Pigment

Eléonore Crespo had worked as a financial analyst at Google advising the EMEA president and CFO on strategy, then moved to Index Ventures as an investor. At Index, she met Romain Niccoli — the co-founder and former CTO of Criteo, the French adtech company that had become one of Europe's landmark tech successes. Both had spent years watching finance teams in large companies attempt to plan the future using Excel spreadsheets and legacy software built in a different era. In 2019, Crespo left Index and she and Niccoli co-founded Pigment as co-CEOs, an unusual structure that reflected their equal partnership.

Pigment's product connected finance, sales, HR, and supply chain teams in a single real-time planning environment. Instead of emailing spreadsheets between departments and manually reconciling conflicting versions of the truth, Pigment provided a live, collaborative model where every team worked from the same data. The platform integrated directly with ERP, CRM, and data warehouse systems. Enterprise customers could run scenario planning, model headcount, and forecast revenue across global operations in minutes rather than days. By benchmarks from IVP — one of Pigment's investors — the company consistently ranked in the top 5% of all SaaS companies by revenue growth since launch.

Pigment raised $145 million in a rare French tech mega-round in April 2024, led by ICONIQ Growth, valuing the company at $1 billion. Customers included Unilever, which had eliminated five Excel files and saved 480 hours per year; Klarna, Figma, Siemens, and Uber. The company was approaching $100 million ARR, doubling revenue year-on-year for three consecutive years. Crespo had become the first female CEO to join the French Tech Next40 list and was advising French President Emmanuel Macron on AI policy.

Pigment's most significant product evolution was its "Modeler Agent": users described what they wanted to build in natural language, and the agent generated governed, production-ready planning applications on top of Pigment's data engine. Figma reported reaching 80% of what it wanted to build from a blank page in minutes. Early customers said build times had collapsed from weeks to near-instant. More than half of Pigment's new customers in 2025 had migrated from SaaS giants — a 115% year-on-year increase in replacement deals.

By 2026, Pigment had raised nearly $400 million across five funding rounds, employed over 700 people, and was generating approaching $100 million in ARR. The company had grown its enterprise customer base 74% in a single year, with over 60% of revenue coming from North America — an extraordinary figure for a Paris-founded company that had deliberately built globally from day one. Crespo had set her sights on the planning software market dominated by Oracle, SAP, and Workday — legacy platforms she described as too rigid for the speed at which the macroeconomic environment was now forcing companies to react.