AI Is Squeezing Software Wrappers. Pigment Just Raised $250 Million Because It Isn't One.

Pigment, a Paris-based maker of business planning software, said on October 21 that it raised $250 million in a Series E round at a $2.3 billion valuation. The Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, led the round, with participation from World Innovation Lab (WIL) and existing investors Greenoaks, ICONIQ, IVP, and Meritech. Nvidia plans to invest as well; CEO Jensen Huang announced the stake in Paris on October 13 without giving an amount, according to Tech Funding News.

Pigment last raised $145 million in April 2024, when Bloomberg reported it was valued at more than $1 billion.

When co-CEO Eléonore Crespo sat down with EO in June, she said Pigment had raised more than $400 million and was "still on a 2x trajectory" in ARR. The company now says ARR passed $100 million this year, double the year before, and Crespo told Bloomberg she expects it to double again next year.

The round comes as investors sort software companies into two groups: thin products built on someone else's AI model, and companies that own something the models need. Pigment's claim to the second group goes back to a problem Crespo ran into years before the AI boom.

Crespo's first job was at Google, working for the CFOs of Google EMEA and Alphabet. She assumed one of the most innovative companies in the world would have the best possible tools for strategic planning.

She saw the same gap again as an investor at Index Ventures, working with founders of companies such as Figma and Datadog. In 2019 she started Pigment with Romain Niccoli, a co-founder and former CTO of the ad tech company Criteo.

Pigment sells into a market that older companies still run, led by Oracle, Anaplan, OneStream, SAP, and Workday. "Some of them were built before I was even born," Crespo told EO. To compete, Pigment went after large companies from the start, a choice Crespo described as deciding "to climb Mount Everest." Its first customers, including Figma, Brex, and Carta, were tech companies whose word other buyers would listen to.

"If you want people to trust you, you need to have fast-forward-looking companies telling you, 'We love Pigment, we love that platform, and we will tell the entire world that this is true.' And people will follow," she said.

What they built first was not an AI product. Crespo said Pigment needed "an incredible computation engine that really helps you model any data on Pigment" before it could sell anything. "So we could not ship a product in a month," she said. "We started at the end of 2019, and the product was truly ready in 2021."

Pigment now calls its engine Graphite and described it publicly for the first time in June. It stores a company's finance, sales, and workforce data once, lets hundreds of people and AI agents work on the same model at the same time, and controls who can see which numbers.

The company says AI is now how most new work gets done on the platform: agents create 85% of new metrics, and 84% of accounts use its AI every week.

In a February analysis, PitchBook separated "systems of record," which hold a business's core data, from "workflow wrappers," thin products that facilitate a process on top of AI models. "As foundation models improve, they eat the functionality of these wrappers," it wrote, adding that "the market will bifurcate."

Pigment's customers suggest which pile it sits in. AI companies that could build their own tools, including Anthropic and ElevenLabs, use it instead. Anthropic's job listings name Pigment as its planning platform, connected to its accounting and HR systems, and its teams query that data through Claude using a connector Pigment built. Older companies are moving onto it too. L'Oréal is replacing its salary planning tool for more than 95,000 employees with Pigment.

Shannee Braun, a managing director at EQT, put the foundation first when she explained the investment.

Across the AI industry, companies at every layer are moving into each other's territory, and Pigment is not outside that. "Both sides, AI labs and incumbents, are racing toward the same prize from opposite ends of the stack," SiliconANGLE wrote in February.

Finance is one of those fronts. Anthropic, a Pigment customer, released Claude for Excel last October and, in May, finance agents that build financial models and close the books at month-end. The older planning vendors are adding agents too: Anaplan introduced agents that build models and flag exceptions last December, and OneStream, Workday, and SAP have announced their own. Pigment is making the same move as the older vendors, from holding the data to doing the work: its next product, a Planner Agent, is meant to run planning cycles end to end.

The valuation already assumes Pigment holds its ground. At $2.3 billion, it is valued at about 23 times its ARR, by Tech Funding News's count. Crespo expects ARR to double again next year. Whether Pigment can do that while model makers and older vendors close in will show how much its foundation is worth.