Scaleup Europe Fund leads $250M funding round in Pigment
Tech.eu John Reynolds
Pigment just raised $250m at a $2.3bn valuation. The EU-backed fund leading it is trying to build Europe’s next big tech names.
Based on reporting by Tech.eu, John Reynolds — read the original for the full story.
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French startup Pigment has pulled in $250m at a $2.3bn valuation, and the headline here is not just the size of the round. The Series E was led by Scaleup Europe Fund, the EU’s new €5bn push to back bigger European tech companies, with EQT managing the vehicle.
Pigment sells enterprise planning software for finances, operations and forecasting. In plain terms, it is trying to replace the spreadsheets and older planning systems companies still lean on, while also taking on names like Microsoft Excel, SAP, IBM and Anaplan. That’s a crowded fight, but Pigment is already working with Siemens, Unilever, Anthropic and ElevenLabs.
The round also brought in World Innovation Labs, plus existing backers Greenoaks, Iconiq, IVP and Meritech. Nvidia was part of the mix too, after its investment had already been announced. Pigment had raised $145m in its Series D in 2024, led by Iconiq, so this is a sharp step up in both valuation and ambition.
Pigment says the money will go into faster R&D and a larger engineering team. Its founders, Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli, are pitching a future where AI agents handle planning workflows from end to end. That is a big claim, but it fits the broader bet behind the Scaleup Europe Fund: Europe wants more homegrown tech heavyweights, and it wants them to scale before the US and China pull even further ahead.
The fund has already backed Mistral and Iceye, so Pigment is not an isolated experiment. It is part of a deliberate effort to turn Europe’s funding gap into something closer to a platform for serious scale.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is exactly the sort of cheque Europe should be writing more often: large, strategic, and slightly impatient. The continent has spent years talking about tech champions while letting the best companies get starved between startup and scaleup. Nice to see money arrive before the obituary does.
Read more about this at: Tech.eu
