Paris-based startup Pigment has raised a $145 million funding spherical simply 5 years after its inception. The enterprise software program firm provides a enterprise planning platform for big corporations to visualise their previous monetary efficiency and forecast upcoming quarters.
This funding spherical comes as a little bit of a shock as giant rounds have been few and much between in France. Based on a current examine from EY, funding rounds within the French tech ecosystem have been down 38% in 2023 in comparison with 2022.
However when you take away buzzy AI startups like Mistral AI and capital-intensive infrastructure performs that aren’t actually tech startups like EV charging networks (Driveco) and EV battery factories (Verkor), funding rounds are drastically down. Pure software program startups have had a tough couple of years.
Pigment seems as an exception with its Sequence D. Present investor Iconiq Progress is doubling down by main this new funding spherical. Sandberg Bernthal Enterprise Companions, IVP, Meritech, Greenoaks and Felix Capital are additionally taking part — a lot of them have been current traders too.
And there’s a cause why Pigment managed to boost a lot at a considerably greater valuation lower than a yr after its earlier funding spherical. In 2023, the startup managed to triple its income and double its buyer base with well-known shoppers like Unilever, Datadog, Kayak and Merck. Half of Pigment’s shoppers are based mostly within the U.S.
“Our present traders instructed us ‘when you’re going to boost cash in 18 months to scale with others, we would as properly give you nice phrases proper now for an inside spherical.’ And every part occurred in a short time . . . In a single week, it was a completed deal,“ co-founder and co-CEO Éléonore Crespo instructed me.
Earlier than Pigment, Crespo labored for VC agency Index Ventures and Google. She co-founded Pigment with Romain Niccoli who was the co-founder and CTO of adtech startup Criteo — an early success of the French tech ecosystem.
“IVP — one in every of our backers — benchmarks the expansion price of all SaaS corporations. And since we’ve been promoting our product, we’ve been within the high 5% of SaaS corporations with the very best development price ever, by way of income development,” Crespo stated.
Picture Credit: Pigment
Pigment is a versatile enterprise planning instrument that’s utilized by chief monetary officers and finance groups to create stories and budgets. It’s a contemporary SaaS platform, that means that you could combine it with all of your firm’s knowledge (ERP, HRIS, knowledge lakes, and so on.) and use it as a collaboration instrument.
Along with finance groups, gross sales groups can use Pigment to create quotas and see how everyone seems to be performing in opposition to quarterly quotas. HR groups can see how they need to scale the workforce up and down based mostly on strategic adjustments and monetary aims.
“We’ve completed a variety of work to deal with different groups, not simply finance groups. We’ve developed a variety of modules that allow us to serve HR groups, provide chain groups and gross sales groups,” Crespo stated.
The truth is, as extra groups begin utilizing Pigment, it turns into an necessary instrument for cross-team collaboration. And it’s purported to work higher than legacy instruments from Oracle and SAP.
Like many software program corporations, Pigment has additionally added AI options. As Pigment acts because the central repository for all of the necessary metrics of an organization, clients can ask inquiries to Pigment AI in pure language to get a fast reply. Examples embrace “are you able to give me a breakdown of income per nation” or “why was our precise income decrease than our forecast final quarter for this product.”
However extra importantly, the corporate has optimized its core product in order that it really works properly even with giant knowledge units and complex calculations. The perfect enterprise software program merchandise are must-have merchandise, which implies that corporations often don’t want to spend so much of sources on bettering the product — shoppers want this instrument to function. Pigment continues to be the challenger on this business, so it believes it wants to offer a greater product to compete with different enterprise planning merchandise.
