Pigment, a French company making AI-powered business planning software, raised $250 million in a round that values it at $2.3 billion. The Scaleup Europe Fund led, with participation from Nvidia, World Innovation Lab, ICONIQ, IVP and Meritech Capital. The Paris-based company serves finance teams with budgeting, forecasting and analysis, and positions itself against tools such as Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint.

What it means: Budgeting and forecasting are among the most time-consuming jobs in any finance department, and in most companies they still happen in huge spreadsheets passed around by email. Pigment is betting that a shared data model with AI assistants can make that work faster and less error-prone. The round also has a European angle, since it is led by the Scaleup Europe Fund, a fund created to keep European growth companies financed in Europe. Nvidia's participation shows the chipmaker is also investing in applications that will raise demand for compute. For customers, the real benefit depends on the connection to ERP and accounting systems: without clean data, no forecasting tool helps. For Greek businesses that already digitise documents through myDATA and e-invoicing, that data could gradually feed planning tools like this. Competition with Microsoft, which is building Copilot into Excel, will be tough, and Pigment will have to show it offers something an improved spreadsheet cannot.

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