The Story of Figures: Building Europe’s Compensation Intelligence Platform

Sometimes the most compelling startup stories begin with an unconventional career pivot. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Figures CEO Virgile Raingeard shared how his unusual path from computer science to HR laid the foundation for a company that’s reshaping how European businesses handle compensation.

The Unlikely Path to Founding “I have a computer science degree and I switched to a master’s degree in human resources afterwards for very weird reasons,” Virgile recalls. This unusual combination proved prescient, though it wouldn’t become clear for over a decade.

After spending twelve years in HR roles at progressively smaller companies, Virgile found himself as HR director at a Series A startup. It was there that he encountered a problem that would become the genesis of Figures: the complete lack of reliable market data for setting compensation in France.

From Side Project to Startup Rather than immediately diving in full-time, Virgile took a measured approach. “I’m going to take one day off a week from my day to day job,” he explains. “My Founder accepted. I’m going to try to do on the side project to work on the first compensation benchmark for startups in France.”

The response was immediate. Within months of launching a simple Google Sheet subscription in October 2020, fifteen companies had signed up to share their compensation data. The model was basic but effective: companies would share their data and pay for access to the aggregated insights.

The Technical Evolution The breakthrough came when Virgile convinced a top developer to join as co-founder, turning their spreadsheet into a proper product. “We made out of like my Co-Founder, which is an amazing the best developer I’ve ever seen, agreed to join me when he had like ten offers to join those startups,” Virgile shares.

Early Pricing Lessons One of the company’s most instructive early mistakes came from underpricing their product. Initial subscriptions ranged from €400 to €2,500 annually, which Virgile now acknowledges was “ridiculous.” When they later tripled their prices, they discovered it had no impact on their win rate, revealing just how much they’d been undervaluing their service.

Building Trust Through Transparency Despite handling sensitive compensation data, Figures has taken an unconventional approach to brand building. They’ve embraced humor and transparency, even implementing playful features like zodiac sign-based compensation filtering for April Fools’ Day. This approach helps make the serious business of compensation more approachable while building trust through authenticity.

The Future Vision Looking ahead, Virgile’s ambition is to fundamentally transform how companies think about compensation. “I want it to become obvious five years from now, people are going to be like, how come? As an HR professional, I managed to run compensation without the tool like Figures,” he explains.

The goal isn’t just to provide better data, but to make the entire concept of managing compensation without specialized tools seem as outdated as managing customer relationships without a CRM. “I think we’re the Stone age or Dark Age of composition and that five years from now, people are going to look back and it’s going to be a completely different type of norm when it comes to composition and how you manage it.”

For tech founders, Figures’ journey offers a compelling example of how deep domain expertise, combined with technical innovation and strategic market understanding, can create category-defining companies. By solving a specific problem they deeply understood, then methodically expanding their solution across Europe’s complex market landscape, they’ve built more than just a successful company – they’re reshaping how an entire industry operates.