Planning Software that Keeps up with a Fast-Changing World
ICONIQ Growth invests in Pigment, a modern solution for business planning
By: Seth Pierrepont, Matt Jacobson, Ritika Pai, Sarah Stebbins | June 8, 2023
Pigment's co-founders Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli
The market tumult of the past few years tested and humbled business leaders around the world in extraordinary ways. In times of such enormous change, we have observed first-hand how the greatest leaders embrace agile business planning as a key strategic imperative, responding to shifts in a data-driven way and ultimately getting to operational excellence faster.
Despite this urgency, a majority of businesses are still using legacy spreadsheets to do the work. Several legacy software tools have attempted to tackle the planning problem, but our research in this space over the last few years reveals that the underlying architecture, user experience, slow pace of innovation, and long implementation times are still painful for the end user. The stage is set for a new-generation player to disrupt this mission critical category. We believe that Pigment is doing just that. Today, we are excited to announce our lead investment in Pigment’s Series C round.
From our first meeting with Pigment co-founders Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli, we were blown away by their intense focus on product detail and customer care.
Founded in Paris in late 2019, Pigment is a modern platform purpose built for effective, sophisticated, and easy-to-use business planning across teams at scale. Pigment accurately integrates and centralizes dozens of data sources, aligns teams and workflows in real time via an API-first, modular, flexible, and intuitive platform. This enables teams across divisions to build and maintain dynamic reports, plans, and forecasts, which better equips them to respond to their evolving needs faster and more efficiently.
Beyond the product as it stands today, we’ve been incredibly impressed by Pigment’s sheer pace of innovation. Their ability to build a comprehensive, multidimensional, enterprise-grade platform in just a few short years is extraordinary and a true testament to the team’s vision and commitment to product excellence. While Pigment quickly reached feature parity with incumbents and secured validation from enterprise customers early in its journey, simply matching the offerings of legacy players is not their end goal. Their publicly-posted roadmap and incredible launch of Pigment AI is a clear reflection of the team’s singular commitment to win this category by building the most sophisticated, innovative, beautiful, and secure product.
It’s an investor’s dream when companies recommend products to us that they love for us to consider as potential investments. Across our conversations not only with portfolio leaders, but also our CFO dialogues and events in the broader ICONIQ network, Pigment has come up time and time again.
The consistently positive experiences we've heard from their customers made it clear to us that this is an exceptional business. In a market that is, at first glance, crowded with legacy and point solution players, it’s impressive how many of the most innovative global companies and enterprises—including Airtable, Figma, Gong, Klarna, Miro, PVH (including brands such as Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger) and more—are proud to share their trust and advocacy for Pigment.
As we’ve seen time and again though our investments in some of the world’s leading enterprise software and “office of the CFO” companies from Adyen, Bill.com, Blackline, Coupa, HighRadius, Ramp, and more—leaders must make fast, data-driven decisions in response to the complexities and opportunities of the future. As such, we believe every enterprise will need a planning software tool. We believe there is no better choice than Pigment.
ICONIQ Growth is thrilled and grateful to support Eléonore, Romain, and the entire Pigment team in their mission to bring people, data and processes together so they can plan, make decisions and adapt to change. And while, ICONIQ Growth has been partnering with visionary entrepreneurs based in Europe since 2015, we are proud that such an exceptional business is our first investment in a company founded in Europe since we opened our office in London last year.
We have deep conviction that Pigment will become one of the most meaningful enterprise software businesses for companies globally and could not be more excited to partner and support the team as they continue their extraordinary journey.
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