Parisian startup Pigment, led by Google and Criteo veterans, pulls in $25+ million

Pigment, a Paris-based startup behind the eponymous business forecasting platform, has raised $25.9 million to scale up. The Series A round was led by Blossom Capital, with participation from investors New York-based FirstMark Capital and Frst – as well as angel investors including Paul Melchiorre, former CEO of business planning giant Anaplan, and David Clarke, the ex-CTO of Workday.  The French company is out to overhaul the spreadsheet. Instead of a rigid annual planning process, Pigment says its platform presents an intuitive, full-spectrum view of the company that allows users to play with multiple future scenarios in real-time through charts, simulations and continuous modeling. Pigment was founded in 2019 by Eléonore Crespo, a former data analyst at Google and investor at Index Ventures, and Romain Niccoli, the former CTO and co-founder of Criteo – the ad-tech company that filed a NASDAQ IPO in 2013 with annual revenues of over $2 billion. The startup says its beta product has already secured enterprise and pre-IPO startup clients, including a major European bank. With the fresh capital, the company wants to scale up its engineering team, which includes senior hires from tech companies such as Criteo, Datadog, Aircall and Payfit.

Photo: Pigment founders Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli