Paris-based startup Pigment has raised $145 million in funding just five years after it was founded. This enterprise software company provides a business planning platform that allows large companies to visualize past financial performance and predict upcoming quarters.
This funding round came as a bit of a surprise, as few large-scale funding rounds have taken place in France. According to a recent study by EY, funding rounds in the French technology ecosystem fell by 38% in 2023 compared to 2022.
But if you exclude hot AI startups like Mistral AI and capital-intensive infrastructure businesses that aren't really tech startups, like EV charging networks (Driveco) and EV battery factories (Verkor), the funding round will decrease significantly. Pure software startups have had a tough time over the past few 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 also participated, many of which were also existing investors.
And there's a reason Pigment was able to raise so much money at a significantly higher valuation less than a year after its last funding round. In 2023, the startup has successfully tripled its revenue and doubled its customer base with famous clients such as Unilever, Datadog, Kayak, and Merck. Half of Pigment's customers are based in the US
“Our current investors said, 'If we're going to raise money in 18 months to scale with another company, we might as well offer great terms for an internal round now.' ” And it all happened so quickly. . . The transaction was completed in a week,” co-founder and co-CEO Eleonore Crespo told me.
Before founding Pigment, Crespo worked at VC firm Index Ventures and Google. She co-founded Pigment with her Criteo co-founder and CTO, Romain Niccoli, an early success in the French tech ecosystem.
“One of our backers, IVP, benchmarks the growth rate of all SaaS companies. And since we've been selling our product, we've had the highest growth rate ever in terms of revenue growth. , and are now in the top 5% of SaaS companies,” said Crespo.
Image credit: Pigment
Pigment is a flexible business planning tool used by chief financial officers and finance teams to create reports and budgets. This is his latest SaaS platform that integrates with all your company's data (ERP, HRIS, data lake, etc.) and can be used as a collaboration tool.
In addition to finance teams, sales teams can also use Pigment to create quotas and see everyone's performance against quarterly quotas. Human resources teams can see how they need to expand or contract their workforce based on strategic changes and financial goals.
“We've done a lot of work to address not just finance teams, but other teams as well. We've built a number of modules that allow us to serve HR teams, supply chain teams, sales teams. We have been developing it,” Crespo said.
In fact, as more teams start using Pigment, it will become an important tool for cross-team collaboration. And it is believed to work better than traditional tools from Oracle and SAP.
Like many software companies, Pigment has added AI capabilities. Pigment acts as a central repository for all the company's key metrics, so customers can ask his Pigment AI questions in natural language and get answers instantly. Examples include “What is the breakdown of revenue by country?” and “Why were actual revenue for this product lower than last quarter's forecast?”
But more importantly, the company has optimized its core product to work well with large datasets and complex calculations. The best enterprise software products are must-haves. This means that companies usually don't have to spend a lot of resources improving their products, and clients have to interact with this tool. Pigment is still a challenger in this industry, so other businesses believe he needs to offer better products to compete with planning products.