grade financial intelligence for businesses that lack armies of analysts. 

Galarneau and her three co-founders built their first product—a budget management system for government—which they successfully sold to multiple federal departments through Rain Technologies before pivoting to serve the broader market with Pluvo. The company was recently recognized as a Best Ottawa Business Awards recipient and has pioneered what it calls "context-rich judgment systems" that capture not just numbers, but the reasoning behind every strategic decision. 

Galarneau practices what she preaches as the CFO of a fast-growing fintech startup, using Pluvo internally to manage the company's own financials. She's passionate about challenging the status quo of spreadsheet dependency, arguing that CFOs spending hours building board packages and reconciling broken Excel formulas are symptoms of a finance function stuck in 2000.