法国 AI 公司 Pigment 已完成一轮 2.5 亿美元融资，增强了这家欧洲明星初创企业向美国科技巨头发起挑战的实力。该融资将于周二宣布，公司估值达到 23 亿美元。Scaleup Europe Fund 领投，英伟达公司和美日基金 World Innovation Lab 参投，现有机构投资者 Iconiq、IVP 和 Meritech Capital 也跟投。（英伟达首席执行官黄仁勋上周在访法期间宣布了该投资。）
Pigment, a French AI company that competes with Microsoft’s Excel and PowerPoint, has raised $250 million in a funding round, bolstering a push by a prominent European startup to take on an American technology giant. The financing, set to be announced Tuesday, values the company at $2.3 billion. The Scaleup Europe Fund led the round, with participation from Nvidia Corp. and World Innovation Lab, a US and Japan-based fund, as well as existing institutional investors Iconiq, IVP and Meritech Capital. (Nvidia’s Jensen Huang announced its investment last week as part of a visit to France.)
联合创始人兼首席执行官 Eléonore Crespo 表示，公司还计划在本轮融资中引入几家亚洲投资者，以支持计划中的亚洲市场拓展。
The company also plans to add a few Asian investors to the round to support a planned expansion into the region, according to Eléonore Crespo, Pigment’s co-founder and chief executive officer.
Pigment 成立于 2019 年，开发 AI 驱动的软件，帮助企业进行财务预测、快速生成幻灯片和规划运营。与微软一样，Pigment 正致力于说服更广泛的办公人群在工作流中采用 AI —— 这比说服软件工程师使用 AI 编程工具要难得多。Crespo 表示，Pigment 作为 Anthropic PBC 的财务规划系统，正寻求赢得目前使用 SAP SE、Oracle Corp.、International Business Machines Corp. 和 Anaplan Inc. 等公司产品以及微软产品的客户。
Founded in 2019, Pigment makes AI-powered software that helps businesses forecast finances, quickly spin up slide decks and plan operations. Like Microsoft, Pigment is working to convince a broader swath of office workers to adopt AI into their workflows — a harder proposition than convincing software engineers to use artificial intelligence coding tools. Pigment, which serves as a financial planning system for Anthropic PBC, is seeking to gain customers who currently use programs from SAP SE, Oracle Corp., International Business Machines Corp. and Anaplan Inc., Crespo said, as well as Microsoft.
Crespo 说，AI 办公工具需要更加易用。“如果 AI 系统不是从一开始就完全为你设计的 —— 能用自然语言交互，让你感到舒适、得心应手，所有数据、所有系统都已接入其中 —— 你要采用它将非常困难，”她说，“这就是我们看到的差距。”
AI workforce tools need to be much easier to use, Crespo said. “If the AI system is not completely designed for you to be able to use it day one — speaking natural language, feeling comfortable, feeling at home, with everything already plugged in, all of your data, all of your systems — in it’s going to be very hard for you to adopt it,” she said. “That’s the gap that we see.”
法国化妆品公司欧莱雅正在为其 9.5 万名员工推广 Pigment 作为薪资规划工具。Pigment 的年度经常性收入已突破 1 亿美元，较上一年翻倍。
French cosmetics company L’Oreal SA is rolling out Pigment as a salary-planning tool for its 95,000 employees. Pigment passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, doubling from the year prior.
Crespo 表示，公司预计明年业绩将再次翻倍。Pigment 的增长反映了欧洲更广泛的人工智能战略。该大陆鲜有前沿 AI 模型开发商，但正在形成一个不断壮大的生态系统，由构建 AI 应用的公司组成，法律、银行等行业的企业可能愿意为这些应用付费。Pigment 特别希望接下来构建 AI 智能体，使其运行在企业现有的企业资源规划（ERP）软件之上，涵盖会计和人力资源等任务。
Crespo said the company expects to double again next year. Pigment’s growth reflects Europe’s broader artificial intelligence strategy. The continent has few frontier AI model makers, but it has a growing ecosystem of companies building AI applications that businesses across legal, banking and other industries might pay to use. Pigment, in particular, next wants to build AI agents that sit on top of a company’s existing enterprise resource planning software, which includes tasks like accounting and human resources.
EQT Growth 的董事总经理 Shannee Braun 表示，该公司的软件在帮助客户利用智能体进行各类规划流程方面非常强，无论是在供应、销售还是人员编制方面。EQT Growth 负责管理 Scaleup Europe Fund。
The company’s software is really strong at helping clients use agents for a wide range of planning processes, whether in supply, sales or headcount, said Shannee Braun, managing director at EQT Growth, which oversees the Scaleup Europe Fund.
“许多大型企业仍在用 Excel 处理这些工作，数据分散在各个孤立且互不关联的地方，”她说。在一个集中化的地方处理这些数据“变得越来越重要”。
“A lot of large enterprises are still doing this in Excel, in sort of disparate and disconnected places,” she said. It’s “becoming increasingly important” to handle that data in one centralized place.