Brussels has decided it doesn't just want to regulate tech — it wants to own some of it. Pigment, the Paris-based business planning platform, announced Wednesday that it has raised a $250 million Series E at a $2.3 billion valuation, led by the EU's new €5 billion ($5.6B) Scaleup Europe Fund, the investment vehicle designed to mint homegrown tech giants that can stand up to the US and China, according to Tech.eu.

The round, managed by EQT, drew participation from World Innovation Lab and existing investors including Greenoaks, ICONIQ, IVP, and Meritech — along with a planned investment from Nvidia. It follows a $145 million Series D in 2024 led by ICONIQ and puts the six-year-old company past $100 million in annual recurring revenue, a number it says it doubled year over year.

Here's the tell: the companies most aggressively automating the economy are paying someone else to automate their planning. Pigment's customer list includes Danone, Siemens, and Unilever — and also Anthropic, ElevenLabs, and Uber, the kind of engineering-dense AI companies that could build this in-house. Instead, they rent it. The company says 85% of new metrics created in Pigment are now generated by an agent, and the new capital goes toward what it calls "autonomous planning" — workflows that run end to end, with AI agents not just drafting the forecast but turning decisions into action.

"Enterprise planning will change more in the next few years than it has in the last thirty," said co-founders Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli. "Legacy tools are being left behind, and the world's most advanced AI companies now run their planning on Pigment."

The Nvidia angle is worth watching. Jensen Huang's company has quietly been planting flags across the AI application layer this year, and a stake in the spreadsheet replacement is a bet that the next interface for enterprise work is conversational, not cell-based. For the Scaleup Europe Fund, whose other bets include Mistral and ICEYE, Pigment is becoming the portfolio's proof that the continent can produce a winner — not by regulating Silicon Valley, but by out-building it in the boring software that runs everything.

Watch next: whether "autonomous planning" survives contact with a real CFO. Agents writing the forecast is impressive; agents approving the headcount is where the story gets interesting.

— via Tech.eu