How Pigment outpaced 20-year-old industry giants

For Édouard, the answer starts with a paradox.

“Budgeting and business planning were probably among the very first areas to be tooled in companies. And paradoxically, for twenty years, not much really happened.”

For two decades, planning remained a critical pillar of the enterprise, yet frozen in architectures designed for a very different world. Pigment was built precisely in that blind spot.

An old market, technologically stuck

Legacy business planning tools were designed at a time when technical constraints were radically different. Relational databases, multidimensional cubes, heavy reporting servers.

Édouard sums up this reality with a telling image.

“These architectures were built at a time when you and I were still using a BlackBerry.”

Those solutions proved resilient over time, but at the cost of significant structural debt. Even when modernized on the surface, their core remains constrained by choices made twenty or thirty years ago.

“You can put them in the cloud, containerize them, but the core of the software is still deeply shaped by that original design.”

That is precisely the legacy Pigment did not have to carry.

Being born at the right time, with the right architecture

Pigment was founded in 2019, in a radically different context. The cloud was mature, data platforms had become central, and AI was starting to establish itself as an operational lever.

“Our very inception was fully aligned with today’s technological ecosystem. Cloud, elasticity, and AI.”

This point is fundamental. While legacy players have to deal with accumulated technical debt, Pigment was able from day one to design a platform capable of absorbing new use cases without disruption.

“It’s not that we have better engineers. It’s that the architectural choices we made from the start make us far more compatible with what’s coming.”

That compatibility became a decisive advantage with the successive arrival of machine learning, large language models, and then agents.

From finance to company-wide planning

Initially, Pigment addressed a classic need: translating a strategic plan into financial budgets, revising them, and comparing them to actuals.

But very quickly, the platform expanded to cover other dimensions of the business.

“Historically, we were mostly doing financial planning. Today, it’s become much more elastic.”

Pigment now covers P&L, OPEX, CAPEX, and cash flow, as well as much more operational topics such as workforce planning, skills planning, logistics, demand planning, and sales performance management.

“Planning is not just a financial topic. It’s a company-wide topic.”

This cross-functional approach set the stage for a deeper integration of AI.

A progressive and pragmatic integration of AI

At Pigment, AI did not arrive all at once. It was integrated in successive waves, in line with concrete use cases.

First came machine learning.

“Machine learning allowed us to do projections on empirical data, handle seasonality, and also perform classification, for example in management consolidation.”

Then large language models, integrated very early, as early as 2022.

“LLMs made it possible to very quickly build assistants for search, documentation, and explanation.”

For Édouard, context is the key.

“I strongly believe in LLMs when they are placed in the context of data, calculation rules, and management rules.”

Finally, Pigment took another step forward with agents.

Agents to accelerate time to value

Today, Pigment no longer talks only about AI, but about a digital workforce.

“Our customers already have agents in production that help them with repetitive, complex, and low-value tasks.”

The analyst agent, for example, automates actual-versus-budget comparisons and continuously produces analyses and dashboards.

“What really accelerated is the time to value. Projects that used to take two years can now be delivered in a matter of months.”

Other agents complement this approach, such as the modeler agent or the planner agent, dedicated to multiplying scenarios.

“The core challenge of planning is the number of scenarios you can run and rerun.”

In a volatile world, this capability becomes strategic.

Why legacy players struggle to keep up

The question is inevitable: why do much larger players fail to move at the same pace?

For Édouard, the answer is structural.

“Their product architecture was designed between the late 1990s and the early 2010s.”

Even with significant resources, that original design limits their ability to quickly integrate new paradigms.

“We may have competitors that are fifty times larger than us, but we are fifty times faster.”

This speed differential becomes a decisive competitive advantage.

A success driven by digital natives and the US market

Pigment first gained traction with digital-native companies, both in Europe and North America.

“Digital natives were our first core group of customers. They move fast because they have no legacy.”

Very early on, Pigment chose to tackle the US market.

“You can’t succeed as a B2B software company without cracking the US market, and you have to do it from the start.”

Today, around one third of the Forbes Cloud 100 companies use Pigment, a strong signal of its international traction.

Restoring value to business roles

Beyond technology, Pigment promotes a clear vision of how work should evolve.

“A financial controller is there to do financial controlling, not to write Excel macros.”

AI makes it possible to mechanize data collection and consolidation, allowing teams to refocus on analysis, strategic thinking, and decision-making.

“We put the nobility of the role back at the center. We allow people to think and create, not to collect and assemble data.”

Conclusion

If Pigment has outpaced twenty-year-old industry giants, it is neither because of size nor because of marketing narratives.

It is the result of an architecture designed from the ground up for cloud and AI, a progressive but concrete integration of these technologies, and a deep understanding of business use cases.

“Many talk. We ship.”

In a world where planning must become continuous, agile, and decision-driven, Pigment illustrates what a new generation of enterprise software can look like.