Pigment raises $250m in a round led by the EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund
The Paris-founded planning software company is valued at $2.3bn and says its ARR passed $100m this year, doubling again year on year.
Pigment, the Paris-founded AI business planning platform, has raised a $250 million Series E at a $2.3 billion valuation, the company announced on 21 October 2026. The round was led by the Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, the new fund that brings together public and private money to keep Europe's most promising tech companies growing in Europe.
It is one of the first headline deals for the Scaleup Europe Fund, and it puts European capital at the front of a late-stage round for a company that competes with global incumbents such as SAP, IBM, Anaplan and Microsoft Excel.
Who is in the round
According to Pigment's announcement, the Series E also includes WIL (World Innovation Lab), a VC firm headquartered in Palo Alto and Tokyo, existing investors Greenoaks, ICONIQ, IVP and Meritech, and a planned investment from Nvidia. Tech.eu notes that the round follows Pigment's $145 million Series D in 2024, led by ICONIQ. Sifted reports that the new round brings Pigment's total funding to nearly $600 million since it launched in 2019.
Nvidia's planned stake fits a wider pattern of the US chipmaker taking positions in European AI companies. Earlier this month we reported that Nvidia took stakes in nine European AI startups.
What Pigment does
Pigment sells a platform that helps large companies plan their finances, operations and forecasts. Its customers include established groups such as Siemens and Unilever, as well as AI companies such as Anthropic and ElevenLabs, according to Tech.eu.
The company says it passed $100 million in ARR earlier this year, doubling year on year again, and that 85 percent of new metrics in Pigment are now created by an AI agent. The money will go into research and development and a bigger engineering team, focused on Graphite, Pigment's proprietary, patent-pending compute engine, and the AI agents that run on it. Pigment also plans to expand into new regions.
"Enterprise planning will change more in the next few years than it has in the last thirty," co-founders Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli said in the announcement. They added: "With AI agents running planning workflows end to end and turning decisions into action, companies can respond to change as fast as it happens."
Pigment's pitch to investors rests on that engine. The company says Graphite already lets thousands of AI agents and people work on the same governed model at once, scaling to hundreds of billions of data points with deterministic, fully traceable results. Its argument is that companies will only trust AI agents to run planning workflows, and act on the results, when every number can be checked and every action traced. With the new money, Pigment plans to extend its agents from building models and analysing data to running planning workflows end to end.
Why the Scaleup Europe Fund matters
European founders have long complained that late-stage rounds are dominated by US investors, which can pull companies, headquarters and listings across the Atlantic. The Scaleup Europe Fund was set up to address that gap. Pigment's announcement describes it as a commercially driven fund targeting €5 billion that invests across deep tech, AI applications and life sciences. Tech.eu reports that its other investments include Mistral and ICEYE.
"Eléonore and Romain have built a global category leader from Paris, and that is exactly the kind of company the Scaleup Europe Fund was created to back," said Shannee Braun, Managing Director at EQT and the Scaleup Europe Fund. EQT itself manages €341 billion in total assets, according to the announcement.
What it means for European founders
For founders approaching Series C and beyond, there is now one more European lead investor able to write a very large cheque. Pigment's round also shows the profile such investors look for: more than $100 million in ARR, global enterprise customers and a clear AI story.
The deal came in the same week as Legora's $550m Series E and the launch of Seaya's €600m growth fund, another vehicle aimed at Europe's growth-stage funding gap.
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