Before he sold anyone a phone, Thibaud Hug de Larauze helped build schools in Haiti.
It was a gap year, taken after he had finished a scientific baccalauréat in Toronto in 2006 and enrolled at the IESEG business school. He was born in 1988 into an old family from the Quercy region, whose coat of arms bears an open oyster. His father, Bruno, would go on to run the food group IDEA. Haiti was a break from that world of boardrooms.
Their pitch was simple: refurbishing beats recycling, and a used phone can be as good as new.
He returned to finish an entrepreneurship MBA in 2010 and a master's in international negotiation in 2011. Then came a job at Neteven, a company helping merchants sell online. His work there brought him into contact with refurbishing factories, places that repaired and tested used electronics but had almost no way to reach consumers. What almost nobody saw, he later seems to have realised, was that these workshops were doing good work in the dark.
In 2014, with Quentin Le Brouster and Vianney Vaute, he started Back Market. Their pitch was simple: refurbishing beats recycling, and a used phone can be as good as new. The first money was modest, about 300,000 euros from private investors in 2015.
Trust was the product. In 2019 a consumer magazine said the platform accounted for most of the complaints in its investigation, and critics pointed at the one-year minimum warranty and lack of a new-battery option. Back Market responded with vetting and random tests, later added a battery option, and the defective rate reportedly dropped from 10% to 5%. Criticism that refurbishment was happening in China led it to show the country where each device was repaired.
Capital followed. 41 million euros came in 2018 from Daphni, the Arnault group and Eurazeo, 110 million with Goldman Sachs Growth in 2020, and 276 million in 2021. In January 2022 a 450 million euro round valued it at 5.1 billion. By the end of that year it had cut 13% of its staff, 93 of 715 people. The company reports first profitability in Europe in 2024 and worldwide in 2025.
Today it works with about 1,700 refurbishers and in September 2025 announced physical stores, starting in the United States. In 2024 Challenges estimated his fortune above 375 million euros.
The lesson is a quiet one. The idea came from standing next to people doing unseen work. Before building a platform, spend time where the thing actually happens.