- Pigment raised $250M at a $2.3B valuation, led by the EU-backed Scaleup Europe Fund.
- Annual recurring revenue passed $100M and doubled again, the company says.
- Just 20% of finance AI projects lean toward better decisions.
Anthropic runs its financial planning on Pigment, according to Bloomberg. The Paris company wants to replace Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint in the finance office, and on October 21 it announced a $250 million Series E at a $2.3 billion valuation.
The Scaleup Europe Fund, the European Union-backed vehicle managed by EQT, led the round. WIL (World Innovation Lab), a venture fund with offices in Palo Alto and Tokyo, joined existing investors Greenoaks, ICONIQ, IVP, and Meritech. Nvidia has also planned an investment. Chief executive Jensen Huang announced the stake in Paris on October 13 without giving an amount, as Tech Funding News reported.
“Enterprise planning will change more in the next few years than it has in the last thirt. Legacy tools are being left behind, and the world’s most advanced AI companies now run their planning on Pigment. With the backing of our investors, we are moving fast to make autonomous planning a reality for every enterprise. With AI agents running planning workflows end to end and turning decisions into action, companies can respond to change as fast as it happens,” said co-founders Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli.
Planning software is a big, slow-moving corner of enterprise tech. Straits Research puts the market for enterprise performance management, the category covering budgeting, forecasting, and planning tools, at $7.51 billion in 2026, growing 10.4% a year through 2034, though analyst estimates vary widely. Adoption of AI inside it looks stuck. Gartner’s 2025 survey of 183 finance leaders found 59% used AI in their finance function, barely up from 58% a year earlier.
The spreadsheet problem Crespo saw at Google
Pigment was founded in Paris in 2019 by Crespo and Niccoli. Crespo was a financial analyst at Google, advising its EMEA president and CFO on strategy and planning, before becoming an investor at Index Ventures. Niccoli co-founded the advertising technology company Criteo and was its chief technology officer.
The startup, founded in 2019, works by connecting finance, sales, and workforce data in one platform, then letting AI agents build and run plans on top of it. For example, L’Oréal is replacing its salary planning tool for more than 95,000 employees with Pigment. Other customers named in the announcement include Danone, DirecTV, Siemens, Snowflake, ServiceNow, and Unilever, plus Anthropic, ElevenLabs, and Uber.
Pigment says its proprietary engine, Graphite, lets thousands of agents and people work on one governed model, scaling to hundreds of billions of data points with traceable results. It also says agents now create 85% of new metrics on the platform. Both figures come from the company, not an independent audit.
Annual recurring revenue passed $100 million in 2026, doubling again, according to Pigment. Crespo told Bloomberg she expects it to double once more next year, which would put it near $200 million. The $2.3 billion valuation is about 23 times today’s recurring revenue, by TFN’s arithmetic. About 786 people worked at Pigment in mid-September, TipRanks estimates.
Europe’s new scaleup fund moves into software
The Scaleup Europe Fund targets €5 billion and is backed by the European Commission and founding investors including Novo Holdings and Allianz. EQT was selected to run it on May 18, 2026.
Pigment follows ICEYE, the Finnish satellite company that became the fund’s first investment in August, and Mistral, the French AI lab whose €3 billion Series D the fund co-led in September.
“In most companies, the richest picture of how a business actually runs sits in its plans. Pigment has built that foundation with a single platform connecting finance, sales and workforce planning — and put AI agents to work on it, helping teams model, analyse and act in hours rather than months. Eléonore and Romain have built a global category leader from Paris, and that is exactly the kind of company the Scaleup Europe Fund was created to back,” said Shannee Braun, managing director at EQT and the Scaleup Europe Fund.
The test is decisions
Pigment is targeting customers on SAP, Oracle, IBM, Anaplan, and Microsoft. Anaplan, a major planning vendor, was taken private by Thoma Bravo in a $10.7 billion deal announced in 2022. Smaller AI-first rivals are emerging: Israel’s Fintastic raised a $12 million seed round in October 2022, and TFN covered Plinto’s €2.9 million pre-seed on October 20 for agents that catch invoice errors.
The harder question is what finance agents are for. A Gartner survey of 204 finance leaders in March 2026 found 45% of finance AI investments lean toward productivity, while 20% lean toward decision quality. Pigment’s pitch targets the smaller group, and Crespo says adoption depends on ease of use.
The money goes to research and development and to engineers working on Graphite and the agents that run on it, Pigment said. Pigment wants agents that sit on top of companies’ existing enterprise resource planning software, handling work such as accounting and human resources.
Pigment has raised about $643 million by TFN’s count: roughly $393 million before this round, by the company’s own tally, plus $250 million. Its $145 million Series D, led by ICONIQ Growth in April 2024, followed an $88 million Series C in June 2023. Crespo co-leads the company, and TFN has covered Pigment as a female co-founded startup since its 2022 Series B+.
If Pigment does double again, that will say less about AI enthusiasm than about whether finance chiefs will let software act on a plan without re-checking the numbers. Its new investors are betting they will.
