Forecasting the future is something that many people claim to be able to do; cyrpto curency influencers on TikTok, Mystic Meg, or climate change activists and their sea level guesstimates for 2050. But in reality, forecasting is very tricky, because patterns of data shift, evolve or change direction quite suddenly. So insurers need all the data science help they can get. Because facts, not feelings, determine premiums.
Pigment, the planning and forecasting platform for fast-growth companies, has announced a $73 million Series B to become the central business planning solution powering Finance, HR, Sales and Marketing decisions. This comes just a year after Pigment’s Series A and the company’s promise to reboot the spreadsheet. Pigment’s intuitive platform, which anyone can use and understand in minutes, allows leaders and analysts to understand all of their business data better and anticipate the impact of their decisions with unprecedented speed and flexibility.
The investment was led by US heavyweight Greenoaks with Series A investors participating, including New York-based FirstMark Capital and Blossom Capital. Pigment will use the funds to hire employees and increase resources to meet massive demand from clients, and to expand their footprint in the US and European markets.
For too long, Finance and Business teams have had to adapt to expensive and complex tools or error-prone Excel spreadsheets to understand their business, operating in isolation from the rest of their company’s functions. But in a remote-first world, the need for online collaboration capabilities that allow true team alignment has never been stronger. Since its Series A in December 2020, Pigment has further developed their platform to allow any leader in an organisation to adopt a common language around the numbers that matter, and to work on them in real time with their teams. The platform has native integrations with Workday, Netsuite, Salesforce and many other SaaS solutions.
The platform is seeing rapid uptake. In less than a year, Pigment has signed some of Europe’s fastest growing businesses, including ManoMano, Melio, Deliveroo, Spendesk, Blablacar, and Cheerz. Those companies chose Pigment to inform important business decisions under the tight timeframes required of the competitive space they operate in: validating and tracking hiring plans across fast-growing teams, expanding – or deciding not to – in new markets, defining new customer segmentation, raising a new round or planning an IPO. In addition, Pigment’s potential is drawing top talent. Tech hotshots Julien Lesaicherre and Rebeca Tristan recently left Facebook – where they were in charge of Workplace’s success – to join the Pigment mission as Head of Business and Head of Customer Experience, respectively. The company aims to triple the size of their business team by Q1 22.
Pigment has grand ambitions for the US market, having just signed new flagship US clients, Melio, Algolia, and Gong, one of the fastest growing US sales companies. Pigment plans to open US offices in New York and Silicon Valley, hiring across all sales and support functions in 2022.
Eléonore Crespo & Romain Niccoli, Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of Pigment said: “In every category from sales to marketing, innovation has happened – but the most strategic decisions still rely on analysts spending long, painful hours on Excel. We want to help fast growth companies see, understand, and imagine the full spectrum of their business by creating a common language around the numbers that matter. And the proof we’re succeeding in that goal can be seen in our client’s recent successes!”.
Neil Shah, at Greenoaks Capital said: “Financial planning & analysis is a critical business function. But today, most companies rely on software that hasn’t evolved in years — either outdated spreadsheets that are inflexible and don’t scale, or expensive and overly-complex FP&A suites that require an industry of consultants to support them. Today’s businesses demand agile and intelligent tools that will help them make better decisions more quickly. That’s why we were excited to meet Pigment, which is bringing a world-class engineering team and an exceptional product to a timely problem. We believe that the company will rapidly become the market’s clear leader in planning software, building faster and for broader use cases than any competitor, and delighting their customers along the way. Greenoaks is thrilled to partner with them at this exciting moment in their journey.”
Paul Melchiorre, former CEO of business planning giant Anaplan, said: “I’ve been in the enterprise planning business since my time at SAP in the early 1990s. I recently led the largest player in the space, and I can honestly say that Pigment’s platform is the most flexible and comprehensive. Pigment will be transformative for the start-up ecosystem because it will be at the core of successful and sustainable growth strategies, tailor made for the next generation of leaders. It will allow them to deliver on high expectations set by increasing levels of funding, and plan for uncertain scenarios while being socially and environmentally mindful.”
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