{"id":87538,"date":"2024-04-04T09:25:26","date_gmt":"2024-04-04T09:25:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2024\/04\/04\/business-planning-startup-pigment-raises-145-million-round-in-rare-french-tech-megaround-techcrunch\/"},"modified":"2024-04-04T09:25:26","modified_gmt":"2024-04-04T09:25:26","slug":"business-planning-startup-pigment-raises-145-million-round-in-rare-french-tech-megaround-techcrunch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2024\/04\/04\/business-planning-startup-pigment-raises-145-million-round-in-rare-french-tech-megaround-techcrunch\/","title":{"rendered":"Business planning startup Pigment raises $145 million round in rare French tech megaround | TechCrunch"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Paris-based startup Pigment<\/a> has raised a $145 million funding round just five years after its inception. The enterprise software company offers a business planning platform so that large companies can visualize their past financial performance and forecast upcoming quarters.<\/p>\n

This funding round comes as a bit of a surprise as large rounds have been few and far between in France. According to a recent study from EY<\/a>, funding rounds in the French tech ecosystem were down 38% in 2023 compared to 2022.<\/p>\n

But if you remove buzzy AI startups like Mistral AI and capital-intensive infrastructure plays that are not really tech startups like EV charging networks (Driveco) and EV battery factories (Verkor), funding rounds are drastically<\/em> down. Pure software startups have had a rough couple of years.<\/p>\n

Pigment appears as an exception with its 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 \u2014\u00a0many of them were existing investors too.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s a reason why Pigment managed to raise so much at a significantly higher valuation less than a year after its previous funding round<\/a>. In 2023, the startup managed to triple its revenue and double its customer base with well-known clients like Unilever, Datadog, Kayak and Merck. Half of Pigment\u2019s clients are based in the U.S.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur current investors told us \u2018if you\u2019re going to raise money in 18 months to scale with others, we might as well offer you great terms right now for an internal round.\u2019 And everything happened very quickly . . . In one week, it was a done deal,\u201c co-founder and co-CEO \u00c9l\u00e9onore Crespo told me.<\/p>\n

Before founding Pigment, Crespo worked for VC firm Index Ventures and Google. She co-founded Pigment with Romain Niccoli who was the co-founder and CTO of Criteo \u2014\u00a0an early success of the French tech ecosystem.<\/p>\n

\u201cIVP \u2014 one of our backers \u2014 benchmarks the growth rate of all SaaS companies. And since we\u2019ve been selling our product, we\u2019ve been in the top 5% of SaaS companies with the best growth rate ever, in terms of revenue growth,\u201d Crespo said.<\/p>\n

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Image Credits:<\/strong> Pigment<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Pigment is a flexible business planning tool that is used by chief financial officers and finance teams to create reports and budgets. It\u2019s a modern SaaS platform, meaning that you can integrate it with all your company\u2019s data (ERP, HRIS, data lakes, etc.) and use it as a collaboration tool.<\/p>\n

In addition to finance teams, sales teams can use Pigment to create quotas and see how everyone is performing against quarterly quotas. HR teams can see how they should scale the workforce up and down based on strategic changes and financial objectives.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve done a lot of work to address other teams, not just finance teams. We\u2019ve developed a lot of modules that enable us to serve HR teams, supply chain teams and sales teams,\u201d Crespo said.<\/p>\n

In fact, as more teams start using Pigment, it becomes an important tool for cross-team collaboration. And it\u2019s supposed to work better than legacy tools from Oracle and SAP.<\/p>\n

Like many software companies, Pigment has also added AI features. As Pigment acts as the central repository for all the important metrics of a company, customers can ask questions to Pigment AI in natural language to get a quick answer. Examples include \u201ccan you give me a breakdown of revenue per country\u201d or \u201cwhy was our actual revenue lower than our forecast last quarter for this product.\u201d<\/p>\n

But more importantly, the company has optimized its core product so that it works well even with large data sets and complicated calculations. The best enterprise software products are must-have products, which means that companies usually don\u2019t need to spend a lot of resources on improving the product \u2014 clients need this tool to operate. Pigment is still the challenger in this industry, so it believes it needs to provide a better product to compete with other business planning products.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n


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Paris-based startup Pigment has raised a $145 million funding round just five years after its inception. The enterprise software company offers a business planning platform so that large companies can visualize their past financial performance and forecast upcoming quarters. This funding round comes as a bit of a surprise as large rounds have been few […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":87539,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-87538","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87538\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}