Pigment co-founder and chief executive Eléonore Crespo says her company is displacing legacy enterprise software providers “at the speed of light” as AI-native business planning demand surges.
The Paris-headquartered platform serves major clients including Unilever, Siemens, Anthropic and Coca-Cola, helping them manage financial planning and performance across their operations.
Pigment is now approaching $100m (£75m) in annual recurring revenue, having doubled revenue for the third consecutive year.
Over half of its new customers in the past year migrated from a legacy vendor, representing a 115 per cent year-on-year increase in replacement wins.
“Still being on IBM or SAP is a liability for your business,” Crespo told City AM. “You’re not going to be able to be agile enough in this environment. So you need to buy fast, take the risk, and even if you make a mistake, it’s not a problem.”
The company crossed a $1bn valuation in 2024 and has raised nearly $400m to date from backers including Meritech, IVP and Greenoaks.
Pigment’s newest AI product, the Modeller Agent, allows users to describe a planning model in natural language and receive a production-ready output.
Figma reported reaching 80 per cent of what it wanted to build from a blank page in minutes, while Clickup’s strategic finance team said the agent handled upfront structure that would previously have taken hours.
Crespo argued that macroeconomic volatility is accelerating the shift away from legacy vendors just as much as product superiority is driving it.
“Every single CEO or CFO on this planet wants to make fast decisions to react to this environment. They cannot wait months,” she said.
She pointed to tariffs, inflation, supply chain disruption and geopolitical headwinds as forces capable of shifting operational plans almost overnight.
“If you’re impacted by a tariff, are you going to wait months to understand how that impacts your business? Your business is lost,” Crespo said.
She also challenged traditional planning cycles, suggesting CFOs should consider rolling forecasts instead, re-forecasting dozens of times a year rather than following rigid long-term schedules.
London has become Pigment’s fastest-growing market, with the company’s UK head Rachel Phillips calling Britain “one of our fastest-growing markets” and calling for faster investment in shared infrastructure.
“The landscape has changed massively in the past two years, in an amazing way,” Crespo said, citing the billions in investment seen in the first quarter alone as unparalleled.
Crespo singled out Demis Hassabis, founder of Google DeepMind, crediting him with helping build the ecosystem that now makes London so attractive to global talent.
“My favourite founder of all time is Demis Hassabis,” she said. “For me, he is the best AI leader out there.”
London ranked fourth globally in Dealroom’s tech ecosystem index, behind Silicon Valley, New York and Boston, with AI investment in the capital almost doubling to $7bn last year.
Dealroom founder Yoram Wijngaarde said: “London reclaiming the top spot in Europe reflects the maturity and resilience of the UK’s tech ecosystem.”
Crespo did highlight a meaningful gap in enterprise AI adoption speed between the US and Europe, noting that US customers such as Uber and Palo Alto Networks completed full sales processes in just two weeks.
“The game is the speed,” she said. “Speed of adoption, speed of deploying the technology. The more you regulate, the less you can get to that.”
On the question of AI sovereignty, Crespo was blunt, stating that Europe is “too late to the game” and that “we’re not going to create Anthropic tomorrow, that’s for sure.”
Her scepticism echoes that of Sir Nick Clegg, who recently told City AM the push for sovereign AI was “dishonest” and described the UK as being of “marginal relevance” in foundation model development.
Pigment plans to launch a planner agent later this year, with Crespo outlining a longer-term ambition to “build towards a modern ERP over time.”