Paris-based startup Pigment has raised a $145 million funding round just five years after its founding. The enterprise software company offers a business planning platform so that large companies can visualize their past financial performance and forecast the coming quarters.
This funding round comes as a bit of a surprise, as larger rounds have been few and far between in France. According to a recent study from EY, funding rounds in the French tech ecosystem fell by 38% in 2023 compared to 2022.
But if you remove AI startups like Mistral AI and capital-intensive infrastructure that aren't actually tech startups like electric vehicle charging networks (Driveco) and electric vehicle battery factories (Verkor), the funding rounds drop dramatically. Pure software startups have had a rough couple of years.
Pigment appears as an exception in Series D. Existing investor Iconiq Growth is doubling down by leading this new funding round. Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, IVP, Meritech, Greenoaks and Felix Capital are also participating – many of whom were existing investors as well.
There's a reason why Pigment was able to raise so much at a much higher valuation less than a year after its previous funding round. In 2023, the startup was able to triple its revenue and double its customer base with established clients such as Unilever, Datadog, Kayak and Merck. Half of Pigment's customers are in the United States
“Our existing investors told us that if you are going to raise money in 18 months to expand with others, we might as well offer you great terms now for an internal round.” And everything happened very quickly. . . And in one week, an agreement was reached,” co-founder and co-CEO Eleonor Crespo told me.
Before founding Pigment, Crespo worked at VC Index Ventures and Google. She co-founded Pigment with Romain Nicoli who was co-founder and CTO of Criteo – an early success for the French tech ecosystem.
“IVP – one of our backers – measures the growth rate of all SaaS companies. “And since we sold our product, we have been in the top 5% of SaaS companies with the best growth rate ever, in terms of revenue growth,” Crespo said.
Image credits: pigment
Pigment is a flexible business planning tool used by CFOs and finance teams to create reports and budgets. It's a modern SaaS platform, which means you can integrate it with all your company's data (ERP, HRIS, data lakes, etc.) and use it as a collaboration tool.
In addition to finance teams, sales teams can use Pigment to create quotas and see how everyone is doing against quotas quarterly. HR teams can see how they should scale their workforce up and down based on strategic changes and financial goals.
“We've done a lot of work to address other teams, not just finance teams. We've developed a lot of modules that enable us to serve HR teams, supply chain teams and sales teams,” Crespo said.
In fact, as more teams start using Pigment, it is becoming an important tool for cross-team collaboration. It should work better than legacy tools from Oracle and SAP.
Like many software companies, Pigment has also added artificial intelligence features. Since Pigment serves as the central repository for all important company metrics, customers can ask Pigment AI questions in natural language to get a quick answer. Examples include “Can you give me a revenue breakdown for each country” or “Why were our actual revenues lower than our expectations last quarter for this product.”
But more importantly, the company has improved its core product so that it works well even with large data sets and complex calculations. The best enterprise software products are must-have products, which means companies usually don't need to spend a lot of resources on improving the product — customers need this tool to work. Pigment is still a competitor in this industry, so they believe they need to provide a better product to compete with other business planning products.
