Eléonore Crespo is co-founder and co-CEO of Pigment, an AI-powered enterprise performance management platform that unifies finance, supply chain, HR, and sales data to help large companies make strategic decisions. The company has raised over $400 million and is growing at roughly 2x ARR year-over-year. Pigment competes against legacy incumbents like SAP and Oracle — some of which were built before she was born — by offering a modern, enterprise-ready platform from day one.
The Problem Pigment Solves
While working for the CFO of Google EMEA and Alphabet, Crespo noticed that even one of the world’s most innovative companies relied on Google Sheets for strategic planning, revenue forecasting, and budgeting — tools never designed for that scale or complexity.
Later, as a VC at Index Ventures, she saw the same pattern at fast-growing companies like Figma, Datadog, and Revolut: even well-equipped, tech-savvy founders struggled to analyze finance data, optimize margins, and plan sales territories as they approached or went through IPOs.
The core issue: at scale, companies need to combine data from dozens of countries, hundreds of business units, and billions of rows — something Excel and spreadsheets simply cannot handle. Yet most companies still use them because no better enterprise-ready alternative existed.
Building for Enterprise from Day One
Rather than starting with a narrow feature and expanding later, Pigment made the deliberate choice to build a full enterprise-ready platform from the start — what Crespo calls “climbing Mount Everest.”
This meant building:
An elastic canvas — a powerful computation engine that can model any data
A superior UX designed for broad adoption across finance, sales, and operations teams
End-to-end governance, security, and multi-user collaboration
The tradeoff was significant: development took roughly two years (late 2019 to 2021) before the product was truly ready, and they raised about $25 million pre-launch to fund it.
Landing the First Customers
Getting early customers was extremely hard because Pigment had zero brand awareness, was based in Paris, and was asking large US tech companies to trust a brand-new platform over incumbents with 15–30 years of history.
Key strategies that worked:
Carefully selecting investors who could open doors and connect them with US executives
Hiring domain experts — former finance analysts, revenue operations analysts, and people who had sold similar platforms for 15+ years — so customers would hear from credible practitioners, not just a new startup
Early customers like Figma, Brex, and Carta took the leap, partly on the strength of VC backing and the team’s credibility
The CFO of Carta was so impressed he immediately wanted to become an angel investor
The compounding effect: once fast-forward companies like these publicly endorsed Pigment, trust cascaded to other enterprise buyers.
Hiring Philosophy
Crespo considers the team the single most critical factor, especially pre-launch when there’s no product track record or press coverage.
Her approach to hiring:
Write company values on day one and keep them visible and evolving
Calibrate before hiring: go to the market and meet the best CFOs, CROs, and salespeople to understand what “top talent” actually looks like
Use case studies in interviews to test whether candidates are doers who get their hands dirty and listen well
Conduct deep background checks, including calling people the candidate didn’t refer, and asking uncomfortable questions
Never oversell or undersell the role — be honest about the difficulties
She acknowledges making many hiring mistakes, but emphasizes that the key is understanding why each mistake happened to avoid repeating it.
Fundraising Before Product
Pigment raised ~$25 million before launching. Crespo notes this is only possible with:
A very strong founding story and track record
A world-class team that investors can bet on
Investors who bring more than money — doors, credibility, and executive networks
Broader Lessons
Taking the hard route early can create an easier path later: building a full platform upfront was painful but created a compounding trust advantage with enterprise buyers.
Trust is the currency when selling to CFOs and strategic decision-makers — and it’s built through credible teams, reference customers, and investor backing, not just product features.
Europe can produce world-class enterprise companies, even when the local ecosystem is smaller than Silicon Valley’s.
