Pigment has raised $65 million in a Series B+ funding round led by IVP and Meritech Capital. It follows the earlier $73 million Series B round in November 2021 led by Greenoaks and its existing investors. Headquartered in France, Pigment has ambitions to expand within the US market. The company already has a presence in the UK and several teams in the United States. The firm has now raised more than $150 million in funding since it was founded in 2019 (source Crunchbase).
What now for Pigment?
Pigment intends to use the investment to continue its R&D efforts, extending the solution to appeal to larger enterprises and will also invest in the US market. Eléonore Crespo, co-founder and co-CEO of Pigment, commented, “In the past year, we have grown from 0 to 33 people supporting our North American operations, and we expect this to double in the next year”. According to LinkedIn, the company already has 41 employees in the US, spread across the nation, with a single office in New York and an ambition to open a second in Boston. The company has many open positions, with several in the US, and as the company has adopted remote working, it will consider applications for developers from seemingly anywhere.
Crespo added, “With so much economic uncertainty, it’s more important than ever for companies to be confident about their decision-making. Shifting market conditions make it vital to have the best possible planning and forecasting capabilities. With Pigment, rather than fearing change, companies can embrace it with the assurance that they will be able to make and execute informed decisions. Our latest round of funding strengthens our ability to shake up traditional EPM for best-in-class business strategy.
“Pigment’s growth and the support of our investors validates why we’ve chosen to disrupt the planning space. We are thrilled with the momentum we are seeing which shows we are on track to be the next category leader.”
What is Pigment
Pigment aims to eliminate spreadsheets from the business planning process with RevOps or FinOps. Unlike rivals, it started from a more holistic viewpoint rather than a pure finance or sales planning tool. To support this, it provides integrations to different application platforms:
- ERP: includes NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Xero
- CRM: Salesforce, Dynamics, HubSpot, Pipedrive
- HRIS: Workday, BambooHR, Greenhouse, HiBob, Lever, Personio, Rippling
- Customer Service: Zendesk, Freshdesk
- Billing and Payment systems: Stripe, Chargebee
It also has integrations to data lakes and BI tools to enhance its capabilities further. Finally, it provides full integration with Excel and Google Sheets for employees who still desire spreadsheets. There is also a suite of open APIs to support further application integrations.
The planning solution looks across the whole business, drawing data from every function. Coupled with an easy-to-use interface, this helps to break down organisational silos and makes the whole planning process more efficient. The solution supports what-if scenario planning, enabling leaders to assess the key drivers better. It offers projections with various optimistic and pessimistic outcomes to enhance decision-making. Users can compare projections using tables, waterfall charts, bar charts, line charts and other visualisations.
Recent and future improvements
Over the last year, Pigment has extended its platform with the funding already received. The recent product updates included:
- “One click” scenario planning capabilities offer complex “what-if” scenarios in minutes. This enables companies to react quickly to unforeseen circumstances, such as inflation hitting double-digits. Just 2-weeks after launch, 80% of Pigment’s customers were already using it, signalling the appetite for better decision-making
- Scheduled imports to create and maintain reports with no IT dependency and further data import automations with dozens of available integrations from Salesforce, NetSuite, Workday, Snowflake and more
- A two-way data connector for Google Sheets to effortlessly build board presentations in one click. With nearly 80% of its users being business-facing, Pigment wants to ensure gathering inputs and reporting company results is seamless
While it didn’t go into detail about what the investment would fund, its intention to tackle the enterprise market may give a hint. It could look to build an integration with S/4HANA and possibly Oracle Fusion. The former would help efforts to expand in Europe and the latter in the US.
Rapid expansion catches the investors’ eye
Raising such sums in quick succession is rare for a European startup, though one can understand it better when looking deeper into the company’s recent success. The founders are no strangers to investment and fast-growth companies Eléonore Crespo was a financial analyst at Google and an investor at Index Ventures, sitting on several boards. Her co-founder, Romain Niccoli, also co-founded Criteo as CTO, helping to lead the French company to its IPO on Nasdaq. Over the last six months, the company has grown revenues by 500% and has increased its customer base tenfold. That expansion has seen new logos such as Webhelp, PayFit and Forto in Europe join firms such as deliveroo, Ankorstore and BlaBlaCar, Figma, Gong, Carta and ClickUp have signed up in North America.
Figma, recently acquired by Adobe for $20 billion, credited Pigment for helping them maintain an agile approach to financial planning and strategy. Nicole Wittlin, VP of Strategic Finance at Figma, commented, “We’ve had a phenomenal experience with everyone at Pigment as they’re genuinely interested and invested to make sure we’re successful.”
Rob Ward, co-founder and general partner of Meritech Capital, commented, “Pigment’s superior solution could not be more timely. Businesses of all sizes must equip themselves with the information they need to make the most important decisions. Pigment’s suite allows business leaders to do just that.”
Another investor, Ajay Vashee, general partner at IVP, summarises how Pigment aims to take on the traditional planning tools within organisations, either spreadsheets or legacy Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) systems. Vashee commented, “As a former CFO at Dropbox, I know business leaders at companies of all sizes need to surface actionable insights quickly, particularly in periods of market volatility. Pigment delivers an unmatched business planning platform that finance leaders and executive teams are adopting en masse to accelerate top-line growth and strengthen their resource allocation muscle. Under the leadership of the company’s visionary founders, we believe Pigment represents the future of EPM and business planning.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Pigment is a company to watch. The business planning market is awash with companies. Some of them are long established and build a portfolio of cloud-based customers as they migrate their customers. Others are trying to build traction in the market. Pigment appears to have built a strong following in a very short time with a novel approach. While some solutions have extended their financial planning to other functions, few, if any, have started that way.
What does the future hold for Pigment? Will it continue to grow and look for an IPO, or will it be swallowed up by an ERP vendor looking to accelerate the functionality of its business planning solution?
