Paris-based startup Pigment has raised a $145 million funding spherical simply 5 years after its inception. The enterprise software program firm presents a enterprise planning platform for giant corporations to visualise their previous monetary efficiency and forecast upcoming quarters.
This funding spherical comes as a little bit of a shock as massive rounds have been few and much between in France. Based on 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 Collection D. Current 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 — a lot of them have been present buyers too.
And there’s a purpose why Pigment managed to lift a lot at a considerably greater valuation lower than a yr 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 based mostly within the U.S.
“Our present buyers instructed us ‘if you’re going to lift cash in 18 months to scale with others, we would as nicely give you nice phrases proper now for an inside spherical.’ And all the pieces occurred in a short time . . . In a single week, it was a accomplished 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 of our backers — benchmarks the growth rate of all SaaS companies. And since we’ve been selling our product, we’ve been in the top 5% of SaaS companies with the best growth rate ever, in terms of revenue growth,” Crespo stated.
Picture Credit: Pigment
Pigment is a versatile enterprise planning software that’s utilized by chief monetary officers and finance groups to create stories and budgets. It’s a contemporary SaaS platform, which means you can combine it with all of your firm’s information (ERP, HRIS, information lakes, and so on.) and use it as a collaboration software.
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 based mostly on strategic adjustments and monetary aims.
“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 stated.
Actually, as extra groups begin utilizing Pigment, it turns into an necessary software 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 “can you give me a breakdown of revenue per country” or “why was our actual revenue lower than our forecast last quarter for this product.”
However extra importantly, the corporate has optimized its core product in order that it really works nicely even with massive information units and sophisticated calculations. The most effective enterprise software program merchandise are must-have merchandise, which implies that corporations normally don’t want to spend so much of assets on bettering the product — purchasers want this software to function. Pigment remains to be the challenger on this trade, so it believes it wants to supply a greater product to compete with different enterprise planning merchandise.
