Pigment, a business planning and forecasting service that integrates data from many platforms including Snowflake and Salesforce, raises a $73M Series B
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Pigment's $73M Series B comes barely a year after its $25.9M Series A built around real-time dashboards, simulations, and continuous modeling — an unusually fast follow-on that signals investor appetite for replacing spreadsheet-bound financial planning with a tool that pipes live data from platforms like Snowflake and Salesforce into one forecasting layer.
The round sits inside a broader 2021 funding wave for planning software: DataRails extended its own Series A to $43.5M for Excel-anchored FP&A, and London-based Forecast raised $19M for AI-driven resource planning. Pigment's later trajectory — an $88M Series C led by Iconiq Growth and then a $145M round at a reported $1B+ valuation — makes this Series B the inflection point where the company pulled ahead of that cohort.
First-order effects
- Pigment gains the capital to scale engineering and go-to-market against its directly funded rivals DataRails and Forecast, with its Snowflake and Salesforce integrations as the wedge into enterprise finance teams.
Second-order effects
- DataRails' Excel-first positioning now faces a competitor whose pitch is leaving the spreadsheet behind entirely, forcing the FP&A category to compete on which data sources — warehouse or worksheet — anchor the forecast.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, financial planning consolidates around cloud-data-native platforms that sit on top of systems like Snowflake and Salesforce rather than inside any single app, turning integration breadth into the category's main moat.
The trend: Business planning and forecasting is shifting from spreadsheet-bound tools to real-time, multi-platform modeling layers, with venture capital accelerating each stage of the race.