Nvidia-backed Pigment raises $250M to take on Microsoft

Pigment, a French startup that makes AI planning software, has raised $250 million in a round that values it at $2.3 billion, Bloomberg reported in an exclusive on Tuesday, October 20. The Scaleup Europe Fund led the round. Nvidia ↘ 0.29% took part, along with World Innovation Lab, a fund based in the US and Japan, and existing investors Iconiq, IVP and Meritech Capital.tradingview.com

The new money gives one of Europe's most closely watched software startups more resources to compete with Microsoft's ↘ 0.31% Excel and PowerPoint, as well as with older enterprise planning vendors. Co-founder and CEO Eléonore Crespo told Bloomberg that Pigment plans to bring a few Asian investors into the round to support an expansion into that region.tradingview.com

Nvidia's Paris Announcement

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang first disclosed the investment on October 13 in Paris, at the start of a tour that also includes London and Berlin. At the same event he said Nvidia planned to announce $2 billion in new European investments, according to Bloomberg Law. Pigment was one of four French startups Nvidia named that day, alongside Doctolib, Genesis AI and Entalpic. All four were minority stakes, and Nvidia did not disclose the amounts, Le Monde reported.news.bloomberglaw.com+1

Taking On the Incumbents

Pigment was founded in 2019 by Crespo and Romain Niccoli, a co-founder of Criteo ↗ 1.18%. Its software helps businesses forecast finances, build slide decks and plan operations. Anthropic uses Pigment as its financial planning system. Crespo said the company is trying to win customers from SAP ↗ 1.31%, Oracle ↗ 1.20%, IBM International Business Machines Corporation ↗ 2.34% and Anaplan, as well as Microsoft, Bloomberg reported.bloomberg.com

Pigment's annual recurring revenue has passed $100 million, double the figure a year earlier, and Crespo said she expects it to double again next year. L'Oréal is rolling out Pigment as a salary-planning tool for its 95,000 employees. Pigment's next goal is to build AI agents that run on top of companies' existing enterprise resource planning systems, according to Bloomberg.bloomberg.com

The round is a big step up in valuation. Pigment raised a $145 million Series D led by ICONIQ Growth in April 2024, Tech Funding News noted, and had crossed a $1 billion valuation that year, Fortune reported.techfundingnews.com+1

Crespo says the main obstacle is getting ordinary office workers to adopt AI. "If the AI system is not completely designed for you to be able to use it day one — speaking natural language, feeling comfortable, feeling at home, with everything already plugged in, all of your data, all of your systems — in it's going to be very hard for you to adopt it," she told Bloomberg. "That's the gap that we see."bloomberg.com