Pascal Gauthier, the CEO of French crypto unicorn Ledger, meets me wearing a typical suit-and-white-trainers combo and thick square glasses, extends his ring-adorned fingers and, shaking my hand, gives me a ‘welcome’ nod and smile.
Our interview has been squeezed in between meetings, panel discussions and media interventions at France’s flagship tech event VivaTech in Paris. “It’s a pretty busy week for me,” Gauthier says.
He’s been rubbing shoulders with French tech VIPs, including at a dinner two days before at the Élysée presidential palace with Nvidia chief Jensen Huang and Mistral AI founder Arthur Mensch, as well as French president Emmanuel Macron. It’s not Gauthier’s first time doing some presidential mingling: earlier this month he was also invited to join Macron’s official delegation on a tour of southeast Asia.
Ledger, which Gauthier has been leading since 2019, builds hardware crypto wallets — physical devices that store the cryptographic keys needed by cryptocurrency owners to access their digital assets. It launched in Paris in 2014 and over the last 10 years has raised more than $550m, reaching a valuation of $1.5bn in 2021. Gauthier says the business’s valuation now “largely exceeds” this, but won’t specify the exact number.
Its next step might well be a US-based initial public offering (IPO). “Our size is compatible with an IPO,” says Gauthier. “That’s a short-medium term vision — in a maximum of three years.”
His long-term vision is even more ambitious. Four years ago Gauthier told Sifted Ledger would one day be a $100bn company; that’s still the objective, he says now, albeit for the “medium-long term”.
To get there Gauthier has his eyes on branching outside of crypto and into cybersecurity more widely — something he tells me will make Ledger a “very, very, very large enterprise.”
From bear market to good run
Ledger doesn’t share its revenue figures, but Gauthier says the company has sold 8m products to date, with hardware wallets costing €79-399. Half of the company’s revenues come from its software services, which enable users to buy and swap cryptocurrencies while interacting with their hardware wallets. According to the company, more than 20% of the world’s crypto assets are currently protected through Ledger wallets.
Gauthier says Ledger has always been profitable. “Nowadays crypto is a main market, but back in 2014 it was much more complicated,” he says. “If you didn’t have a profitable business model, you couldn’t raise money. So we designed the company to be very profitable.”
It means Ledger has had the firepower to invest in its own growth, even in past years as the crypto market slowed down.
Since taking the reins, Gauthier has increased investments in Ledger’s software products to diversify revenue sources. He’s also invested in talent with key hires including product designer Tony Fadell, previously senior vice president of Apple’s iPod division, who led the team that created the first generations of the iPod and the iPhone.
Fadell started working with Ledger in 2021 and designed one of the company’s wallets. In 2024 he joined the business’s board of directors.
Last year the company also unveiled swanky new headquarters extending over nine floors in the centre of Paris, complete with a basketball court, a music room and a rooftop bar. The building has capacity to host 800 people despite only 350 of Ledger’s 700 employees being based in the French capital.
It wasn’t easy convincing the board to invest in a “bear market”, says Gauthier. “But it means we were ready for the good run that started at the end of 2024.”
The past few months have seen the crypto market heat up as a result of the US government adopting a pro-crypto stance following the election of Donald Trump. Demand for Bitcoin surged late last year, leading the cryptocurrency to hit $100k for the first time.
A US IPO
Being profitable doesn’t mean Ledger won’t be raising money again.
“When you are funded by VCs, you are always eventually going to raise money,” says Gauthier. “It is certain we will raise again, so the next question is whether we will stay private or go public. For us going public is possible.”
There is no question that an IPO would happen on the other side of the Atlantic, says Gauthier, with 30-40% of Ledger’s activity currently coming from the US. “In the US everyone already thinks ‘Ledger’ is American,” he says, laughing as he pronounces the name of the company with an American twang.
It would be Gauthier’s second public listing in the US. In 2008, he joined French commerce marketing startup Criteo and eventually led the company’s IPO on NASDAQ in 2013 — one of the only example to date of a French tech business successfully listing in the US.
Back then, liquidity could only be found across the Atlantic, says Gauthier, and not much has changed since. “Today, IPOs are in the US. It’s not possible on the European market nor on the UK market. It’s in the US or no IPO.”
The past few years have seen many tech companies adopt a similar stance and a number of European scaleups, including Sweden’s Spotify, Britain’s healthtech Babylon and cybersecurity firm Darktrace, have turned their noses up at home markets in favour of the US.
UK fintech giant Wise recently announced it is moving its primary listing from the UK to the US in a bid to attract more investors and increase its valuation, dealing a blow to the LSE. High-profile European tech companies like Swedish fintech Klarna and German climate tech 1Komma5 also have plans to list in the US.
Gauthier says this is due to European “conservatism”.
“There is money in Europe, that’s not the problem,” he says. “But we’re too conservative, we are not tech-oriented […] we need to change our mentality.”
Protecting secrets
While an IPO may happen in the next few years, Gauthier has his eyes set on the future beyond a public listing.
“The IPO is not the end game,” he says. “Reaching a $100bn valuation will happen after that.”
To get there Gauthier has been coming up with “an execution plan that matches the ambition.” For the past year, the CEO has been planning the expansion of Ledger’s technology beyond crypto enthusiasts, by leveraging the company’s hardware wallets to protect sensitive data for the wider public.
“Secure hardware is the only way to really protect online secrets,” says Gauthier. “When you combine this with the fact that people are getting more and more hacked […] it’s a colossal market.”
A key use case for this is decentralised identity — an established methodology enabling individuals to control their identity online without relying on third parties.
To access online websites and applications ranging from social media to banking, users typically identify themselves through accounts owned and managed by these authorities, meaning they have little control over the data they share. Decentralised identity reverses this dynamic: it lets users create and manage their own “digital passport” and present it to third parties when needed to verify their identity.
This digital passport, however, must be stored securely. Gauthier says Ledger’s hardware wallets could store the data and protect it thanks to cryptographic keys.
It is only the start of the project, with no dedicated product available yet to users. But Gauthier says it’s a growing market in the age of AI, as identity verification will become critical to differentiate humans from machines. The company, he says, is therefore on track to becoming a “very, very, very large enterprise.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/ledger-pascal-gauthier-interview/
