Eléonore Crespo, head of the French start-up Pigment, August 28, 2023 in Paris (AFP / ALAIN JOCARD)
At 35, Eléonore Crespo is one of the rare women at the head of a French start-up valued at more than a billion dollars, Pigment, whose business planning software, powered by artificial intelligence, aims to replace Excel.
“Pigment is what GPS with a compass is,” summarizes, with a smile, the engineer trained at the Paris School of Mines.
When a company is looking to increase its revenue, Pigment’s data analysis tool should “help it hit the highway” or even change its trajectory altogether in the event of an accident, such as higher-than-expected inflation risking affecting its activity, she continues, pushing the metaphor.
Eléonore Crespo started from the observation that large companies managed their revenues and their margins on Excel spreadsheets which were not “made to have a lot of data at the same time, in the same place”.
To stand out from giants like Microsoft, SAP or Salesforce, his start-up is banking on generative artificial intelligence (AI) which makes it possible to centralize and connect a company’s data to provide instant answers.
Thanks to this technology, “we are able to build models at the speed of light”, whether they are financial, commercial or intended for human resources teams, adds the thirty-year-old.
This “democratization of data” should allow companies to “accelerate decision-making”, according to her.
– International prism –
A vision that seems to seduce. Pigment, which has nearly 400 employees, managed to raise 134 million euros in April, one of the largest funding rounds in French Tech in 2024.
The funds will be used to gain market share, invest in new countries and accelerate in AI with a doubling of the engineering team, explains the entrepreneur.
The United States is already the first market for the start-up, whose offices are spread between Paris, New York, Toronto, London and soon San Francisco, and which has 500 clients around the world.
An international prism which can be explained by the career of Eléonore Crespo, who worked with the oil services giant Schlumberger in Texas, JCDecaux in New York, Google and the Anglo-Saxon investment fund Index Ventures.
The emphasis on artificial intelligence, beyond being in tune with the times, is also linked to the experience of the young woman, who graduated with a master’s degree in quantum physics from ENS Paris-Saclay. .
“To fully understand the substance of AI, you still need to have fairly advanced knowledge of physics,” she notes, in the light-filled premises of Pigment in the heart of the capital.
His models? Bret Taylor, president of OpenAI or Demis Hassabis, founder of Deepmind (bought by Google in 2014), “the thinkers of the coming century”, she confides.
– “Conductor” –
Committed to ecology and questions of inclusion in digital technology, the business leader recently worked with the Barnier government’s Secretary of State for Artificial Intelligence, Clara Chappaz, to develop a pact two years ago to inject more parity into a “very masculine” start-up universe.
“We are still in a world that is quite asymmetrical,” she notes.
“The more examples we have, the more we will be in a virtuous circle which will show that it is possible,” concludes the entrepreneur, who says she has never been personally slowed down in her ambitions.
Daughter of a classics professor and a doctor, Eléonore Crespo, who grew up in Savoie, was attracted very early by maths and physics to “understand things as much as possible”.
“I remember a very motivated, very organized student, who asked a lot of questions and was very curious,” Philippe Mustar, who was her teacher at the School of Mines, told AFP.
Today, as boss, she is an “energetic”, “ambitious” figure, “whom everyone clings to and who knows how to motivate the troops”, says Romain Niccoli, with whom she co-founded Pigment in 2019 .
“Eléonore is capable of presenting a vision and bringing people together, but more as a conductor who gets her hands dirty than as an inaccessible leader,” he explains.
