By Hamza Faisal
French AI startup Pigment has raised $250 million at a $2.3 billion valuation, Bloomberg first reported, in a round led by the Scaleup Europe Fund with new participation from Nvidia and World Innovation Lab. Existing investors ICONIQ, IVP and Meritech Capital also returned, and the company plans to add several Asian investors to the round to back a regional push.
The round, closed on October 20, more than doubles the $1 billion valuation Pigment commanded at its April 2024 Series D, when it raised $145 million. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang had effectively pre-announced his company's investment last week during a visit to France, where he unveiled a pledge of nearly $10 billion toward Europe's technology ecosystem.
What Pigment actually builds
Founded in 2019 and led by co-founder and chief executive Eléonore Crespo, Pigment makes AI-powered software for business planning: financial forecasting, scenario modeling, headcount and operations planning, and slide-deck creation. It pulls real-time data from ERP, CRM and HR systems, lets users work in natural language, and plugs into tools teams already use, including Notion, Google Drive and Slack.
The pitch is that planning software should feel less like a spreadsheet and more like a conversation. Around September the company launched Pigment Frames, which generates custom planning interfaces with AI instead of forcing customers to build views by hand. More than 90 percent of customers use the product across multiple departments.
The customer list is the proof point: Unilever, Merck, Klarna, Uber and Siemens are clients, Anthropic uses Pigment's financial planning system, and L'Oréal is rolling the platform out to its 95,000 employees for compensation planning.
The growth numbers behind the valuation
The headline metric is revenue. Pigment's annual recurring revenue has passed $100 million — doubling year over year — and Crespo expects it to double again. The jump from a $1 billion valuation to $2.3 billion in two and a half years reflects a broader rush toward AI-native enterprise software that can credibly compete with entrenched American incumbents on their home turf.
The money will fund an expansion into Asia and the build-out of AI agents that work inside companies' existing enterprise systems — a natural next step for a company whose pitch already centers on AI doing the planning work.
The entrenched incumbents
Pigment is positioning itself against Microsoft's Excel and PowerPoint and the established planning platforms of SAP, Oracle, IBM and Anaplan. That is a harder fight than the one AI coding tools have been winning: convincing software engineers to adopt AI assistants is one thing; getting a finance team off its beloved spreadsheets is another.
Crespo's argument is that AI workforce tools have to feel native from the start — natural language, comfort, and every system stitched together — or adoption stalls. L'Oréal pushing the platform to 95,000 employees suggests at least one giant believes that gap is finally closing.
By Hamza Faisal
