For Eléonore Crespo, the French attitude of “jamais content,” or never happy, is a business strategy, not a stereotype. The Paris-trained fundamental physicist turned co-founder and CEO has built Pigment around a French-flavored “Never Settle” ethos—an aggressive refusal to be satisfied that’s now powering one of Europe’s fastest-growing AI software companies.
Fortune has exclusively learned Pigment is approaching $100 million in ARR, having doubled ARR for a third consecutive year. The company has grown its customer base 74%, with leaders like Uber, Unilever, Anthropic, Siemens and more using Pigment, and 57% of new revenue coming from enterprise customers. More than half of Pigment’s new customers in 2025 migrated from SaaS giants, Crespo says, a 115% year-over-year increase in replacement.
Crespo, a former Index Ventures investor, co-founded Pigment with Romain Niccoli in 2019 to replace the spreadsheets and legacy planning tools that still run the guts of large companies. The pitch: an AI-native enterprise performance management platform that sits across finance, sales, HR, and supply chain, unifying data and decision-making in one system.
“Every single CEO or CFO on this planet wants to make fast decisions to react to this macroeconomic environment,” Crespo told Fortune, pointing to wars, tariffs, inflation, and supply chain shocks. “They cannot wait months to make decisions.”
Pigment’s core product aggregates business data into a single platform and lets teams run scenario models—different oil price paths, shifting tariff regimes—without blowing up fragile Excel sheets or waiting weeks for a specialist to reconfigure a model.
Crespo’s latest bet is what she calls Pigment’s biggest leap yet: a “Modeler Agent.” Users describe what they want in natural language, and the agent generates governed, production-ready applications on top of Pigment’s data engine. Early customers say build times have collapsed from weeks to minutes. Figma reported getting to “80% of what they wanted to build from a blank page in minutes,” according to Crespo.
Investors have bought in. Pigment has raised nearly $400 million to date and crossed a $1 billion valuation in 2024, with backers including ICONIQ Growth, Meritech, IVP, Greenoaks, Blossom, and Sheryl Sandberg’s fund. But Crespo insists she’s in no rush to add more capital—or to go public. “IPO for us would be way, way down the line,” she said.
Crespo advises French President Emmanuel Macron on AI, and speaks frequently about “AI sovereignty.” But she resists framing Pigment as a European champion in opposition to the U.S.
“I do not consider ourselves a French company. I consider ourselves a global company,” she said. Most of her executive team is U.S.-based, while engineering remains concentrated in France—a talent base she describes as a “secret weapon.”
Crespo runs Pigment with the intensity of a founder who still feels behind. This energy extends to how she thinks about the so-called “SaaSpocalypse.” In her view, AI is a sorting event: some new players, like Pigment, will adopt the technology, while many legacy vendors will struggle to bolt AI onto old architectures. She’s betting she can outrun the incumbents.
“It’s a total revolution,” she said.
See you tomorrow,
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