Pigment’s Eléonore Crespo: Building France’s Next Unicorn With AI Agents And Tom Cruise

**Eléonore Crespo** (0:00)
Spreadsheets, they cannot scale. They cannot put the right data in. They cannot communicate. They cannot help different departments communicate together. So it's a massive issue for a company. And what I would see is a lot of analysts spending days, months analyzing data, reconciliating data, validating data, et cetera, instead of thinking about the potential trajectory of the company.

**Alex Konrad** (0:21)
Planning for your financial future can mean wrangling a huge amount of data. Even at companies as big as Google, CFOs and strategists usually do this sort of thing in spreadsheets or old software that wasn't built for the AI era. Pigment is a French startup that says its agents can do it better. Our guest today is Pigment's co-founder and co-CEO, Eléonore Crespo.
Eléonore says Pigment stands out by providing customers like Uber, Coca-Cola and Anthropic with unreasonable hospitality.

**Eléonore Crespo** (0:51)
When you come to a meeting, first of all, you know, you will bring your favorite cookies from your country. We try to create some bonds that go way beyond just, you know, the prospect is that how can we create a sort of friendship over time? I would say, whenever they have a question, they all have me on WhatsApp or on messages. And I can tell you that they send me a message, whether it's, you know, 11 p.m. on a Saturday or 7 a.m. on a Sunday, I will always answer within the next five minutes. And it's the same for the rest of my team.

**Alex Konrad** (1:19)
Today on the podcast, we're going to talk about solving big and obvious problems. Why Eléonore left a career in Venture Capital to start her own company. And how Pigment can help companies spend less on pricey AI tokens. Plus why Pigment had to be built in France, where fans include President Emmanuel Macron.
I'm Alex Konrad, founder and editor of Upstarts Media. And this is The Upstarts Podcast, our weekly show where we talk to emerging startup founders who are punching above their weight to take on the status quo. Eléonore, thanks for joining us on the show.

**Eléonore Crespo** (1:50)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Alex Konrad** (1:52)
This episode is brought to you by Rippling AI, the only AI built to give you full visibility into your startup and the ability to take action across every department. So Eléonore, we're in London today, but you're usually based in the Paris area, right?

**Eléonore Crespo** (2:06)
Yeah. So I'm actually between Paris and New York now. I try to spend half of my time in the US.

**Alex Konrad** (2:11)
So are you basically on a plane then most of the time?

**Eléonore Crespo** (2:13)
Most of the time.

**Alex Konrad** (2:14)
That's awesome. And what's bringing you back and forth? What exactly is Pigment doing?

**Eléonore Crespo** (2:18)
So Pigment is an AI business planning platform. So what we do is very simple.
I think every CEO, every CFO right now is living through very, very complicated microeconomic conditions where they have to react extremely fast to what's happening outside. So they have to react to supply chain shortage, tariffs, AI, et cetera. And so we help them make faster, smarter decisions extremely fast with our platform.

**Alex Konrad** (2:42)
You obviously now work with some really big companies, Coca-Cola and Siemens, right? And then also Anthropic as a fast growing company. What did those big companies want from Pigment specifically that they couldn't build themselves?

**Eléonore Crespo** (2:56)
If you take these companies, so you take the Coca-Cola of this world, or the Siemens or Unilever, they all have the same problems, is that they have to navigate a very complex macroeconomic environment. And at the same time, they have to optimize their top line, they have to optimize their margins, their costs, they have to also be more productive, and they have a big incentive to know how to use AI productively within their companies.
And in order to do that, they actually need help, because it's not that easy to run multiple scenarios at a time to understand how to optimize your top line, for instance. It's not that easy to connect your supply chain with your finance team and help them get together on the plan for the next, you know, months to know exactly what they need to do to match their supply and their demand, and to connect that to the sales team and the HR team. And so these are very complex matters that they are all trained to get through, and obviously they are all trained to automate as much as possible, because today obviously with agents, you can do a lot, you can automate your analysis, you can automate modeling scenarios, you can automate decisions for you, and this is what they are looking for. And the idea of doing that for them is really to help them accelerate their decision making to be able to be more competitive, to be able to be more agile in this very complex environment.