Eléonore Crespo, the cofounder of French business planning unicorn Pigment, has been on a roll over the past year.
The startup, which provides a platform to collect and analyse critical business data in real-time, raised a $145m Series D last year led by US VC Iconiq Growth, which valued the company at more than $1bn. Crespo has never confirmed the valuation, but French president Emmanuel Macron let the cat out of the bag, congratulating France’s “new unicorn” on LinkedIn.
It brought total funding raised by Pigment to $400m — and firmly established the company as a French tech favourite. Five years after launch, it counts high-profile companies like Unilever, Siemens and ServiceNow as customers, and Macron as a fan.
Crespo tells Sifted it is only “the beginning” for Pigment; her objective is to build a global champion from Europe. But she says that to enable the emergence of leaders, the region must move on from a narrative that advocates for tech sovereignty in opposition to perceived rivals like the US.
“I’m absolutely against the US and Europe rivalry,” says Crespo. “The US is my number one market, and most of my suppliers are American… The US needs Europe and Europe needs the US.”
“So, I’m not sure that I understand the notion of sovereignty. I don’t know if it’s addressing the problem with the right angle.”
Building Pigment
Pigment launched in 2019 to provide a better database for enterprises. The platform connects to various sources of enterprise data, ranging from financial and sales to HR, to enable users to access up-to-date information about their business in a single platform.
While Pigment always used machine learning to let users carry out analytics and predictions in the platform, Crespo says that the advent of generative AI “significantly accelerated” the company’s roadmap. In September, the startup launched ‘Pigment AI’, a suite of generative AI tools that enables users to use natural language prompts to make various data-related queries, such as carrying out analyses of datasets, creating forecasts and writing statements.
Pigment saw its annual recurring revenue (ARR) double in 2024 compared to 2023 (the company does not share its ARR).
The startup also saw a 50% increase in its customer base (which in 2023 represented several hundred customers), particularly among Fortune 500 companies in the US. Crespo says that 60% of Pigment’s ARR now comes from across the Atlantic.
The founder expects growth to continue this year as Pigment adds agentic AI capabilities to the platform. The startup has just unveiled a new AI agent in private preview for its users, which it says can carry out tasks similar to those of a financial analyst, such as autonomously identify trends and anomalies in business data, and produce reports and recommendations.
European sovereignty
With Pigment’s success, Crespo is increasingly becoming one of the poster children of European tech. Just last week, she announced her participation in British podcaster-turned-VC Harry Stebbings’ Project Europe — an initiative gathering 150 of Europe’s top founders to back young entrepreneurs with mentoring and funding.
Last month, she put her name down alongside LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Hugging Face’s Clément Delangue and Mistral AI’s Arthur Mensch to support Current AI, a new public interest AI initiative launched by the French government. In October, she joined the EU Inc movement, asking for the creation of a single pan-European startup entity.
These initiatives come as European nations scramble to boost innovation in the face of competition from the US and China. But while Crespo is all for supporting the bloc’s tech ecosystem, she says these efforts should not be seen as fostering a rivalry with other players.
“No founder in these projects is here to create rivalries,” she says. “All my fellow founders have businesses that go beyond borders. It’s more about helping Europe take off — about playing offense, not defence.”
For Crespo, the view that a successful tech ecosystem must happen in Europe, independent of players like the US, is flawed. This was epitomised by the deal signed by French AI darling Mistral with Microsoft last year, which caused outcry among some policymakers who argued the partnership undermined Mistral’s commitment to European sovereignty.
“Today, every European company… is buying American tech, and is looking at what’s happening outside of Europe,” says Crespo. “We can’t exist only in Europe.”
“And for me, using the best technology to be the most competitive is what will save Europe. It makes no sense to create barriers or to think only on the basis of a European reality.”
“That’s why I find [the notion of sovereignty] counter-productive.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/pigment-ceo-eleonore-crespo-interview/
