French SaaS company Pigment, which provides enterprise customers with a platform that lets them visualise critical business data in real-time, ranging from profit and revenue to burn rate and headcount, has raised $145m in Series D funding.
The equity round was led by US VC Iconiq Growth, with participation from US-based Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners and returning investors IVP, Meritech, Greenoaks — also from the US — as well as UK VC Felix Capital.
“From Pigment’s very beginning, we’ve wanted US investors because we knew that the US would be our biggest market,” says Pigment cofounder Eléonore Crespo. “Today, the US represents more than 50% of our revenue.”
The new funding will support the company’s growth in North America.
Iconiq also led Pigment’s $88m Series C less than a year ago. The company declined to share its latest valuation but was recently cited as one of France’s next unicorns by tech advisory firm Avolta.
“What’s true is that our valuation has significantly increased since last year,” says Crespo.
What does Pigment do?
Pigment connects to various sources of enterprise data such as Workday, SAP or Salesforce, to enable users to access up-to-date information about their business in a single platform.
The company says that this helps different teams within the business make better and more informed decisions, for example when planning a change of strategy, creating a forecast or changing a budget across teams — instead of using various siloed spreadsheets.
“We often say that we are an Excel competitor, because we help companies get rid of all the Excel files that are spread across the company,” says Crespo.
What will the funding be used for?
Today Pigment’s customers include UK consumer goods multinational Unilever, German pharmaceutical group Merck and US software company Datadog.
In 2023, it doubled its customer base to several hundred and tripled its annual recurring revenue (ARR), says Crespo. The company doesn’t disclose its ARR.
Since 2022, Pigment has increased its efforts to penetrate the North American market with the opening of new offices in New York and Toronto. It plans to continue expanding its presence on the other side of the Atlantic, which is where more than half of the company’s revenue originates.
“The objective is to keep the current proportion of US revenue, and even to increase it slightly,” says Crespo.
The funding will also be invested in AI.
Pigment has developed a generative AI technology that enables users to query the platform in natural language. For example, a user could ask for a comparison of costs for a specific product over a certain period.
In the next few months, the company will develop a copilot tool, which it says will help detect issues and give recommendations for certain tasks. In the longer term, Crespo says that the technology could be used to automatically suggest and create business-wide scenarios and forecasts.
To do so, Pigment will invest “massively” in R&D, says the cofounder. The engineering team will double from 100 currently to 200 employees, while Pigment’s overall workforce will increase from 400 to 550 by the end of 2024.
