In early 2024 Denis Ladegaillerie did something few founders ever have to do. He sat on both sides of the table. The man who had taken Believe to the Paris stock exchange three years earlier announced that he, with the funds TCV and EQT, wanted to buy the whole company back and take it off the market.
The price was EUR 15 a share, valuing Believe at about EUR 1.52 billion. Minority shareholders thought it was too low, and said so loudly. It is an uncomfortable position for a founder: the people he had invited in at the IPO were now telling him his own offer undervalued the thing he had built.
A year later it paid EUR 10 million for the French label Naive Records.
To understand why it mattered to him, go back to April 2005, when Ladegaillerie, Arnaud Chiaramonti and Nicolas Laclias started a digital music company in Paris. Their idea was simple and slightly heretical. Independent artists had no good way to get onto the new streaming and download platforms, and the big labels had little reason to help them. Believe would be the pipe.
The first years were slow. The company signed the French rapper MC Solaar for distribution in 2008 and, in 2010, its own label, Believe Recordings, signed its first artist. In 2015 it raised 60 million dollars from Ventech, TCV and XAnge and bought TuneCore, the American self-service distributor. A year later it paid EUR 10 million for the French label Naive Records.
Growth did not come without bruises. The company was accused of aggressive copyright claims on YouTube, and in 2020 it faced a federal lawsuit in New York alleging large-scale infringement. After the invasion of Ukraine it kept operating in Russia but cut ties with sanctioned artists and labels, and Ladegaillerie said its investment there had been interrupted.
The IPO came on 10 June 2021 and raised EUR 300 million. Revenue climbed to about EUR 880 million in 2023 and about EUR 989 million in 2024, though the company was still posting small net losses: EUR 18.1 million in 2023, EUR 2.12 million in 2024.
What almost nobody expected was how hard the market would push back. Warner stepped aside, regulators cleared the path, but investors held out. In 2025 the consortium raised its offer first to EUR 15.30 and then to EUR 17.20, a figure an independent expert judged fair. By late June 2025 it held 94.99 percent of the shares, and the listing story was over.
The lesson for a first-time founder is a quiet one. Going public does not end your obligations to the people who back you, and getting out can cost more than getting in. Ladegaillerie got his company back, but he paid the price the market insisted on.