Pivot, a French startup, is an interesting startup story because it is growing quickly despite the fact that startup investments in Europe are declining. After raising a $5.3 million pre-seed round in April (€5 million), the company spent the summer working on the first iteration of its procurement tool.
Pivot began selling its software solution to its first clients in September. And the response has been so positive that Pivot is raising an additional $21.6 million (€20 million) in a new Series A round from its existing investors, including Visionaries, Emblem, Anamcara, and Oliver Samwer.
I’ve already written a detailed description of Pivot, so I encourage you to read that as well. However, Pivot is a modern spend management solution that allegedly outperforms Oracle NetSuite’s procurement component or Coupa.
Instead of relying on time-consuming integration processes, Pivot integrates as much as possible with your existing financial stack as well as your ERP. After that, administrators can tailor Pivot to their specific requirements, making it simple to use. Employees will find it easier to understand purchase order forms this way.
It means that Pivot has a no-code interface for creating internal purchase order workflows. For example, if the price exceeds a certain threshold, validation rules may be triggered. Pivot can also ping other employees in Slack or Microsoft Teams by using the company’s org chart.
Finance teams can approve or deny purchases and see the big picture once everything is in Pivot. Other teams can also monitor their budgets to determine whether they are overspending (or underspending). Everything is in sync with your ERP, which continues to be the single source of truth for vendors and invoices.
Companies are looking for ways to cut costs, which is why a tool like Pivot makes sense in the current environment. “Pivot offers a unique response to a problem we see in any of our LPs companies, whether a digital scaleup or an industrial world market leader,” Visionaries founding partner Robert Lacher said in a statement.
Change of plans
“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 intends to expand to a team of 50 people by the end of the year, and then 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 in a statement.
For the time being, the company expects to end the year with ten clients. Although there do not appear to be many customers, Pivot is developing an enterprise SaaS product. And investors are most likely focusing on the team’s future potential as well as its track record.