At 30, Jay Peir stepped into the CFO role at SunPower, a high-efficiency solar cell manufacturer. The appointment came after leading M&A and venture investments at Cypress Semiconductor, where SunPower was the largest portfolio company. “I had my first CFO experience at the age of 30,” Peir tells us, recalling how corporate development responsibilities opened the door to finance leadership.
That early leap reflected a broader pattern in his career: moving fluidly between finance and strategy. With dual engineering degrees from Stanford, Peir began in economic consulting before earning his MBA amid the rise and fall of the dot-com era. His background in technology and data analysis, he tells us, formed “my first chapter” and prepared him for navigating growth in fast-moving sectors.
Read MoreA decade at Tableau deepened those lessons. When revenue slowed and the company’s stock “dropped about 50% in one day,” Peir was tasked with helping lead a shift to subscription. He emphasizes that success required aligning stakeholders across sales, marketing, and finance, ensuring teams could both understand and articulate changes to customers. “There’s both internal and external change management,” he tells us, noting the importance of investor communication as well.
Today, as CFO and Head of Strategy at Pigment, Peir applies these experiences to scaling an AI-native planning platform. Pigment’s tools unify financial and operational planning, enabling companies to act on data with speed and flexibility. The company’s AI roadmap includes predictive analytics and autonomous agents, helping finance teams drive variance analysis, expense tracking, and forecasting more efficiently, Peir tells us.
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CFOTL: Tell us about Pigment. What are its offerings today? What sets the company apart?
Peir: Pigment is an AI-native planning and performance management platform. At our core, we make it easier for organizations to plan, model, understand, and act on their data. Essentially, we help democratize access to data for better decision-making.
We support companies with both proactive and reactive decisions. On the proactive side, that means questions like: How do you set hiring plans, territories, or quotas for your sales teams next year? How do you design your supply chain or forecast demand? On the reactive side, it’s about helping businesses quickly adapt to macroeconomic changes—tariffs, higher interest rates, inflation, or supply chain disruptions. All of these require a greater degree of stability and flexibility in planning, and that’s what Pigment provides.
Read MoreToday, we’re working with some of the leading companies in the world—from Snowflake to Block to ServiceNow—as well as over a third of the Cloud 100. Our customer base spans across industries and includes many of the most innovative companies globally.
CFOTL: I read that you’ve doubled annual recurring revenue year over year. What are the segments you’re targeting next? Where are you headed?
Peir: We think about growth along three vectors. The first is market segments. We began with high-growth technology and mid-market companies. Over the last two or three years, we’ve made strong inroads into the enterprise, which is now our highest-growth market.
The second is geography. We’re headquartered in France, but we’ve made significant investments in North America. Today, close to 60% of our business comes from that region.
The third is use cases. While we started as a financial planning and performance management platform, we now also support revenue operations and sales operations—things like setting quotas and targets. We’ve expanded into workforce planning and supply chain as well. So our growth has been about broadening from core finance into adjacent areas that are critical for businesses.
CFOTL: Many planning platforms are investing in AI. How does Pigment’s AI roadmap set the company apart?
Peir: A lot of legacy platforms were architected 20, 30, even 40 years ago. They weren’t designed for today’s pace of innovation, especially when it comes to AI. Companies often end up budgeting in those systems, but for revenue plans, demand forecasts, or other critical processes, they revert to spreadsheets. Analytics then gets done in separate BI tools, so planning and decision-making remain fragmented.
Pigment brings all of this together in a single platform. We combine the agility of spreadsheets with the stability of an integrated model. Our interface is intuitive, so anyone in the organization can participate in planning.
AI is central to our roadmap. We already offer generative AI capabilities so users can ask questions of their data or build models more quickly. We also have predictive capabilities powered by machine learning. And today, customers are testing our first AI agent—an analyst agent that can run variance analyses and surface insights on its own. The goal is not just to analyze data faster, but to truly help companies make better decisions and drive stronger performance.
Pigment | www.pigment.com | Paris, France