With the release of iOS 18 later this year, Apple may again borrow ideas third-party apps. This time it’s Arc that could be among those affected.
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Online travel agency Expedia is testing an AI assistant that bolsters features like search, itinerary building, trip planning, and real-time travel updates.
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Paris-based startup Pigment has raised a $145 million funding round just five years after its inception. The enterprise software company offers a business planning platform for large companies to visualize their past financial performance and forecast upcoming quarters.
This funding round comes as a bit of a surprise as large rounds have been few and far between in France. According to a recent study from EY, funding rounds in the French tech ecosystem were down 38% in 2023 compared to 2022.
But if you remove buzzy AI startups like Mistral AI and capital-intensive infrastructure plays that are not really tech startups, like EV charging networks (Driveco) and EV battery factories (Verkor), funding rounds are drastically down. Pure software startups have had a rough couple of years.
Pigment appears as an exception with its Series D. Existing investor Iconiq Growth is doubling down by leading this new funding round. Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, IVP, Meritech, Greenoaks and Felix Capital are also participating — many of them were existing investors too.
And there’s a reason why Pigment managed to raise so much at a significantly higher valuation less than a year after its previous funding round. In 2023, the startup managed to triple its revenue and double its customer base with well-known clients like Unilever, Datadog, Kayak and Merck. Half of Pigment’s clients are based in the U.S.
“Our current investors told us ‘if you’re going to raise money in 18 months to scale with others, we might as well offer you great terms right now for an internal round.’ And everything happened very quickly … In one week, it was a done deal,” co-founder and co-CEO Eléonore Crespo told me.
Before Pigment, Crespo worked for VC firm Index Ventures and Google. She co-founded Pigment with Romain Niccoli, who was the co-founder and CTO of adtech startup Criteo — an early success of the French tech ecosystem.
“IVP — one of our backers — benchmarks the growth rate of all SaaS companies. And since we’ve been selling our product, we’ve been in the top 5% of SaaS companies with the best growth rate ever, in terms of revenue growth,” Crespo said.
Image Credits: Pigment
Pigment is a flexible business planning tool that is used by chief financial officers and finance teams to create reports and budgets. It’s a modern SaaS platform, meaning that you can integrate it with all your company’s data (ERP, HRIS, data lakes, etc.) and use it as a collaboration tool.
In addition to finance teams, sales teams can use Pigment to create quotas and see how everyone is performing against quarterly quotas. HR teams can see how they should scale the workforce up and down based on strategic changes and financial objectives.
“We’ve done a lot of work to address other teams, not just finance teams. We’ve developed a lot of modules that enable us to serve HR teams, supply chain teams and sales teams,” Crespo said.
In fact, as more teams start using Pigment, it becomes an important tool for cross-team collaboration. And it’s supposed to work better than legacy tools from Oracle and SAP.
Like many software companies, Pigment has also added AI features. As Pigment acts as the central repository for all the important metrics of a company, customers can ask questions to Pigment AI in natural language to get a quick answer. Examples include “Can you give me a breakdown of revenue per country?” or “Why was our actual revenue lower than our forecast last quarter for this product?”
But more importantly, the company has optimized its core product so that it works well even with large datasets and complicated calculations. The best enterprise software products are must-have products, which means that companies usually don’t need to spend a lot of resources on improving the product — clients need this tool to operate. Pigment is still the challenger in this industry, so it believes it needs to provide a better product to compete with other business planning products.
When entrepreneur Stephen Chen’s mom began approaching retirement age, she was forced to borrow money from Chen — and Chen’s brother — to make ends meet. They wanted to help, but the siblings also wanted to figure out a more sustainable, long-term solution that’d help their mom retire without having to worry about finances.
Chen tried to get guidance from a financial adviser, but no one would take his mother as a client because her net worth wasn’t considered high enough. So Chen started building spreadsheets and financial models himself, doing his best to figure out how his mom could live the retirement lifestyle that she wanted.
“People like my mom lack the tools to look at their money holistically and strategically so they can make informed decisions, monitor their financial situation, understand which levers to pull and when and make the connection between the choices they make today and the long-term ramifications to their plan,” Chen told TechCrunch. “There’s a confluence of factors that may alter the future of financial planning and advising.”
It was after Chen helped his mom lower her expenses, figure out when to claim Social Security, decide when to downsize and take other steps to become financially independent that Chen realized lots of other older Americans were facing the same challenges.
So Chen founded NewRetirement, a Mill Valley-based company building software to help people create financial retirement plans. Today, NewRetirement’s direct-to-consumer products power financial planning for 70,000 users managing close to $100 billion in their own financial plans, according to Chen.
“Our models go beyond savings and investments, taking into account all of the other factors in a person’s life, from home equity, healthcare costs and taxes to Medicare and Social Security,” Chen said. “Every time a user makes a change, we run thousands of simulations in order to help them optimize their plan … We account for thousands of different scenarios, enabling users to confidently map out accumulation and decumulation projections with digital guidance.”
NewRetirement is Chen’s second startup after Embark, an online college search and admissions tool he launched in 1995. And, like Embark, Chen sees NewRetirement as a digital solution to a transition faced by millions of Americans.
“120 million Americans over age 50 hold 80% of the wealth in this country,” Chen said, “But running out of money remains a top 10 fear, with nearly half of Americans saying they are worried about it.”
NewRetirement’s platform uses predictive modeling and data analytics to help users suss out the right savings approaches. Image Credits: NewRetirement
Indeed, the majority of Americans — as many as 65%, per Charles Schwab’s Modern Wealth Survey 2023 — have no formal financial plan. And while 37% of respondents say that they work with a financial adviser, two-thirds of Americans believe that their financial planning needs improvement, according to Northwestern Mutual’s Planning and Progress Study 2023.
NewRetirement, which began as a consumer offering and in 2021 expanded to the enterprise, charges $120 per year for access to a suite of tools, calculators, recommendations and scenario comparisons and ~$1,500 per year for check-ins with a certified financial planner. In addition, NewRetirement sells a subscription-based private label version of its tools aimed at financial advisers.
Now, you might wonder, what makes NewRetirement different from startups like Retirable, which similarly provides an array of retirement planning tools and access to asset managers? Chen asserts that NewRetirement is one of the few — and perhaps only — financial planning platform that serves consumers as well as advisers and workplaces.
“Our core innovation is allowing anyone to create a plan with industrial-strength tools, enabling advisers to collaborate with the end user and making this available at scale through enterprise partners who bring it to their customers,” Chen said. “As more financial services companies see their offerings like investment management become commoditized, there’s huge value in helping clients and prospects think about their money holistically. By offering self-directed digital planning to clients versus starting with a human adviser, they can scale and serve any number of users, learn about them, help them make good decisions and position their products and services more effectively.”
Chen says that about 70% of NewRetirement’s revenue is enterprise presently, with the remaining 30% coming from consumer customers. The platform has 20,000 individual subscribers and “several” wealth management clients as well as “multiple” enterprise customers including Nationwide, which recently expanded an existing partnership with NewRetirement.
That momentum no doubt helped NewRetirement to cinch its Series A funding round this month.
The company raised $20 million in a tranche that brings its total raised to $20.8 million, led by Allegis Capital with participation from Nationwide Ventures, Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Motley Fool Ventures and others. Chen says that the cash infusion will be used to expand 50-employee NewRetirement’s enterprise products, scale up onboarding, accelerate R&D efforts and build capacity to meet future demand.
“With this new capital, we will have three to four years of runway,” Chen said. “That gives us time to continue to scale our enterprise partnerships and enhance our product. What’s more, the current downturn is enabling us to bring in incredible talent. We have a strong team in place and will expand headcount further this year.”
When Marissa Mayer co-founded a startup six years ago in Palo Alto, California, expectations were sky high for the former Yahoo CEO and early Google employee. When that startup, Sunshine, revealed that its first app centered around subscription software for contact management, people wondered if something more ambitious might be around the corner. Today, after Sunshine released two equally mundane features — event organizing and photo sharing — internet commenters were decidedly mystified.
I was also baffled last week when Mayer walked me through Sunshine’s new offerings. Though there are AI components to all that Sunshine offers, it’s hard to understand how Sunshine’s new photo app enhances photo sharing as it exists today, and the same could be said of its new events app, which looks very much like something that was designed 20 years ago.
It’s tempting to dismiss the 15-person outfit as out of touch. But Mayer may be onto something with Sunshine, and that’s nostalgia. Throwback tech is all the rage these days. Further, while most Silicon Valley startups focus on the newest new thing, America is getting older, as the U.S. Census Bureau declared last year. Mayer says Sunshine is tackling problems for people “of all ages,” but targeting a slightly older demographic that gravitates toward the familiar would be a smart move. Older Americans now account for a record share of spending. They have the time to socialize and take pictures. Sunshine’s interface is even steeped in the same purple hue that was long associated with Yahoo, which she famously led for five years beginning in 2012.
Asked if the design choice was intentional, Mayer seemed surprised for a moment, calling it “purely coincidental.” She instead offered that users’ photos are hosted on Sunshine’s servers and “available indefinitely,” and that users can share albums and send invites easily through text, iMessage, email and other sharing platforms. Mayer further stressed that Sunshine will never sell its customers’ data to a third party and that the company is “not building models or deriving any other data for any other purposes from what is shared.”
Mayer sees the need for something simpler, certainly. “There are a lot of companies that focus on that bleeding and leading edge of AI,” she said. “But we think there’s a lot of things that can be done with AI that just help with everyday problems, things that we all experience every day, and are often overlooked.”
She mentioned, for example, that before launching events and photo sharing, Sunshine rolled out a birthday app as “kind of an adjacent area to addresses and contacts.”
She declined to discuss customer numbers, but the product is reminiscent of an app run by entrepreneurs Michael and Xochi Birch called BirthdayAlarm.com. The birthday reminder and e-card site is not exactly design forward, but with more than 50 million registered members at one point, it has made the couple — who earlier sold a social media company to AOL for $850 million in cash — many millions more dollars.
Mayer is friends with Birch and says she was “definitely influenced by Michael. He talked about the fact that [BirthdayAlarm] was a very simple app and got a lot of traction early on.”
Sunshine seemingly didn’t see that kind of traction from contacts management, an area where consumers have largely steered clear owing to privacy concerns. But perhaps its simple and free (for now) new apps will change the game for Sunshine, which raised a $20 million round in 2020 and is largely self-funded, per Mayer.
In the meantime, Mayer has other tricks up her sleeve, including, eventually, video sharing. “I’ve got a list of all the different things that we thought would be in the first version and will hopefully come out soon after,” she said last week. “The core thesis has always been to take the mundane and make it magical.”
The team “thought about naming [the company] Mundane AI,” she continued. “I sometimes think that might have been a better name.”
Image Credits: Sunshine
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