Author丨Barry
Editor丨Guan Ju
It is normal for companies to use spreadsheets such as Excel to analyze and predict their business.
Eléonore Crespo, a female investor who has invested in three unicorns, sees the pain points: data is fragmented across departments, it can't be updated in real time, and processing large amounts of data is slow and cumbersome......
It was precisely because of such an opportunity that she officially went to sea and made a super-large cup version of Excel, and gained major customers such as Unilever, a global consumer goods giant, Merck KGaA, and Blablacar, a European version of Didi.
In early April, the French business forecasting platform called Pigment announced the completion of a $145 million (about 1.05 billion yuan) Series D financing. The round was led by ICONIQ Growth, which also led a Series C round in the past year. Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners and existing shareholders including IVP, Meritech, Greenoaks and Felix Capital also continued to invest.
With this financing, Pigment has also reached a valuation of $1 billion, officially becoming a unicorn.
A female investor who has invested in three unicorns goes to the sea to start a business
This is the story of a former Google employee and female investor who started a business.
After graduating from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Saclay and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris, Eléonore Crespo joined JCDecaux, the world's number one outdoor media company, and then worked in financial analysis at Google.
In 2017, she joined Index Ventures, a veteran European venture capitalist. Although he has only been there for two years, he has a unique vision to grow into unicorns in 2021 at the same time for three portfolio companies: Alan, a French digital health insurance provider, Swile, a French corporate benefits platform, and Spendesk, a business reimbursement software.
"She's smart," Spendesk founder Rodolphe Ardant once praised. "She is very tech-savvy, has strong analytical skills, and is able to build relationships with people easily. ”
At Index Ventures, Eléonore Crespo's experience working side-by-side with many of the world's leading entrepreneurs has not only given her an insight into the world of venture capital, but also the critical role financial planning plays in the growth of fast-growing startups.
The idea to start a business came from Eléonore Crespo's personal experience as a financial analyst at Google.
While spreadsheets are a widely used tool for processing data and doing basic data analysis, she found that even at the cloud computing giant, employees were using spreadsheets to keep track of internal data, which meant that data was often kept in separate silos, and when there was a need to process large amounts of data, consolidate information across departments, update data in real time, and provide a dynamic view of the business, spreadsheets could seem slow and cumbersome.
"Almost every day, everyone is working on a plan to increase revenue, expand customer resources, and so on," says Eléonore Crespo. But it's interesting to note that at Google, people still rely on spreadsheets for all sorts of work, but it doesn't work at all. ”
Eléonore Crespo(左)Romain Niccoli(右)
So, in 2019, Eléonore Crespo founded Pigment in Paris, France, together with Romain Niccoli, co-founder of the business media platform Criteo.
For her, entrepreneurship comes naturally. "I've always wanted to start my own company," she says.
From the beginning, the startup set the goal of replacing and surpassing Excel and other traditional financial planning tools to develop a platform that was both complex and easy to use. It's also what every finance person who hates Excel dreams of.
That's why the Pigment platform was created to address these issues, providing a more integrated, dynamic and visual solution that helps business managers better understand their business and make more informed decisions.
This platform provides businesses with a comprehensive 360-degree view of their business by using visualizations on dashboards. Managers can use the platform to run a series of scenario simulations to observe the impact of different factors on the business over time.
Generative AI makes business planning as easy as chatting
From the outset, Pigment identified three core issues to address business planning reporting, including:
There is a lack of transparency and insight into the data that underpins the business, massive amounts of data need to be processed, and many of today's tools are presented in a "static" fashion, making it difficult for employees to change or manipulate data.
So, since its Series A funding round in December 2020, Pigment has not hesitated to connect with Salesforce, NetSuite, Workday, Snowflake, and many other SaaS database tools. Customers can import, clean, and enrich company data from other products through Pigment. Then, as soon as the customer enters the data into the platform, Pigment can automatically provide a business analysis report to fully reflect the company's business metrics.
This means that Pigment breaks down the data silos of SaaS software in the enterprise and builds a vast pool of data for planning and forecasting.
In this way, human-caused data entry errors are avoided at the root, and the efficiency of data import is improved.
As a result, Pigment can replace Microsoft's Excel in many features for growing startups, and is generally more secure and reliable. For many large companies that have already deployed a business planning platform, some of the more modern features in Pigment can also replace traditional business planning platforms such as Oracle or SAP.
Let's look at an example from the retail industry.
The IDKIDS Group is the largest children's clothing group in France, with 1,386 physical stores, 29 websites, 17 brands and more than 6,000 employees in 70 countries.
The post-pandemic supply chain and logistics issues, coupled with a complex organizational structure and huge data sets, made the IBM TM1 database + Excel solution used by the company inflexible enough to meet the needs of its rapidly growing business. Collaboration was also a challenge, resulting in much of the planning and budgeting process eventually needing to be done in Excel.
IDKIDS' integration of finance and procurement teams on the Pigment platform brings great synergies between processes and data, and also helps reduce business risk. As a result, finance staff were able to use Pigment to manually change revenue targets in less than 15 minutes, saving 92% of the time and creating new cost centers 4x faster.
At the same time as announcing the Series D funding round, Pigment also plans to increase its investment in research and development of generative AI, with the goal of making business planning as simple as conversation. The Pigment AI version was launched in May 2023.
It is reported that the key features of Pigment AI will include data query, pattern recognition, intelligent insights, automated analysis and reporting, assisted modeling, and scenario construction.
Specifically, anyone in the company can use natural language to operate in the chat interface, getting answers faster and more intuitively with instant queries. Through AI scenario planning, different hypothetical scenarios can be simulated and new hypotheses can be tested in a few seconds to help managers make decisions.
Focus on attracting top talent and iconic customers
According to the latest report from Global Market Insights (GMI), the collaboration software market exceeded $9 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach $30 billion by 2026, growing at a compound annual growth rate of more than 14%.
Benefiting from the high growth of the track, Smartbeast analysis shows that Pigment has completed at least 6 rounds of financing, and has maintained an annual round of financing rhythm since its establishment in 2019, with a total financing of 397 million US dollars (about 2.873 billion yuan) so far. With the official announcement of the $145 million (about 1.05 billion yuan) Series D financing, Pigment's valuation has also reached $1 billion, officially becoming a unicorn.
The local media once exclaimed that there had never been a female founder in the French tech world who had raised so much money!
Pigment has a particular focus on attracting top talent and iconic clients. Eléonore Crespo believes that these in themselves can endorse the brand.
At the time of its Series A funding round in December 2020, Pigment's product was still in beta and had already been advertised to be a major European bank and SME client.
Half a year later, Pigment officially released its commercial version, and in just six months, it has already won a large number of high-profile customers, including search API company Algolia, DIY e-commerce platform ManoMano, Israeli fintech platform Melio, European food delivery giant Deliveroo, business reimbursement software Spendesk, European version of Didi Blablacar, and retail company Cheerz.
Pigment is also quite satisfied with the customer portrait.
"These companies consider Pigment to be the best choice because they're growing rapidly, at least 80% of them are using Google Sheets or Excel for business planning, and they need a flexible and scalable platform that will help them stay in control of their business and make the best decisions," they said. ”
In terms of talent, Pigment brought in former Facebook talents Julien Lesaicherre and Rebeca Tristan after its first round of funding. They have grown Facebook's Workplace from zero to over 7 million paying users.
Today, North America is Pigment's largest market. Following the opening of offices in New York and Toronto, Pigment has also announced several significant appointments over the past year, including Jay Peir, former executive vice president of corporate development and strategy at Tableau, as head of global strategy and Sean Brophy, head of U.S. corporate sales at Alteryx, as head of global sales.
With the support of benchmark customers and top talent, Pigment's revenue has also grown rapidly.
In 2023, Pigment's ARR annual recurring revenue (undisclosed) tripled and doubled its customer base, with global brand customers including global consumer goods giant Unilever, global pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co., Ltd., French public transport company Keolis, cloud application monitoring platform Datadog, KAYAK and big data marketing technology provider 6sense.
It is worth mentioning that Eléonore Crespo's leadership style is also unique. She shares the role of CEO with Romain Niccoli. In France, this practice is not widespread. She also chose not to have a board of directors because, in her view, such forms of organization were often paralyzing and did not contribute to efficient decision-making. "When it's time to make a decision, the number should be small," she asserted.
Today, she is one of France's most talked-about female entrepreneurs.
In 2022, Eléonore Crespo was selected as one of the 14 female founders on the list in the "French Tech 120" (FT120, one of the top 120 startups in France). In 2023, she became the first female founder to be listed in the "Next40" (the 40 best startups in France). This honor also led her to be invited to the Élysée Palace to be commended by French President Emmanuel Macron.
Now, with the $145 million funding round, Pigment's upholstered unicorn is gaining momentum. However, in the face of the more competitive US market, Eléonore Crespo still can't let up.