Eléonore Crespo, co-founder and chief executive of Pigment, said the company is replacing legacy enterprise software providers “at the speed of light”, as demand for AI-native business planning accelerates across the private sector.

The Paris-headquartered platform, which helps companies including Unilever, Siemens, Anthropic and Coca-Cola run financial planning and performance management, is 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, 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.”

Pigment crossed a $1bn valuation in 2024 and has raised nearly $400m to date from backers like Meritech, IVP and Greenoaks. The company’s core product aggregates business data into a platform, enabling teams to run scenario models across finance, sales, supply chain, and HR. Its 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, whilst Clickup’s strategic finance team said the agent handled the upfront structure that would previously have taken hours to build.

Crespo said the shift away from legacy vendors is being driven by macroeconomic volatility as much as product superiority: “Every single CEO or CFO on this planet wants to make fast decisions to react to this environment. They cannot wait months.”

She pointed to tariffs, inflation, supply chain disruption and general geopolitical headwinds as events that can shift 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.”

“Maybe [CFOs] shouldn’t plan,” she added. “Maybe they should be on rolling forecasts – re-forecast 70 times this year, and that’s fine. The long cycles have been created because of legacy technology that was forcing you into a cycle that just does not make sense anymore.”

London: ‘Our fastest-growing market’

Driven by a massive wave of capital and a surging talent pool, London has officially become Pigment’s fastest-growing market. “The landscape has changed massively in the past two years, in an amazing way,” Crespo said. “The billions in investment we’ve seen just in Q1 are unparalleled. There are more and more talents coming back to the UK because of that.”

Crespo singled out Demis Hassabis, founder of Google DeepMind, crediting him with helping create the ecosystem that now makes London attractive.

“My favourite founder of all time is Demis Hassabis,” she said. “For me, he is the best AI leader out there.”

London consolidated its position as Europe’s leading tech hub last month, with AI investment in the capital almost doubling to $7bn last year, according to Dealroom, which now ranks London fourth globally in its tech ecosystem index, behind Silicon Valley, New York and Boston.

The City minted 12 new unicorns in the first quarter alone. Anthropic, a Pigment customer, recently announced plans for a London office near King’s Cross with capacity for 800 staff, whilst OpenAI is also preparing a permanent UK base.

“London reclaiming the top spot in Europe reflects the maturity and resilience of the UK’s tech ecosystem”, said Dealeroom founder Yoram Wijngaarde.

“The city continues to attract global investment while producing internationally significant companies across AI, fintech and life sciences.”

Pigment is expanding its UK teams across sales, customer success and partnerships, with financial services, retail, telecoms, life sciences and media identified as its core verticals in the market.

The company’s head of UK and Ireland, Rachel Phillips, has described Britain as “one of our fastest-growing markets” and called for “moving faster by investing in shared infrastructure and removing friction between markets.”

But Crespo did point out areas where she thinks European AI adoption is falling short. In the US, she said, enterprise customers such as Uber and Palo Alto Networks had completed a full sales process in two weeks.

The equivalent in Europe typically runs to several months of RFP and governance review. “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.”

She stated that “we are too late to the game” in pushing for AI sovereignty, with European governments and corporates looking to prioritise homegrown technology over US or Chinese alternatives.

“We’re not going to create Anthropic tomorrow, that’s for sure,” she added.

Indeed, while many UK leaders have championed the idea of independent, sovereign infrastructure, the gap between Western tech giants and local alternatives has also been viewed as already too wide to bridge.

This scepticism was recently echoed by Sir Nick Clegg, who recently told City AM the push for sovereign AI was “dishonest”, as he labelled the UK as being of “marginal relevance” in the grand scheme of foundation model development.

Like Crespo, Clegg said attempting to replicate the massive capital and computing power of US tech behemoths is an unrealistic strategy, suggesting instead that regions like Europe and the UK should focus on deploying existing open-source models rather than playing a futile game of catch-up.

“Whether they do it with US technology or Chinese or European technology, maybe that doesn’t matter,” Crespo said. “The most important thing is to see them transform themselves at the speed of light.”

Pigment plans to launch a planner agent later this year and said its longer-term ambition extends beyond enterprise performance management. “We want to build towards a modern ERP over time,” Crespo said.