Nvidia-backed French AI company Pigment raises $250 million to take on Microsoft's office software.

French AI company Pigment has raised $250 million in a funding round, as the business competing with Microsoft Corporation's Excel and PowerPoint intensifies efforts to propel a prominent European startup into a challenger to U.S. tech giants. The funding, to be announced Tuesday, values Pigment at $2.3 billion. The round was led by Scaleup Europe Fund, with participation from NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) and U.S.- and Japan-based fund World Innovation Lab, alongside existing institutional investors Iconiq, IVP and Meritech Capital. NVIDIA Corporation CEO Jensen Huang announced the investment last week during a visit to France. Pigment co-founder and CEO Elonore Crespo said the company also plans to bring in several Asian investors in this round to support its planned regional expansion. Founded in 2019, Pigment develops AI-driven software that helps businesses forecast their financial position, quickly produce presentations and plan operations. Like Microsoft Corporation, Pigment is working to persuade the broader office workforce to integrate AI into their workflowsa far harder task than convincing software engineers to use AI coding tools. Crespo said Pigment provides financial planning systems for Anthropic PBC and is currently courting customers that use products from SAP SE, Oracle Corporation (ORCL.US), International Business Machines Corporation (IBM.US) and Anaplan Inc., as well as Microsoft Corporation. She said AI workforce tools must be extremely easy to use. "If the AI system isn't fully designed for you from the startable to communicate in natural language, make you feel comfortable, feel like home, with all your data and all your systems connectedthen it's very hard to adopt it," she said. "That's the gap we see." French cosmetics company L'Oral SA is rolling out Pigment to its 95,000 employees as a compensation planning tool. Pigment's annual recurring revenue has surpassed $100 million, doubling from the prior year. Crespo said the company expects to double again next year. Pigment's growth reflects a broader European AI strategy. Europe has few frontier AI model makers, but a growing ecosystem of AI application companies is taking shape, developing products that could be paid for by businesses in legal, banking and other industries. Pigment in particular hopes to next build AI agents that sit on top of enterprises' existing ERP software, covering tasks such as accounting and human resources. Shannee Braun, managing director at EQT and head of Scaleup Europe Fund, said Pigment's software is very powerful in helping customers use agents to complete various planning processes, whether for supply, sales or headcount. "Many large enterprises are still doing this in Excel, fragmented and siloed," she said. Centralizing data on a unified platform "is becoming increasingly important."