French AI Planning Startup Pigment Raises 250 Million Dollars at 2.3 Billion to Challenge Microsoft Excel

Pigment, a French startup building AI-powered business planning software, has raised 250 million dollars at a 2.3 billion dollar valuation, according to Bloomberg. The round, set to be announced Tuesday, was led by the Scaleup Europe Fund managed by EQT Growth, with participation from Nvidia and the US-Japan fund World Innovation Lab, plus existing investors Iconiq, IVP and Meritech Capital. The company said it plans to add Asian investors to support expansion into the region.

Nvidia's involvement is notable for its timing: CEO Jensen Huang announced the chipmaker's investment last week during a visit to France, part of a broader push to seed a European application-layer AI ecosystem. Pigment becomes one of the larger European AI software companies by valuation without training a single frontier model — a bet that the money in this cycle increasingly sits in applications, not just infrastructure.

Founded in 2019 and led by co-founder and CEO Eléonore Crespo, Pigment sells software that helps companies forecast finances, build slide decks and plan operations. It competes with an unusually broad set of incumbents: Microsoft's Excel and PowerPoint on the productivity side, and SAP, Oracle, IBM and Anaplan in enterprise planning. The company also serves as the financial planning system for Anthropic, one of the leading AI labs.

The numbers behind the round are concrete. Pigment has passed 100 million dollars in annual recurring revenue, double the level of a year prior, and Crespo said the company expects to double again next year — a company projection, not an audited figure. Global cosmetics group L’Oréal is rolling Pigment out as a salary-planning tool for its 95,000 employees, one of the larger single-company deployments in the category.

Crespo's argument is that AI office tools must be usable from day one. In her framing, an AI system that is not designed so workers feel at home immediately — speaking natural language, with all their data and systems already plugged in — will struggle to get adopted beyond engineers, who took readily to AI coding tools. The next product push targets AI agents that sit on top of a company's existing ERP software, handling planning processes across supply, sales and headcount.

EQT Growth managing director Shannee Braun said Pigment is strong at helping clients apply agents across a wide range of planning processes, positioning it as a test case for whether Europe can produce AI software champions. With the round, Pigment joins a small group of European AI application companies competing directly against US giants on their home turf: the office worker's desktop.