Agents For CFOs, Runaway Tokens And 'Unreasonable Hospitality,' With Pigment's Eléonore Crespo
One of France's top founders talks building AI for CFOs, the AI talent "buffet," Tom Cruise and much more on The Upstarts Podcast.
It’s tough to keep a big startup valuation under wraps for too long. Filings or investors might disclose it; reporters will sniff it out.
But founder Eléonore Crespo has a rare distinction: her startup, Pigment, had its funding milestone scooped by an unlikely leaker: the President of France.
“One more French unicorn!” Emmanuel Macron posted on LinkedIn two years ago. (Naturally, he said this in French, so the exact word was “licorne”.)
And given that Pigment is one of France’s most prominent AI startups alongside Mistral and Dataiku, I was excited to ask Crespo about that experience. What was her reaction?
“I was like, ‘So be it,’ you know?” She tells me in our latest episode of The Upstarts Podcast, recorded from London. “We didn’t want to announce anything, because we found that it was not necessarily the milestone we wanted to celebrate.”
Crespo laughs now. “Thanks to the government, I’ve met so many of the top CEOs in France that are now buying Pigment.”
As a community, AI startups in France have been “very lucky” to have that support, Pigment’s co-CEO says. “But at the same time, I’m here to create a global success from France,” she notes.
That ambition is a big part of what makes Crespo and her startup more interesting than you might think from just scanning its description: “business planning, powered by agentic AI.” Or translated again, a new crack at an old category of software, financial planning and analysis, or FP&A, taking on the likes of Oracle, SAP and Workday.
Founded in 2019 by Crespo and Romain Nicoli, the former co-founder of Criteo, Pigment counts tech darlings including Anthropic and Notion as customers, alongside corporations like Coca-Cola and Unilever.
The startup’s AI agents help finance teams at those businesses to make important financial decisions faster by reducing the amount of time they spend collecting, managing and pulling data from spreadsheets. (A problem that Crespo encountered first-hand while working at Google.)
More interestingly for someone not working in financial planning, Pigment is also starting to help its customers rein in runaway AI budgets, better managing their token and model spend. On the show, Crespo and I talk about Uber, which made headlines when one of its executives revealed in May that the company had blown through its annual AI budget in just four months. Uber is a Pigment customer, but not for AI spend tracking yet.
“I would love to build something with them now,” Crespo tells Upstarts. “It’s going to be a big topic for everyone, and it’s a topic that goes beyond just understanding your costs.”
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In our conversation, Pigment stands out for other reasons: it maintains an unusual co-CEO structure, with Crespo’s co-founder Romain Niccoli building an engineering team in Paris that Crespo calls “probably one of the most loyal in tech history,” with zero regrettable attrition to date.
Its Paris roots also help it compete for talent with what Crespo compares to a “Chinese buffet,” where AI heavyweights like Anthropic and OpenAI pass through and grab all the steak and lobster first.
But most interesting to me is Crespo’s policy of “unreasonable hospitality” – a customer-obsessed mindset that is reflected, she says, in everything from late-night WhatsApp messages to personal touches like baked goods: she recently visited Meta with cookies featuring dual Meta and Pigment logos.
More on those big takeaways – including a guest-starring role by Tom Cruise – below. Plus, per reader feedback, we’ll try something new: signing off with my own personal thoughts.
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How to make a co-CEO set-up work
Before Pigment got started, Crespo ran a painstaking process to identify her ideal co-founder. She knew she wanted an experienced enterprise leader who could build an engineering team, and Niccoli stood out as a former co-founder of Criteo, which went public in 2013.
Crespo spoke to a number of mutual contacts about Niccoli before first approaching him: “I did my own CIA due diligence, and he had no idea.”
“Take your time to find a founder, if you want one, because it will make or break your company.”
To win him over, she brought a 100-page memo book of potential projects to show him. After three afternoons together around Christmas, he told her, “Let’s go.”
How do they make co-CEO status work in practice? The key, Crespo tells me, is organization. “He leads tech, product, and HR. I lead everything else, and we are extremely clear about that.”
The duo have a policy of making tactical decisions on their own, and syncing up on big decisions. For key strategic product updates or company milestones, they’ll spend two hours together in a workshop to reach agreement.
“We have this concept internally of direct ownership, or DRI [directly responsible individuals, an Apple-coined term], to make sure that there is always a single individual that is an owner of a specific topic.”
Most recently, Crespo and Niccoli shared several calls to discuss the right criteria, and compensation package, for a potential C-suite hire. But when it comes to fundraising, Niccoli defers to Crespo, who previously worked as an investor at Index Ventures.
“That’s the type of thing he doesn’t care about,” she laughs.
Competing at the AI talent “buffet”
Building an engineering team in Paris has proven an “incredible edge” for Pigment, Crespo argues, because France currently produces high-quality, AI-trained engineers, who are loyal and mission-driven.
“It’s something that would have been impossible for me to replicate in the Bay Area,” she says, noting that she was recently talking to one of Intercom’s co-founders, and they compared competing with Anthropic and OpenAI for talent to a “Chinese buffet.”
“You have lobster, and you have, whatever, let’s say a good steak, and then you have the noodles, and then you have the rice. And so you come, and Anthropic and OpenAI, they take the lobster and the good steak. And there are only some noodles left, and you’re like, ‘Oh my God.’
That’s what happens today, and it’s very, very, very hard not only to compete, but to retain the talent. So for us, building in Europe has been an incredible strength.”
Maintaining offices in France and the U.S. has also helped Pigment “think globally” from day one, Crespo says, with employees from a number of countries – far more than just those two – and a mindset she argues is worldlier than some Silicon Valley peers.
That said, Crespo spends a lot of time in San Francisco personally, and plays nice with both Anthropic and OpenAI as partners.
“We spend a ton of time with their teams, and we will keep doing so for the foreseeable future, because it’s true that’s where a lot of things are happening today.”
Using “unreasonable hospitality” to win
To Crespo, “unreasonable hospitality” means being memorable.
“When we come to meetings, the way we show up, we deliver the experience of when they buy Pigment. We make it extremely memorable, and we spend a lot of time trying to really deliver delight there.”
For customers, that means thoughtful, tailored swag, or the cookies like Crespo recently brought to Meta: “We try to create some bonds that go way beyond the prospect, that can create a friendship over time, I would say.”
A “fantastic” customer experience also means Crespo personally responding to WhatsApp messages on the weekend, or late at night.
“I will always answer within the next five minutes, and it’s the same for the rest of my team. We are extremely reactive. We try to fix issues, and we never push back. We really try to be there all the time, and we always do the extra mile.”
That means hopping on planes whenever a customer has a more complex problem, too.
Working with Pigment should feel like buying a Ferrari, Crespo argues, not a mass-produced car. Like Ferrari, that means it remains up-market; such an approach wouldn’t work with SMBs or many thousands of customers, Crespo admits.
“It’s not a mass play here. It’s a play where we serve the largest companies in the world with a solution that is tailored for them.”
That white-glove experience also extends to closing key hiring candidates. One of Crespo’s biggest challenges has been hiring a chief revenue officer, she says; she met with dozens of candidates. When she found the right one, she was eager to find an “unreasonable” touch to close them.
As it turns out, one of her investors, ICONIQ, works with a number of celebrities through its family office practice, and Crespo was invited by founding partner Divesh Makan to a private 90 minute meeting with Tom Cruise, who was going to talk to portfolio founders about filmmaking and what it took to be a standout actor.
“I begged Divesh, ‘Can I bring my candidate? I think it would make a big difference,’” she remembers. Makan agreed.
“It was quite a lifetime moment for [the candidate] and for myself,” Crespo says. “That’s how we managed to get him.”
Alex’s (armchair expert) take
Pigment’s technology isn’t as high-risk as a dog longevity drug or a new system of nuclear reactors. Given its customers, the fact that it partners with the big AI labs, and the straightforward nature of its software, it seems a safe bet to continue growing and build a lasting business.
What is less clear to me is that Pigment will be a $100 billion company versus an attractive acquisition for one of the last-gen giants it’s taking on. I wish I had asked Crespo straight-up: how big do you think this can get?
But at the same time, founders are wired to respond to that the same way: boundlessly big. It’s hard to reach a $5 billion or $10 billion acquisition outcome if that’s what you set out to build at the start. And if that’s Pigment’s eventual fate, it would be an excellent one worthy of celebration. (One dark horse outcome would be that it joins Anthropic or OpenAI directly, gaining a permanent seat at the “buffet”.)
I’m also satisfied with how Crespo presents her co-CEO setup, although I usually am skeptical of such an arrangement (‘too many cooks’). Crespo can bring the energy, public face, customer-facing sales and service, and fundraising; meanwhile, the more veteran, proven co-founder can focus on going deep on product and tech.
It seems like a good match, in large part because of how carefully Crespo approaches it. Generally speaking, I’d be cautious about startups following suit – it seems to carry a lot of risk if you don’t match the right levels of ego.
One place where I’m not sure I fully buy Crespo’s optimism is when I ask her in the episode about Pigment’s AI’s impact on jobs. Crespo concedes: “Probably there are companies that are going to reduce headcount,” as well as rethink processes.
But overall, she takes the techno-optimist angle that most customers have more financial planning to manage than they can handle, and that analysts at customers welcome an AI agent freeing up some of the 80% of time they spend on busywork.
I’m optimistic in many ways about the technology itself, but less about corporate interests and public company executives. If the incentives set by shareholders encourage companies to instead cut headcount and depend more on AI agents for this kind of work, it’s easy for me to picture a CFO who manages an increasingly agentic team of analysts instead.
love "Alex’s (armchair expert) take"