Before he sold a single crypto wallet, Eric Larchevêque made his living at a poker table. He had sold his first company, a group of dating and adult-entertainment sites called Montorgueil, in 2007 for about EUR 22m. Then he played professionally for two years, until 2009, and went back to building companies.
He was born in 1973 in Boulogne-Billancourt, but grew up in Vierzon, a small industrial town in central France, where his father André made porcelain. He trained as an engineer at ESIEE Paris, graduating in 1996, and co-wrote a book that same year on building advanced PCs. A man who writes a book on assembling computers at 23 is a man who likes taking machines apart.
His associate David Balland was kidnapped, and Larchevêque publicly called for firearms permits for crypto professionals.
The companies came one after another. In 2011 he launched Prixing, a price-comparison service, and sold it to HighCo in 2014. That year he also opened La Maison du Bitcoin in Paris, a physical place where ordinary people could come and ask what bitcoin was. It was an odd bet. Most people who visited were curious, not rich.
The turn came from the people around him. In 2014 a group of French crypto builders came together under the Ledger name, among them Nicolas Bacca, a smart-card specialist who had created BTChip, regarded as the first bitcoin hardware wallet. Larchevêque brought the business sense. Bacca brought the chip. The idea was blunt: if your coins sit on an exchange, you do not own them; if they sit on a small device that never shows your keys to a computer, you do.
The company grew into a unicorn. A $75m round arrived in 2018 and a $380m round in 2021 at a reported $1.5bn valuation. Larchevêque led until 2019, then handed the CEO job to Pascal Gauthier and became chairman.
The price of being famous in crypto showed in 2025. His associate David Balland was kidnapped, and Larchevêque publicly called for firearms permits for crypto professionals. The company had been through the 2020 leak of customer contact details, and a long crypto winter before that.
As of 2026, Ledger is reported to be preparing a New York listing at a value above $4bn, and Challenges estimated Larchevêque's professional wealth at about EUR 340m in 2024. He remains a strategic shareholder.
His other bets have not all worked. ALGOSUP, the computing school he co-founded in his hometown in 2022, closed in July 2025 for lack of financial balance. The poker years explain something about him: he treats a company as a hand to be played, and he has been willing to fold one and sit down at the next.