Eléonore Crespo spent a year confined to bed with a back injury. Most people would call that a disaster. She calls it a gift.
"Sometimes in life you're in a very high-speed train," says the CEO, jogging beside me in the Jardin des Plantes on a chilly Paris morning. "And when you don't stop, you don't have time to ask yourself questions. It forced me to stop working. It forced me to think creatively about what was next."
What came next was Pigment, a business planning platform that helps companies make sense of fragmented data. The company, which Crespo cofounded in 2019, is now worth over $1bn and counts Unilever and Deliveroo among its clients. It raised $145m in its Series D in 2024, from investors including ICONIQ Growth and Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners.
Last year, the company launched AI agents it said were capable of performing CFO-level analysis — and higher performing versions are promised this year.
Over two hours with the French boss, I get a real sense of the focus and energy required to run a global company. I also learn, much to my horror, that running a successful business requires spending almost zero time in front of Netflix.
Laptop open until midnight
Crespo runs her life like an Olympian in training. Morning jogs. No alcohol during the week. Dinner before 6:30pm. Laptop open until midnight. Sleep tracked with an Oura ring.
"You need to treat yourself like an athlete," she insists. "The people working with you expect you to be alert. You cannot be tired."
She doesn't own a TV. When I ask about the last film she saw, she has to think before shrugging: no idea.
If anything feels indulgent to Crespo, it's learning about AI. "I have more fun understanding the latest about AI than watching a random movie." She's considering cancelling her Netflix subscription.
Her Spotify library, meanwhile, is a dense queue of tech podcasts. She uses ChatGPT as a personal coach. "AI gives me a weekly structure,” she says.
It's the kind of regimen that sounds exhausting to many people. But Crespo insists it's energising. "I sleep pretty well," she says.
Running a global company from Paris means operating on California time, Crespo tells me. The second part of her working day starts at 5pm. The biggest chunk of her executive team — and 60% of Pigment's revenue — is US-based.
The hardest part isn't the workload but the travel: she flies to the US roughly twice a month. Recently she's been listening to longevity obsessive Brian Johnson talk about fighting jet lag. "His advice was: fly less," she says, smiling. "Great advice. Hard to apply."
Catacomb parties
As we circle the Jardin des Plantes, Crespo gestures at some of the buildings. "This is where you grow up exposed to science all the time." The garden backs onto some of France's most storied research institutions. She points out a nearby building: Marie Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel prize, once worked there.
Crespo trained as a scientist herself. What pulled her away was the lack of speed. "I needed more pace," she says.
I ask whether she ever imagines opening her own research lab — something like Stripe CEO Patrick Collison's Arc Institute. She laughs: "Maybe in a later life.”
As we jog into the Latin Quarter, Crespo points up at a building overlooking a small square: her old uni dorm.
Later, we pass the École Supérieure, and she casually points to a manhole cover and recounts the nights spent in the sprawling catacombs beneath us. "There's a hidden entrance in the school," she says. "I once knew the network by heart. We had big parties." Tech billionaire Xavier Niel, she adds, loves it down there.
Caviar forever
All of this talk about scientists and France’s best universities, I realise, serves a purpose: Crespo is obsessive about talent and gets animated when the conversation turns to hiring.
"When a team wants to win, you don't compromise," she says. "You need the best players. And you need to pay top, top, top."
She's deeply hands-on with recruitment yet doesn't feel locked into a zero-sum hiring competition with other French companies. Silicon Valley, she argues, plays a different game. "It's like a buffet. When you're OpenAI, you take the lobster. The second takes the caviar. The third gets cold pasta."
France? "Here, you have caviar and lobster — and you eat it forever." Pigment's engineering team has barely changed since the company's founding, she adds. "There's no talent war with other companies. We try to be very nice to each other."
Pigment has an unusual structure: two CEOs, the other being cofounder Romain Niccoli, who mostly manages the product, while Crespo handles the business.
Crespo says she wouldn't want to do it alone. "I don't know if I'd be successful," she says. "Having someone to challenge you is critical."
Disagreement is built into the system. "We contradict each other occasionally. You need to debate everything and look at problems from all angles. I make harder decisions with my co-CEO than I do with my husband” — who, she adds, still knows very little about her work.
Retooling the company
Pigment is named after a painting. "A painting is made of thousands of pigments," Crespo explains. "Individually, they don't make sense. It's only when you look at the full painting that you understand the meaning." Pigment, the company, does the same thing: takes data and assembles it into an intelligible picture.
Pigment’s software ingests numbers scattered across departments — sales forecasts, budget projections, operational metrics — and assembles them into a model that executives can actually use to make decisions. A CFO can ask it "What happens to our runway if we hire 50 engineers?" and get an answer in seconds.
"My obsession is removing all the cumbersome parts of work,” Crespo says. “How do we shrink the time of everything you do and make you the smartest human being possible?”
The company was already two and a half years old when generative AI exploded. It had to retool everything and, according to a few product-obsessed people I’ve spoken to, mostly did a good job. "It wasn't that hard," Crespo says. "We had a super powerful engine."
Pigment’s AI agents are little coworkers that can model complex scenarios and make recommendations, she says. A higher-performing agent, to be released later this year, will "enable the impossible," according to Crespo.
Crespo sounds evangelical about AI. Our jog has taken us to a bridge near Notre-Dame, which she notes took hundreds of years to build, then was rebuilt in just five after the 2019 fire, with AI used to retrace the cathedral's arches. "Can you imagine going from hundreds of years to less than five?"
Joy of closing
It’s near the end of our run and I’m upping my search for chinks in the armour. Would Crespo admit to guilty pleasures? It can’t all be business podcasts, surely.
"One of the secrets of life is not to pursue extravagance," she says. "I'm not sure you find more joy in something super expensive." She says she prefers “wiring her brain” to enjoy small things: a coffee, a nice view.
Still, her hobbies are definitely tech founder-y: off-piste skiing, sailing and running. "I especially love tough weather," she says.
She also clearly relishes closing deals. Crespo gets excited recounting how she returned home at 2am from the Olympics opening ceremony in 2024: there had been a downpour and she was soaked.
On the metro, she got a message from the head of a major company in the US: was she free to chat? Despite the late hour, she accepted, and it led to the biggest deal the company has closed to date.
I tell Crespo that I spent a chunk of last year listening to French founders complain about the government. Is Paris still good for tech? Yes, she insists. "We have everything to be successful. We're very lucky."
French techies are certainly excited about Yann LeCun’s new Paris AI company, AMI, which will be headed by Alex LeBrun, head of AI company Nabla.
If LeCun had asked Crespo to run AMI, would she have been tempted? Another smile. "I'm running Pigment," she says. "That's all I care about."
We talk about the lack of women founders in tech. Crespo is, quite shockingly, one of a small number of women CEOs globally running AI companies. "When I was a student, we were — maybe — 10-20% women in our science class," she says. "These are the same numbers today. That's where the problem starts."
The lady and the unicorn
I've spent enough time with Crespo to confirm her sunny reputation is deserved. If there's any hint of ruthlessness, I suspect it lies in her hiring philosophy: she's upfront with new recruits that working at Pigment demands extraordinary effort.
Our run is ending, which is just as well as I’m on fumes. Crespo brings me to the Musée de Cluny, home of a piece called The Lady and the Unicorn, a series of six tapestries woven around 1500.
I think I know what's happening here: she's the lady, and Pigment is the unicorn?
"Well, I have a unicorn," she says, "but that's not the most interesting part." The last tapestry in this piece depicts a smiling woman taking off her necklace and placing it in a casket. For Crespo, this represents free will. "If I want to be on Netflix every evening, I'll do it. Nobody will tell me not to." She smiles. "But it's not where I find joy."
"As an entrepreneur, that's what you get," she says. "You can do what you want. Everything I do is my choice. In France, we call that liberté."
