Paris-based startup Pigment has raised a $145 million funding spherical simply 5 years after its inception. The enterprise software program firm gives a enterprise planning platform so that giant corporations can visualize 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. In line with a recent study from EY, funding rounds within the French tech ecosystem have been down 38% in 2023 in comparison with 2022.
However should 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 collaborating — lots of them have been present traders too.
And there’s a purpose why Pigment managed to lift a lot at a considerably increased valuation lower than a 12 months after its previous funding round. In 2023, the startup managed to triple its income and double its buyer base with well-known purchasers like Unilever, Datadog, Kayak and Merck. Half of Pigment’s purchasers are primarily based within the U.S.
“Our present traders instructed us ‘should you’re going to lift cash in 18 months to scale with others, we’d as effectively give you nice phrases proper now for an inner spherical.’ And every part occurred in a short time . . . In a single week, it was a carried out deal,“ co-founder and co-CEO Éléonore Crespo instructed me.
Earlier than founding 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 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 most effective progress price ever, by way of income progress,” Crespo mentioned.
Picture Credit: Pigment
Pigment is a versatile enterprise planning instrument that’s utilized by chief monetary officers and finance groups to create reviews and budgets. It’s a contemporary SaaS platform, which means that you would be able to 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 towards quarterly quotas. HR groups can see how they need to scale the workforce up and down primarily based on strategic adjustments and monetary goals.
“We’ve carried out quite a lot of work to deal with different groups, not simply finance groups. We’ve developed quite a lot of modules that allow us to serve HR groups, provide chain groups and gross sales groups,” Crespo mentioned.
In reality, as extra groups begin utilizing Pigment, it turns into an necessary instrument for cross-team collaboration. And it’s speculated 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, prospects 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 effectively even with giant knowledge units and complex calculations. The perfect enterprise software program merchandise are must-have merchandise, which signifies that corporations often don’t want to spend so much of sources on enhancing the product — purchasers want this instrument to function. Pigment remains to be the challenger on this business, so it believes it wants to supply a greater product to compete with different enterprise planning merchandise.
