Jean-Baptiste Rudelle's first company began with a phone bill. He wanted cheaper international calls, so he built a call-back service called Kallback. It was a small, practical fix to a small, personal irritation. Everything he built afterwards came from the same habit.
He was born in Paris in 1969. His father, Pierre-Marie, was a painter and his mother, Odile, a political science researcher. He studied telecommunications at Supélec, graduating in 1991, then took a master's at Imperial College London. His first jobs were at an EDF subsidiary and at Philips-Lucent, then consulting at Roland Berger and Arthur D. Little through 1999.
In 1999 he co-founded Kiwee, which made SMS games, ringtones and logos for mobile phones. It sounds trivial now, but American Greetings bought it in 2004. That sale gave him a first exit, and a reputation.
In 2005 he joined Franck Le Ouay and Romain Niccoli to found Criteo. What nobody expected was how slow it would be. The company spent its first four years on research and development. The first product launched in April 2008.
The idea paid off. Criteo built display ads from a person's browsing behaviour and charged on a cost-per-click basis, so a shopper who looked at a pair of shoes saw those shoes again. Early funding was about $17M, and Bessemer put in $7M in 2010. In October 2013 the company went public, raising $251M.
Then the platform shifted underneath it. In 2017 Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention cost Criteo about $25M in revenue. Eric Eichmann took over as CEO in 2016, Rudelle came back in 2018, and Megan Clarken followed in 2019. In June 2023 the French data authority fined the company EUR 40M, mainly for not verifying that people had consented to data processing.
To outsiders, Rudelle is also a chess player. In June 2017 he and Veselin Topalov won an amateur-professional event at the Paris Grand Chess Tour, facing Garry Kasparov. He wrote a book in 2015, titled in English roughly "They told me it was impossible".
Criteo reported US$1.94bn in revenue and US$145M in net income for 2025, with about 3,600 employees, and at the end of that year announced plans to move to the United States via Luxembourg.
For a founder the thread is simple. Rudelle solved his own annoyance first, then each new company got bigger. The ones that lasted were built by someone patient enough to spend four years before the first product.