[2][3] Born in Lyon, France, in 1964, Vigreux was brought up in the working-class suburb of Vaulx-en-Velin where her father was a commercial buyer for a chemical company and her mother, a pharmacy dispenser.

[2] In 1987, Vigreux started working in London for the Psion consumer electronics company where she managed exports, travelling to North Africa, Israel and around Europe.

[3] While working at Psion, she met Harold Goddijn who was interested in distributing the company's products in the Netherlands.

Attracted back to technology, Vigreux teamed up with two of Goddijn's friends, Peter-Frans Pauwels and Pieter Geelen, and founded Palmtop Software which later became TomTom.

[3] In recent years, the satnav sector has suffered from Google's development of mapping systems for smartphones.