Former Criteo’s co-founder & Index Ventures’ investor raise €21.3M for their business forecasting platform Pigment

Paris-based startup Pigment – a startup that claims itself to be “Minecraft” of business planning software, has raised $25.9M (approx €21.3M) in its Series A round of funding led by a London-based VC firm Blossom Capital.

In addition, Pigment has also secured backing from New York-based VC firm FirstMark Capital and Frst, as well as notable angel investors including Paul Melchiorre, former CEO of US-based business planning giant Anaplan, and David Clarke, the ex-CTO of Workday.

The raised capital will allow the company to scale up its operations and engineering team, including senior hires from leading tech companies such as Criteo, Datadog, Aircall, and Payfit.

The roadblocks in business planning

The startup was founded in 2019 by Eleonore Crespo – former data analyst at Google and investor at European VC firm Index Ventures, and Romain Niccoli  – the former CTO and co-founder of Criteo. 

Criteo is an ad-tech company that is one of the prominent tech success stories of Europe, following a successful NASDAQ IPO in 2013 and annual revenues of over $2B (approx €1.64B).

Both founders identified three key roadblocks in planning and reporting, these include; lack of transparency and insight into underlying data behind their business, the sheer quantity of data they had to get their head around, and the static way it was presented, which made it hard to change and manipulate.

As a result, they believe, planning and reporting waste a lot of time and money, and the inevitable mistakes hamper almost all organisations. 

What does Pigment do?

By contrast, Pigment aims to revolutionise business planning and take the pain out of creating budgets and plans. The startup claims to overhaul the painful experience of using error-prone spreadsheets and inflexible software to forecast the future of business.

This allows businesses to take control of their business data by presenting an intuitive, full-spectrum view of the company with multiple future scenarios in real-time through charts, simulations, and continuous modelling.

“If you’re up to your elbows in the agony of annual budgets right now – we feel your pain,” says Eleonore Crespo, co-founder, and co-CEO of Pigment. 

“At the moment entrepreneurs have to spend so much time simply trying to build an accurate picture of their own business that they’re eating into bandwidth that they could use for strategic thinking and analysis,” Crespo adds.

Growth and development

In the future, Pigment plans to allow for reporting in areas including social and environmental accounting, as the company claims it is increasingly requested by users. 

Niccoli, one of the co-founders of Pigment, feels, “There’s been little innovation in business planning for over a decade. Pigment has set its sights on becoming more than just a system of record for business data – we allow everyone in the company to see how different metrics interact, to creatively explore the potential behind the numbers, and to imagine fresh possibilities for the future.”

The company has already secured prominent enterprise and pre-IPO startup clients for its beta product, including a major European bank.

Image credit: Pigment