The prosecutor did not like how relaxed they were.
In December 2016 Teddy Pellerin and Mathieu Jacob stood in a Paris criminal court. More than 1,500 taxi drivers had joined the case as civil parties. The prosecutor asked for a €10,000 fine and a two-year ban on running any company for each founder, and a €300,000 fine for Heetch itself. She said the pair seemed too décontractés given what had happened to their drivers, many of whom had been taken into police custody and fined.
Its drivers paid for it with custody and fines, while the founders launched a campaign, touche pas à mon Heetch, asking riders to speak up.
Heetch had started in 2013 with a modest promise: rides home at night for people in their early twenties. It worked only from the evening until dawn, and by Pellerin's own account its customers were mostly students. Two-thirds of rides began in the Paris suburbs, where night buses thin out. The name came from hitch-hiking, and the company cultivated a pirate image.
The first small rounds, €1.5 million in 2014 and again in 2015, came from backers including Kima Ventures, TheFamily and Alven. By 2015 it had 51 employees and about €2 million in revenue, slightly loss-making.
Then the state moved. In the summer of 2015, Heetch, UberPop and Djump were named in a ban on apps that matched private drivers with riders. Uber and Djump stopped. Heetch kept running. Its drivers paid for it with custody and fines, while the founders launched a campaign, touche pas à mon Heetch, asking riders to speak up.
In March 2017 the court ruled. Heetch and its two directors were convicted of complicity in illegal taxi activity, misleading commercial practices and illegal matching of clients with non-professional drivers. Damages ran to about €441,000, with fines on top, and each director paid €10,000, half suspended. The original service was suspended in France.
Heetch relaunched with professional drivers, available at any hour. Investors stayed: €16.5 million in 2018 and about $38 million in 2019, led by Cathay Innovation and Total Ventures. The company pushed into Africa, where an Abidjan moto-taxi launch in 2019 ran into another ban and impounded vehicles. In 2022 it became the first VTC platform to take entreprise à mission status.
Pellerin and Jacob's schools and early careers are not on the public record we found.
For a founder, the case is a hard one. Defiance bought Heetch the market and a criminal record. The company survived only by becoming the thing it had refused to be: a business that fits the rules.