Competing for customers with Microsoft, the AI office unicorn has secured 1.6 billion yuan in financing, with NVIDIA participating in the investment round.

Zhidx reported on October 21 that in the early hours of today, according to Bloomberg, French AI office tool unicorn Pigment has completed a new round of financing of 250 million US dollars (about 1.67 billion yuan), with a valuation reaching 2.3 billion US dollars (about 15.361 billion yuan). The company plans to compete for enterprise customers who are 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 NVIDIA and institutions including World Innovation Lab, Iconiq, IVP, Meritech Capital participating in the investment.

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

Founded in 2019, the company's core business is to develop AI office software to help employees with financial forecasting, PPT production, operation planning and other work. According to official information, the company has completed a total of 5 rounds of financing before, with a cumulative financing amount of 397 million US dollars (about 2.651 billion yuan). It obtained 145 million euros (about 1.087 billion yuan) of financing in April 2024 and became a unicorn.

▲ Previous financing history of Pigment (Source: Pigment)

Its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has exceeded 100 million US dollars (about 670 million yuan), doubling compared to last year. Crespo said it expects revenue to double again next year. Its customers include leading enterprises in different tracks such as Google, Anthropic, Uber, Siemens.

Crespo said that they are looking to win new customers who are currently using AI office products from enterprises 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, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, previewed the news at a reception during his European trip in Paris. On October 14, according to French newspaper Les Echos, Jensen Huang said NVIDIA will invest in four French companies: French medical service platform Doctolib, Pigment, robotics startup Genesis AI, and AI materials science startup Entalpic, and the specific investment amount was not disclosed at that time.

Crespo graduated with a master's degree from École des Mines de Paris in 2010. Before founding Pigment, she worked as a financial analyst at Google and an investor at Index Ventures, leading investments in many European unicorn enterprises. She believes that AI tools for enterprise employees must be fully tailored for employees, with fast and convenient interaction, and pre-connected to all data and systems, which is the differentiation between Pigment and other tools.

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

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

Therefore, the business planning AI platform built by Pigment for enterprises can centralize the financial, human resources and sales data of enterprises, so that employees do not need to splice and manually aggregate data across different platforms. It has already built analyst agents, modeling agents, planning agents and other types of agents. Enterprise employees can also generate custom agents by uploading instructions and their own knowledge.

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

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

Conclusion: Building enterprise AI tools requires deep integration with enterprise data

Shallow wrapper products can hardly grab customers from major tech giants

Bloomberg said that the growth of Pigment reflects the overall AI development idea in Europe. There are almost no cutting-edge large model vendors in mainland Europe, but a continuously growing enterprise AI application ecosystem is taking shape, providing payable and implementable AI products for all walks of life such as law and finance.

At a time when the threshold for invoking underlying large model capabilities continues to drop, enterprise AI applications are a key link to translate model capabilities into real business value, which may become the support for Europe to achieve differentiated breakthrough in the AI track.

However, there are also considerable challenges in this track. If the functions of enterprise-oriented AI applications have no differentiation, and only provide basic functions such as simple wrappers and basic Q&A, it is very difficult to grab customers from enterprises such as Microsoft and SAP. Therefore, enterprise-oriented AI tools need to further bind the core business of enterprises and obtain continuously accumulated business data to improve the ease of use of the tools.

Source: Bloomberg, Pigment

This article is from WeChat official account "Zhidx" (ID: zhidxc), written by Cheng Qian, edited by Xinyuan, published with authorization from 36Kr.