Pigment: The True Colors of Next-gen Business Planning

By: Ajay Vashee, Somesh Dash, Michael Miao, James Black

Business growth is often a function of planning and forecasting – financial, resource, product, sales, you name it. And yet, the tools organizations typically use to forge their futures are based on an error-prone 40-year-old technology – spreadsheets – or on plodding, expensive enterprise software that users dread.

Then there’s Pigment, a powerful, integrated platform that vastly improves the financial planning process by focusing on ease-of-use, quick time to value, real-time collaboration, expansive breadth of integrations, and outstanding customer support.

For those and many other reasons, IVP is proud to lead Pigment’s $65 million latest growth-stage financing, elevating the company as the vastly superior alternative to the limited functionality and mistakes of spreadsheets and the clunky, high-overhead drudgery of enterprise performance management (EPM) software.

“Pigment delivers an unmatched business planning platform that finance leaders and executive teams are now adopting en masse,” said Ajay Vashee, a General Partner at IVP and the former CFO of Dropbox. “Pigment is the tool I wish I had when taking Dropbox public.”

“We believe Pigment, under the visionary leadership of the company’s founders, Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli, represents the future of enterprise performance management and business planning,” Ajay added.

Why Pigment Wins

“Pigment is finally the tool that lets us do everything we want for financial planning.”

As strategy and finance become increasingly intertwined, modern finance teams have grown more important and influential to company planning and decision-making. Paradoxically, they often rely on inaccurate, unscalable legacy tooling to get their work done, spending too many hours collecting and cleaning disparate data sources at the expense of high-value strategic planning and analysis.

Excel and Google Sheets don’t provide the features modern finance teams need to build complex, yet highly adaptable models. We’ve all been in the situation when someone used the wrong version of the spreadsheet, lost hours of work when Excel crashed, or found major errors in an obscure cell from a linked workbook. Incumbent enterprise solutions are powerful but require significant IT overhead, training, and user patience – their biggest detractors are often their own customers.

Pigment fills the clear and massive market need for a platform that solves the problems of collaboration, data fragmentation, costly IT investment, and usability, while also strengthening an organization’s financial KPIs. Pigment presents those features via intuitive dashboards and a visually rewarding graphical user experience that customers – including Carta, Figma, Brex, and Deliveroo – love.

“Pigment is finally the tool that lets us do everything we want for financial planning,” one Pigment customer recently told us. Another said: “We’re spending a lot less time preparing data for models and a lot more time actually analyzing our data and getting into the nitty gritty.” Yet another customer noted, “This is the first time I’ve ever felt confident enough in a planning tool to switch over from Excel.”

Pigment’s Journey

In May 2019, Eléonore and Romain founded Pigment to end the pain finance teams, revenue teams and executives endure working with error-prone spreadsheets and inflexible software. Eléonore is a former Google financial analyst and Index Ventures investor; Romain was the co-founder and CTO of Criteo, a global marketing and media data platform which he took public. In three years, the two have signed some of the largest banking, retail and technology customers globally, and built an experienced, diverse team from Google, Meta (Facebook), Atlassian, Criteo, Datadog, and Anaplan.

Alongside Eléonore and Romain’s leadership, IVP is excited to help Pigment grow into an industry leading platform that helps companies revolutionize business decision making, visualize complex scenarios, and update them in real time, with a powerful, scalable data engine and an intuitive UI.