Paris-based startup Pigment has raised a $145 million funding spherical simply 5 years after its inception. The enterprise software program firm affords 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 massive rounds have been few and much between in France. In accordance with a latest research from EY, funding rounds within the French tech ecosystem had been down 38% in 2023 in comparison with 2022.

However if you happen to 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 Development is doubling down by main this new funding spherical. Sandberg Bernthal Enterprise Companions, IVP, Meritech, Greenoaks and Felix Capital are additionally collaborating — lots of them had been current traders too.

And there’s a motive 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 purchasers like Unilever, Datadog, Kayak and Merck. Half of Pigment’s purchasers are primarily based within the U.S.

“Our present traders advised us ‘if you happen to’re going to lift cash in 18 months to scale with others, we’d as properly give you nice phrases proper now for an inside spherical.’ And every thing occurred in a short time . . . In a single week, it was a achieved deal,“ co-founder and co-CEO Éléonore Crespo advised 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 charge 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 charge ever, by way of income progress,” Crespo mentioned.

Picture Credit: Pigment

Pigment is a versatile enterprise planning device that’s utilized by chief monetary officers and finance groups to create studies and budgets. It’s a contemporary SaaS platform, that means which you can combine it with all of your firm’s knowledge (ERP, HRIS, knowledge lakes, and so on.) 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 aims.

“We’ve achieved lots of work to deal with different groups, not simply finance groups. We’ve developed lots of modules that allow us to serve HR groups, provide chain groups and gross sales groups,” Crespo mentioned.

Actually, as extra groups begin utilizing Pigment, it turns into an essential 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 essential metrics of an organization, clients can ask inquiries to Pigment AI in pure language to get a fast reply. Examples embrace “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 properly even with massive knowledge units and sophisticated calculations. The most effective enterprise software program merchandise are must-have merchandise, which implies that firms often don’t want to spend so much of assets on bettering the product — purchasers want this device to function. Pigment remains to be the challenger on this trade, so it believes it wants to offer a greater product to compete with different enterprise planning merchandise.