Nvidia-Backed Pigment Raises $250 Million to Take on Microsoft

Pigment, a French AI company that competes with Microsoft’s Excel and PowerPoint, has raised $250 million in a funding round, bolstering a push by a prominent European startup to take on an American technology giant. The financing, set to be announced Tuesday, values the company at $2.3 billion. The Scaleup Europe Fund led the round, with participation from Nvidia Corp. and World Innovation Lab, a US and Japan-based fund, as well as existing institutional investors Iconiq, IVP and Meritech Capital. (Nvidia’s Jensen Huang announced its investment last week as part of a visit to France.)The company also plans to add a few Asian investors to the round to support a planned expansion into the region, according to Eléonore Crespo, Pigment’s co-founder and chief executive officer. Founded in 2019, Pigment makes AI-powered software that helps businesses forecast finances, quickly spin up slide decks and plan operations. Like Microsoft, Pigment is working to convince a broader swath of office workers to adopt AI into their workflows — a harder proposition than convincing software engineers to use artificial intelligence coding tools.Pigment, which serves as a financial planning system for Anthropic PBC, is seeking to gain customers who currently use programs from SAP SE, Oracle Corp., International Business Machines Corp. and Anaplan Inc., Crespo said, as well as Microsoft. AI workforce tools need to be much easier to use, Crespo said.“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 said. “That’s the gap that we see.”French cosmetics company L’Oreal SA is rolling out Pigment as a salary-planning tool for its 95,000 employees. Pigment passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, doubling from the year prior. Crespo said the company expects to double again next year. Read more: Europe Fights for AI Independence to Avoid Becoming a Tech ‘Colony’Pigment’s growth reflects Europe’s broader artificial intelligence strategy. The continent has few frontier AI model makers, but it has a growing ecosystem of companies building AI applications that businesses across legal, banking and other industries might pay to use. Pigment, in particular, next wants to build AI agents that sit on top of a company’s existing enterprise resource planning software, which includes tasks like accounting and human resources.

The company’s software is really strong at helping clients use agents for a wide range of planning processes, whether in supply, sales or headcount, said Shannee Braun, managing director at EQT, which oversees the Scaleup Europe Fund.

“A lot of large enterprises are still doing this in Excel, in sort of disparate and disconnected places,” she said. It’s “becoming increasingly important” to handle that data in one centralized place.