A Former Google Data Analyst Raised $73 Million Without a Pitch Deck For Her Spreadsheets Killer — Here's How The Paris startup, founded by an ex-Google analyst and investor, has raised a $73 million Series B.
This story originally appeared on Business Insider
A French startup hoping to kill off the spreadsheet by offering businesses an easy-to-use planning and reporting tool has raised a $73 million Series B — without a pitch deck.
Pigment offers business teams such as finance and sales a central database for planning and forecasting in efforts to move away from error-prone spreadsheets and siloed data. The Paris startup said this would help leaders better understand their business data and the effects of decisions.
Spreadsheets are not the most flexible, powerful, or collaborative tools, said Eléonore Crespo, a Pigment cofounder.
This is something the former Google data analyst experienced firsthand at the tech giant and again as an investor at the venture-capital firm Index Ventures, where she saw high-growth startups planning initial public offerings on spreadsheets.
"That struck me," she said. "When it comes to planning — your resources, your revenue, your budgets, your sales — it's hard when you are not well connected to your other SaaS," she added, referring to software-as-a-service products.
Related: These Microsoft Excel Add-Ons Let You Do More With Spreadsheets
Crespo continued: "It's hard to collaborate when you know you don't have the right tool. It's hard to flag mistakes in spreadsheets. It's hard to sync in a spreadsheet when your company is so complex and is growing so massively."
In 2019, Crespo teamed up with Romain Niccoli, a former chief technology officer and cofounder of the adtech giant Criteo, which went public on the Nasdaq in 2013, to launch Pigment.
The startup counts Deliveroo, Melio, BlaBlaCar, and ManoMano among its clients. Its business and customers-experience teams are led, respectively, by Julien Lesaicherre and Rebeca Tristan, former Facebook heads.
Crespo believed that a focus on attracting top talent and "big logo" customers naturally spread the word of Pigment to backers, and she said the raise resulted from inbound interest.
"We didn't have a deck, it wasn't necessarily on purpose but because the round was preempted," she said. She added that she had all the data that investors wanted to see at hand, without having to pull together a traditional deck.
Her background as a venture capitalist also helped — though for founders who aren't in that lucky situation, she mentioned the importance of relationships.
"If you want to be successful at fundraising, you need to meet investors in advance," she said. "You need to create a relationship. This world is about relationships, and that involves everything you do.
"This is not only for you to fundraise, but it's also for you to know investors because it's a two-way relationship. You are actually creating a very long term partnership. You're probably going to spend the next 10 years with this specific investor."
Crespo advised meeting investors months in advance to establish what they can bring to the table. Any deck is more of a tool to paint the full picture.
Pigment's round was led by Silicon Valley's Greenoaks Capital, which backed Airtable earlier this year. FirstMark Capital in New York and Europe's Blossom Capital also participated in the round.
Pigment intends to use the cash injection to fuel expansion in the US, having signed its first customers there. It's eyeing offices in New York and Silicon Valley, and it plans to build out sales and support teams there in 2022.
Research and development are set to stay in Europe, and Crespo is looking to double or triple the head count on Pigment's technical teams. But the founder stressed quality over quantity.
Crespo also hoped to introduce carbon-accounting features so that businesses could better track their environmental footprint.
