French AI office unicorn Pigment raises $250 million, with Nvidia participating

Zhihui Dong October 21 news: In the early hours of today, Bloomberg reported that the French AI office tool unicorn Pigment has completed a round of $250 million (about RMB 1.67 billion) in financing, reaching a valuation of $2.3 billion (about RMB 15.361 billion). The company plans to compete for enterprise customers currently using AI office products from vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM.

This round of financing was led by the European fund Scaleup Europe Fund, with participation from Nvidia as well as World Innovation Lab, Iconiq, IVP, Meritech Capital, and other institutions.

Pigment co-founder and CEO Eléonore Crespo told Bloomberg that the company plans to bring in Asian investors in this financing round to support its plans to expand in the Asian market.

The company was founded in 2019, and its core business is developing AI office software to help employees with financial forecasting, PPT creation, operational planning, and more. According to official information, the company had previously completed 5 financing rounds, with cumulative financing amounting to $397 million (about RMB 2.651 billion). In April 2024, it obtained €145 million (about RMB 1.087 billion) in financing and joined the unicorn ranks.

▲Pigment's previous financing situation (Image source: Pigment)

Its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has exceeded $100 million (about RMB 670 million), doubling year over year. Crespo said it expects revenue to double again next year. Its customers include leading companies across different sectors such as Google, Anthropic, Uber, and Siemens.

Crespo said they are hoping to win new customers, which currently use AI office products from companies such as SAP, Oracle, IBM, Anaplan, and Microsoft. She believes that the ease of use of AI tools for enterprise employees still needs to be greatly improved.

Last week, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang teased this news at a reception in Paris during his Europe trip. On October 14, according to the French newspaper Les Echos, Huang said Nvidia would invest in four French companies: French medical service platform Doctolib, Pigment, robotics startup Genesis AI, and AI materials science startup Entalpic. The specific investment amounts were not disclosed at the time.

Crespo received her master's degree from Mines Paris in 2010. Before founding Pigment, she worked as a financial analyst at Google and as an investor at Index Ventures, where she led investments in several European unicorn companies. She believes that AI tools for enterprise employees must be fully tailored to employees, with fast and convenient interaction, and must be able to connect in advance to all data and systems. This is also where Pigment differs from other tools.

The other co-founder is Romain Niccoli. Before founding Pigment, he was co-founder and CTO of the French adtech company Criteo, which went public in 2013.

▲From left to right: Crespo, Niccoli (Image source: Pigment)

Therefore, the business planning AI platform Pigment builds for enterprises can centralize a company's financial, workforce, and sales data, so that employees do not need to piece together data across different platforms or manually aggregate it. It has already built analyst agents, modeling agents, planning agents, and more. Enterprise employees can also generate custom agents by uploading instructions and their own knowledge.

Bloomberg reported that Pigment's next goal is to develop agents that can be deployed on top of enterprises' existing enterprise resource planning software, which covers work related to accounting, human resources, and more.

Currently, L'Oréal is launching an AI compensation planning tool based on Pigment for use by its 95,000 employees.

Shallow wrappers struggle to win customers from big vendors

Bloomberg reported that Pigment's growth reflects Europe's overall approach to AI development. Europe has almost no local frontier large-model vendors, but it is forming a growing enterprise AI application ecosystem, providing pairable, deployable AI products for industries such as law and finance.

However, the challenges in this track are also significant. If enterprise-facing AI applications lack differentiated functions and only offer basic features such as wrappers and simple Q&A, it will be difficult to win customers from companies such as Microsoft and SAP. Therefore, enterprise-facing AI tools need to be further tied to enterprises' core businesses and obtain continuously accumulated business data in order to improve the tools' ease of use.

Sources: Bloomberg, Pigment

This article is from the WeChat public account "Zhihui Dong" (ID: zhidxcom), author: Cheng Qian, editor: Xinyuan, published with authorization by 36Kr.