In June 2019 Thomas Rebaud announced a number that made French tech sit up: $230 million for a photography platform. Headlines called it a unicorn. Rebaud explained the size of the cheque with a line that would age badly. If you want to make it happen quickly, he said, you have to invest in many things at the same time.
Meero's idea was simple enough. Businesses needed photos, from estate agents to restaurants to event organisers. Freelance photographers wanted work. Meero connected them and used AI to sort and edit the pictures so delivery was fast. Early money came in 2017, including a round that drew Xavier Niel and backers tied to Bernard Arnault, then $45 million in 2018.
That would put the valuation below a billion dollars, and the publication left Meero out of its unicorn count.
The big round turned the company into a hiring machine. Meero grew to roughly 600 people. Everything depended on one assumption: that companies would keep ordering shoots.
What almost nobody knew in 2019 was how much of that headline money had really arrived. In January 2022, Maddyness, reading public documents, concluded that Meero had received only about €130 million. That would put the valuation below a billion dollars, and the publication left Meero out of its unicorn count. The company that launched with a billion-dollar label never quite owned it.
Then the world stopped travelling. Events were cancelled, shops closed, marketing budgets froze. Photo shoots are physical, and the model could not shrink quickly. Headcount fell from about 600 to 350, and then 72 further jobs went. Rebaud stepped down as CEO, keeping his shares and moving to chairman; Gaétan Rougevin-Baville, the COO and one of the first employees, took over. He told Les Echos that visual content budgets had been among the first to be frozen.
The company tried to sell its photographer service and, according to reports, found no buyers. By February 2023 clients could no longer book shoots. Meero pivoted to software for storing and managing photos, the AI tooling it had built for its own marketplace.
Rebaud's own history, his school and his hometown, is not in the public record we found, so Meero's story is told through its numbers and its choices.
The lesson for a founder is uncomfortable. A very large round is a promise to grow fast, and fast growth built on a physical marketplace is hard to reverse. The smart part of Meero, the software, outlived the part that burned the cash.