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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 firms 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. In keeping with a latest 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. 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 traders too.
And there’s a cause why Pigment managed to lift a lot at a considerably larger valuation lower than a 12 months 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 primarily based within the U.S.
“Our present traders informed us ‘when you’re going to lift cash in 18 months to scale with others, we would as effectively give you nice phrases proper now for an inner spherical.’ And all the pieces occurred in a short time . . . In a single week, it was a performed deal,“ co-founder and co-CEO Éléonore Crespo informed 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 — considered one of our backers — benchmarks the expansion price of all SaaS firms. And since we’ve been promoting our product, we’ve been within the high 5% of SaaS firms with the very best progress price ever, when it comes to income progress,” Crespo stated.
Pigment is a versatile enterprise planning device that’s utilized by chief monetary officers and finance groups to create reviews and budgets. It’s a contemporary SaaS platform, that means that you may combine it with all of your firm’s information (ERP, HRIS, information lakes, and many others.) and use it as a collaboration device.
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 targets.
“We’ve performed a number of work to handle different groups, not simply finance groups. We’ve developed a number of modules that allow us to serve HR groups, provide chain groups and gross sales groups,” Crespo stated.
Actually, as extra groups begin utilizing Pigment, it turns into an vital device for cross-team collaboration. And it’s purported to work higher than legacy instruments from Oracle and SAP.
Like many software program firms, Pigment has additionally added AI options. As Pigment acts because the central repository for all of the vital metrics of an organization, clients can ask inquiries to Pigment AI in pure language to get a fast reply. Examples embody “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 information units and complex calculations. One of the best enterprise software program merchandise are must-have merchandise, which implies that firms often don’t want to spend so much of sources on bettering the product — shoppers want this device to function. Pigment remains to be the challenger on this business, so it believes it wants to offer a greater product to compete with different enterprise planning merchandise.
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