French startup Axis of rotation is an interesting startup story as it scales at a rapid pace, even though startup investment is declining in Europe. After raising $5.3 million (€5 million) back in April, the company worked on the first iteration of its procurement tool over the summer.
In September, Pivot began selling its software solution to its first customers. And the 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 — namely Visionaries, Emblem, Anamcara and Oliver Samwer.
I’ve already written an extensive overview of Pivot, so I also encourage you to read my previous article on getting started. But in short, Pivot is a modern spend management solution that is supposed to work 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, administrators can configure Pivot according to their needs so that it is not too complicated to use. This way, the purchase order forms are easier to understand by the employees as well.
It means that Pivot has a no-code interface to create internal workflows for purchase orders. For example, if the value 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.
Image Credits: Axis of rotation
When everything is in Pivot, finance teams can approve or deny purchases and see the big picture. Other teams can also monitor their budgets to see if they’re overspending (or underspending). Everything syncs with your ERP, which remains the single source of truth for suppliers and invoices.
The reason a tool like Pivot makes sense in the current environment is that companies are looking for ways to cut costs. “Pivot offers a unique answer to a problem we see at any of our LP firms – whether they’re digital scale or an industrial global market leader – in a context of drastic cost reduction,” said Visionaries founder Robert Lacher in a statement. .
Plan change
“We didn’t plan to raise so quickly, and we still have most of the funds from the original round. With another €20 million in the bank, we can change the plan and be much more ambitious in terms of hiring to build our product vision and get noticed faster. It was our speed of execution that convinced investors to take this round so quickly,” Pivot co-founder and CEO Romain Libeau told me in an email.
Pivot’s co-founders are used to working for big tech companies, so they know what to do with this new funding. The startup’s CEO was one of Swile’s first employees and most recently acted as head of product for the French unicorn. Marc-Antoine Lacroix previously worked for Qonto as CTO and then as CPO. Finally, Estelle Giuly has worked as an engineer for several entrepreneurial companies and for Wave.ai.
Pivot already plans to grow to a team of 50 by the end of the year — and then wants to double in size every year for the next two years. “We have set a target of 1 million euros [annual recurring revenue] during 2024 — as soon as possible,” Libeau said.
For now, the company plans to end the year with 10 customers. It doesn’t seem like that many customers, but Pivot is building an enterprise SaaS product. And investors likely value future potential as much as the team’s track record.
