We are thrilled to announce our latest portfolio company, Pigment, the business planning platform for forward-thinking organizations. Meritech recently co-led a $60 million Series B extension round to fund Pigment’s continued explosive growth.
The backstory behind our investment begins almost a decade ago when we led Anaplan’s Series C round, and helped build their business into a $10 billion exit earlier this year. Anaplan was the first cloud planning solution, a quantum leap forward for handling extremely large models with numerous concurrent users. Yet for all of Anaplan’s success, the promise of a truly connected planning solution - one that enables all users to actively participate in the planning process - has gone largely unfulfilled. Becoming an expert Anaplanner requires an intense amount of training and model building experience. It’s a complex platform, and not one we’ve ever heard anyone describe as easily approachable or intuitive.
Cue Pigment. Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli, Pigment’s cofounders, knew that a much easier to use planning platform would significantly open up the market, as enterprises of all sizes are desperate for a solution that can not only handle an enormous amount of data but is flexible enough to be used broadly and actively throughout the organization. Without broad adoption, the plan won’t reflect the reality of what employees are actually experiencing. Without active usage, the plan won’t allow decision makers to make sound decisions in real time. The effectiveness of a plan and, as a direct consequence, the strength of a business, directly correlates with how inclusive and dynamic the planning process is. Waiting for weeks for a new product line to be added to your planning model is not how anyone wants to run their business in today’s world, and yet that’s what legacy planning products often require. With Pigment, it takes hours. It’s just that simple to use.
But don’t just take our word for it – forward thinking organizations like Brex, Carta, ClickUp, dbt Labs, Figma, Gong, Harness, Heap, Starburst and many, many more have all decided to run their businesses on Pigment, and are rapidly finding that their planning processes are much more robust and agile. More than ever right now, with so much economic uncertainty, it’s absolutely crucial to have a planning platform that surfaces insights quickly and enables informed business decisions. No wonder that we consistently heard an uncommon level of passion for Pigment’s product in our customer diligence calls. It’s just that different too.
Connected planning has always been the dream. Thanks to Eléonore, Romain, and the entire Pigment team, it is finally turning into a reality. This is one product worth seeing for yourself and seeing it soon – planning is too important not to get picture perfect. Why plan in black and white when you can plan in vibrant colors?