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Paris, France. 2019.
Romain Niccoli has a problem most founders would envy: he's already won.
As CTO and co-founder of Criteo, he helped build a $2 billion ad-tech company that went public on NASDAQ in 2013. He's wealthy. He's accomplished. He could retire, invest, advise—do whatever successful tech founders do after their exit.
Instead, he's obsessing over spreadsheets.
Not using them—he's obsessing over how much damage they cause. Every company he talks to has the same problem: critical business decisions are being made in Excel files passed around via email. Finance teams spend weeks building models that break when someone changes a formula. Planning processes that should take hours take months.
At Criteo, he saw this firsthand. At companies he advises, he sees it everywhere. The larger the company, the more elaborate and fragile the spreadsheet infrastructure.
Niccoli meets Eléonore Crespo. She's been an investor at Index Ventures, seeing hundreds of companies struggle with the same problem. Before that, she was a senior analyst at Google, reporting directly to the EMEA president and CFO.
She's seen planning broken from every angle—as an operator, as an analyst, as an investor.
"There's been little innovation in business planning for over a decade," Niccoli tells her. "The tools are either spreadsheets that don't scale, or expensive legacy suites that require armies of consultants."
Crespo agrees. "Everyone we invest in complains about this. CFOs are drowning in manual work. CEOs can't get answers to basic questions without waiting weeks for analysis."
They look at each other. Two people who've seen the problem from inside. Two people with the skills to build something better.
In May 2019, Pigment is born.
Romain Niccoli: The Technical Visionary
Niccoli's journey to Pigment ran through one of Europe's great tech success stories.
Criteo, the ad-tech company he co-founded as CTO, pioneered personalized retargeting—the technology that shows you ads for products you've browsed. It was technically ambitious, requiring real-time processing of billions of events.
Building Criteo taught Niccoli what was possible. If you could process advertising data at internet scale, why couldn't you process business planning data at company scale?
The technical challenge wasn't the problem. The problem was that nobody had bothered to rebuild planning from first principles.
Eléonore Crespo: The Pattern Recognizer
Crespo's path was different but complementary.
At Index Ventures, she invested in companies like Alan (health insurance), Spendesk (expense management), Swile (employee benefits), and Slite (knowledge management). She worked closely with founders, seeing their operational challenges firsthand.
Before Index, she was at Google, analyzing strategy for European leadership. She understood how large organizations made decisions—and how painful that process could be.
The pattern was clear: every company, regardless of industry, struggled with planning. They had data everywhere but couldn't synthesize it into decisions. They had smart people spending hours copying numbers between spreadsheets instead of thinking strategically.
The Partnership
Niccoli brought technical depth: he knew how to build systems that scaled. Crespo brought strategic breadth: she knew what companies actually needed.
Together, they identified three roadblocks every company faced:
1. Lack of transparency into underlying business data
2. The sheer quantity of data to process
3. Static presentation that was hard to change and manipulate
Spreadsheets failed on all three. Legacy planning tools (Anaplan, Hyperion) were expensive, complex, and required consultants.
The market needed something new.
The Vision
Pigment's vision was ambitious: build a planning platform that felt as intuitive as a spreadsheet but scaled like enterprise software.
This meant:
- Real-time collaboration (like Google Docs)
- Flexible data modeling (like Airtable)
- Enterprise-grade security and scale (like Salesforce)
- Beautiful interface (like Figma)
All in one platform. All for the finance and operations teams that currently lived in Excel.
The Early Product
The founding team went heads-down on building. No splashy launches. No marketing hype. Just product development.
They built a platform where:
- Data from any source could be integrated
- Anyone could build models without coding
- Changes propagated instantly across the organization
- Scenarios could be compared side by side
The goal was to replace the fragile web of spreadsheets with a single source of truth that the whole company could trust.
The Funding
The pedigree of the founders attracted investors:
- 2020: €21.3 million Series A
- 2022: $73 million Series B
- Later: Series C and D funding
By 2024, Pigment had raised nearly $400 million and achieved a $1 billion valuation—unicorn status.
The Target Market
Pigment focused initially on FP&A (Financial Planning & Analysis) teams—the people responsible for budgets, forecasts, and financial models.
These teams were in pain. Their jobs required precision, but their tools were error-prone. Their work affected every decision the company made, but they spent most of their time on data manipulation rather than strategic analysis.
Pigment offered an alternative: a platform that automated the grunt work, so analysts could focus on insights.
The Expansion
From FP&A, Pigment expanded to:
- Revenue operations (sales forecasting, territory planning)
- HR (headcount planning, compensation modeling)
- Supply chain (demand forecasting, inventory optimization)
Any function that needed to plan, model, and forecast became a potential customer.
The Positioning
Pigment positioned itself against two enemies:
1. Spreadsheets: Powerful but fragile, error-prone, and impossible to scale
2. Legacy planning suites: Powerful but expensive, complex, and requiring consultants
Pigment would be the third way: modern, intuitive, and enterprise-ready.
The Customers
Pigment's customer base grew to include major enterprises across industries. Finance teams that had spent years wrestling with Excel discovered they could build in days what used to take months.
The Competition
The business planning market became crowded with challengers—Anaplan, Vena, Planful, and others all competing for CFO attention.
But Pigment's positioning as the "modern" alternative—built for the cloud era, designed for collaboration—resonated with companies tired of legacy approaches.
Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli Today
Crespo serves as CEO, Niccoli as CTO. The investor and the engineer run the company together, bringing complementary skills to every decision.
Crespo has become a visible voice for European tech entrepreneurship—proof that billion-dollar software companies can be built from Paris, not just San Francisco.
The Lesson
Pigment's founding story is about seeing the obvious problem that everyone ignores.
Spreadsheets have run business planning for decades. Everyone knows they're broken. Everyone works around them. But most people accept that "this is just how it is."
Niccoli and Crespo refused to accept it. They'd seen from inside—one as a builder, one as an investor—that planning was broken. And they had the skills and ambition to fix it.
Sometimes the biggest opportunities are hiding in the tools everyone uses but everyone hates.
