Pigment, a French AI company, announced the completion of a $250 million funding round, reaching a post-money valuation of $2.3 billion. The round was led by Scaleup Europe Fund, with Nvidia (NVDA) and World Innovation Lab participating, while existing institutional investors including Iconiq, IVP and Meritech Capital continued to increase their investments. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang disclosed the investment during his recent trip to France. Eléonore Crespo, co-founder and CEO of Pigment, revealed that the company plans to bring in several Asian investors in this round to support its subsequent regional expansion plans.
Founded in 2019, the company focuses on AI-driven enterprise software. Its products help enterprises conduct financial forecasting, quickly generate presentations and carry out operational planning, directly competing with Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint. Unlike AI tools designed for developers, Pigment promotes AI workflows to ordinary office workers, which makes implementation relatively more difficult. The company currently provides a financial planning system for Anthropic PBC, and its target customer base covers existing users of products from SAP SE, Oracle (ORCL), International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Anaplan Inc. and Microsoft. L’Oréal SA has already rolled out Pigment as a compensation planning tool to its 95,000 employees.
Pigment plans next to build AI agents on top of enterprises’ existing ERP systems, covering business scenarios such as accounting and human resources. Shannee Braun, head of Scaleup Europe Fund, said that a large number of enterprises still rely on scattered Excel spreadsheets for planning work, and the value of a unified data platform is becoming increasingly prominent.
Over the past two weeks, Nvidia’s stock price has fallen more than 9% cumulatively, as market concerns about the AI industry have been somewhat released. Anthropic’s postponement of its IPO plan and the financial pressure faced by some cloud service providers have both affected market sentiment. Although Nvidia’s overall performance this year has been solid, its earlier strong financial reports did not meet the expectations of some investors. Some media, citing anonymous sources, reported that Chinese companies including ByteDance, Alibaba (BABA) and Tencent (TCEHY) have collectively purchased more than 3 million Nvidia Blackwell chips, with the total order scale reaching $35 billion. These sales were not included in the company’s previous performance guidance and are expected to provide a potential boost.
Overall, European local AI application companies continue to receive capital support and are challenging U.S. technology companies in enterprise planning-related office scenarios. On the other hand, Nvidia’s stock price is under short-term pressure, while large chip orders from Chinese customers have added potential support for its future performance.
