Planning and forecasting for businesses have never been more crucial than now in the post-covid world, which is driven by uncertainties. A French startup is rising to the challenge of building a platform to facilitate companies to visualise data better and use it for business planning and forecasting.
Founded in 2019 in Paris by Eléonore Crespo, a former data analyst at Google Pigment has scored investors at preeminent European venture capital firm Index Ventures, and Romain Niccoli, the former CTO and co-founder of Criteo.
Central business planning solution
It has raised $73 million Series B to become the central business planning solution powering Finance, HR, Sales and Marketing decisions and to fuel its expansion in Europe and the US.
Leading the funding round were US heavyweight Greenoaks with Series A investors participating, including New York-based FirstMark Capital and Blossom Capital.
Rebooting the spreadsheet
Business and finance teams have had to adapt to expensive and complex tools or error-prone Excel spreadsheets to understand their business, operating in isolation from the rest of their company’s functions. However, in a remote-first world, online collaboration capabilities that allow accurate team alignment is indispensable.
Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli, Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of Pigment want to help fast growth companies see, understand, and imagine the full spectrum of their business by creating a common language around the numbers that matter. “Innovation has taken place in every field from sales to marketing – but somehow the most strategic decisions rely on analysts spending long, painful hours on Excel,” they said.
Pigment’s new funding comes in a year after its Series A raise, planning to take on Excel and other generic spreadsheet players. The startup claims to have an incredibly intuitive platform, allowing leaders and analysts to understand all of their business data better and anticipate the impact of their decisions with unprecedented speed and flexibility.
Supercharging unicorns of the future
The startup has witnessed a rapid increase in its number of users. It has bagged some of Europe’s fastest-growing businesses in less than a year, including Deliveroo, Blablacar, ManoMano, Melio, Spendesk and Cheerz.
Since its Series A in December 2020, the platform has further developed to allow any leader in an organisation to adopt a common language around the numbers that matter and work on them in real time with their teams. The platform has native integrations with Workday, Netsuite, Salesforce and many other SaaS solutions.
Attracting top talent
Owing to the platform’s potential, it is also attracting talent from top-notch companies such as tech hotshots Julien Lesaicherre and Rebeca Tristan, who recently left Facebook – where they were in charge of Workplace’s success.
Spreading wings
The company intends to triple the capacity of its business team by Q1 22. Pigment has grand ambitions for the US market, having just signed new flagship US clients, Melio, Algolia, and Gong, one of the fastest-growing US sales companies. Pigment plans to open US offices in New York and Silicon Valley, hiring across sales and support functions in 2022.
