French startup Pivot is an interesting startup story as it is scaling at a rapid pace even though startup investments are down in Europe. After raising a $5.3 million pre-seed round in April (€5 million), the company worked on the first iteration of its procurement tool over the summer.
In September, Pivot started selling its software solution to its first clients. And feedback has been so great that Pivot is raising another $21.6 million (€20 million) in a new Series A round from its existing investors — and in particular Visionaries, Emblem, Anamcara and Oliver Samwer.
I already wrote a lengthy description of Pivot, so I also encourage you to read my previous article on the startup. But in short, Pivot is a modern spend management solution that supposedly works better than Oracle NetSuite’s procurement component or Coupa.
Instead of relying on lengthy integration processes, Pivot integrates with your existing financial stack as much as possible as well as your ERP. After that, admins can configure Pivot to their needs so that it isn’t too complicated to use. This way, purchase order forms are easier to understand for employees as well.
It means that Pivot has a no-code interface to build internal workflows for purchase orders. For instance, if the price is above a certain threshold, it can trigger validation rules. Pivot can also use the company’s org chart to ping other employees in Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Once everything is in Pivot, finance teams can approve or deny purchases and see the overall picture. Other teams can also keep track of their budgets to see if they’re overspending (or underspending). Everything is synchronized with your ERP, which remains the single source of truth for vendors and invoices.
The reason a tool like Pivot makes sense in the current environment is that companies are looking at ways to cut costs. “Pivot offers a unique response to a problem we witness in any of our LPs companies – no matter if a digital scaleup or an industrial world market leader – in a context of drastic cost-cutting,” Visionaries founding partner Robert Lacher said in a statement.
Change of plan
“We hadn’t planned to raise so quickly, and we still have most of the funds from the initial round. With another €20 million in the bank, we can change the plan and be much more ambitious on recruitment to build the vision of our product and get known faster. It was our speed of execution that convinced the investors to do this round so quickly,” Pivot co-founder and CEO Romain Libeau told me in an email.
Pivot co-founders are used to operating in big tech companies so they know what they’re supposed to do with this new funding. The startup’s CEO was one of the first employees at Swile and more recently acted as the chief product officer for the French unicorn. Marc-Antoine Lacroix previously worked for Qonto as CTO and then CPO. Finally, Estelle Giuly worked as an engineer for several enterprise companies and for Wave.ai.
Pivot already plans to grow to a team of 50 people by the end of the year — and then it wants to double in size every year for the next two years. “We’ve set ourselves a target of €1 million in [annual recurring revenue] over the course of 2024 — as soon as possible,” Libeau said.
For now, the company plans to end the year with 10 clients. It doesn’t seem like that many customers, but Pivot is building an enterprise SaaS product. And investors are likely building on the future potential as much as the team’s track record.
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