Start-up founders now know: the days of easy money are behind them, at least for a moment. In 2023, the cumulative amount of fundraising in France fell to 8.3 billion euros, down almost 40% compared to 2022. And according to the financial data platform Eldorado, the current year is off to an even weaker base with only 1.7 billion raised in the first quarter, compared to 2 billion over the same period a year earlier.
In this context, the announcement, Thursday April 4, by the young company Pigment of a new funding round of 145 million dollars (134 million euros) is remarkable. Since 1er January, only one French start-up had managed to exceed the symbolic bar of 100 million euros (Electra, January 15, 304 million euros).
“It was not planned and it happened very quickly”, explains Eléonore Crespo, co-founder and co-director of Pigment, about the operation: it is the company’s existing investors who are at the origin, starting with the Californian fund Iconiq Growth, which had already led the last fundraising of funds from Pigment (82 million euros), only ten months ago. Only one new investor enters the capital: the fund of Sheryl Sandberg, the former strongwoman of Google and Facebook, whose networks can prove very useful in the United States, where Pigment is well established.
“Continue to innovate”
The company founded in 2019 by Eléonore Crespo (formerly an analyst at Google then an investor at Index Ventures) and Romain Niccoli (co-founder of Criteo) has developed a decision support tool, based on the observation that “99% of leaders make decisions based on incomplete information”. Pigment’s software allows companies to centralize relevant data in order to have a dashboard on their economic activity and to be able to establish action plans. The solution has also been adopted by local authorities, such as the Ile-de-France region.
Keolis, which is in the process of integrating the solution, uses it, for example, to strengthen the quality of its one-year budgets or its five-year strategic plans, depending on the evolution of its costs (indexation of contracts , payroll). “In a sector such as ours which generates very little margin, we have to be quite precise in our financial monitoring”testifies Jean-Michel Archambault, deputy general financial director for France of the company.
You have 27.98% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.