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CEO Tech Talk: How Meero Reached Unicorn Status In 3 Years For Its Online Platform For Photographers – Forbes


This month, French startup Meero raised a $230 C-round making it the largest venture capital fundraising in France’s history. In an exclusive interview, I spoke with CEO and co-founder Thomas Rebaud about the secrets of his meteoric success. (Photographer: Martin Barzilai)

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With over $1 billion raised during the first quarter of this year, according to CB Insights, 2019 is on track to be a record fundraising year for the tech startup ecosystem in France, where venture capital investment is on pace to reach $4.79 billion by year’s end—which would be over $1 billion more than last year’s $3.45 billion raised by the “French Tech”.

To put this in perspective, for the same Q1 period, startups in the U.K., Israel and Germany raised $5.6 billion, $1.55 billion (IVC-ZAG report) and $1.11 billion, respectively, while U.S. startups have raised $24.6 billion in venture capital, including $1.16 billion in Texas, $4.3 billion in Silicon Valley and $7.1 billion in San Francisco alone, according to the latest PwC/CB Insights Money Tree report.

“Our goal is to have 20 tech unicorns by 2025,” told me Kat Borlongan, the head of the French Tech program, when I recently visited her office at Station F in Paris, the world’s largest startup campus.

A lofty goal for sure but one that is well attainable.

According to a study conducted by my firm, Atherton Research, there are indeed more than 20 fast-growing French tech startups that are well on track to unicorn status including Actility, Aircall, Alan, Algolia, BackMarket, Dataiku, Devialet, Klaxoon, Ledger, ManoMano, Mirakl, Lunchr, OpenClassrooms, Payfit, Qonto, Shadow, Shift Technology, Sigfox, Talentsoft, Scality, Vestiaire Collective, Vulog, Ynsect and Younited Credit.

Moreover, they have been recently some huge fundraisings across the French tech ecosystem including Doctolib ($170 million), Ynsect ($125 million), Wynd ($82 million) and more recently Meero, an online marketplace for photographers, which raised $230 million last week—and nearly $300 million in just three years after its founding—catapulting it into France’s small club of tech unicorns (BlaBlaCar, Deezer, Doctolib, Kyriba, Ivalua, Veepee, and OVH).

In an exclusive interview with Meero’s CEO and co-founder Thomas Rebaud, we’ve talked about his journey as a young serial entrepreneur and how he scaled his latest startup from just an idea to a billion-dollar company in only 3 years. Below is the transcription of our conversation that has been edited and condensed for clarity.

“Jeb” Su: What is Meero?

Thomas Rebaud: Meero is a suite of tools and services that we’ve been building for three years to improve the life of photographers. So on one side, we’re trying to increase their revenue and on the other side, we’re providing tools to help them in their work life. And in between these two buckets, you have the technology, which is the only way to answer in a good way these 2 missions.

JBS: So how do you increase photographers’ revenues?

TR: We find clients for them every month in more than 100 countries. So far it was only B2B clients and only on the food and travel industries including UberEats, JustEats, GrubHub, Booking.com, Trivago, Expedia or Airbnb which are online marketplaces that need photographers in many locations and at the same time. For example, how do you shoot for 12,000 hotels per year in 38 countries? The only one in the world who does that is Meero. And so far, on average in the world, we bring the photographers on our platform an additional $1,000 per month. And we’re trying to increase this up to $1,500 per month by the end of next year. So today, photographers overall earn around $1,500 per month without us and we bring them an additional $1,000 per month. These are the latest figures we have from last month.

JBS: How do you help the life of photographers?

TR: First, we’ve built a free online software that manages the whole business journey of a photographer and make it more efficient starting with a CRM, then marketing automation tools, quotes, contracts and accounting tools, a feedback management platform—so that instead of sending photos on WeTransfer and exchanging a lot of emails with the client just to have feedback, we’ve done this in the Cloud. And photographers can use this software for free for their own business, with their existing or new clients. Then we wanted to offer additional services that make sense for photographers. The first one was, ‘how do you help in their training?’ Instead of going to YouTube, we wanted to provide content of value so they can train themselves. So we open a few months ago, master classes for free again. For example, we took 22 top-notch photographers in the world, on nature, portraits, etc., we are filming them on how to do that. We open a master class in how to do documentaries and here again, we’ve selected 12 World Class photographers and we’re following them everywhere, filming their life so you can see how and why they’re doing what they do. And we’ve started a foundation that he’s financing many new areas in the photo industry, including photojournalism which is something that is dying. And so we donate funds to help photojournalists go deeper in topics that do not necessarily make money but are very important for the photography world—like going to Syria and reporting there for 3 months or how is feminism in the world. We also opened a community section because often being a photographer is a very solitary job and you’re kind of on your own all the time. So how do we make them get together. And so we gather our community every month in 110 cities, in 35 countries, we book the event places, we talk to them and try to understand their problems. So that’s basically what we’re building for the photographers, to get closer to them, to get them inspired, to provide them with training, better than what they can find on YouTube, and help them be more efficient in everything they do and not spend 2 hours on an Excel spreadsheet to do a quote. On top of course of just bringing them revenue.

JBS: So what’s next for Meero?

TR: Lots of things. So far, we’ve been focused on the food and travel industries and this year we’re going after the new verticals of the photo industry starting with e-commerce web sites, every product you see online on Amazon and elsewhere there’s someone shooting it, and the B2C market like wedding pictures, portrait, family, and babies. With this, we’re opening Meero to help end consumers look for photographers which is another huge market. So far, if you’re getting married and you’re looking for a photographer, you’re going to post it on Facebook saying ‘hey, do you know a good photographer, etc?’, and you’re gonna have a friend of a friend of a friend, that’s going to post with 20 other comments on your Facebook feed, and at the end you end up with 12 quotes, it’s always the same thing. And they need to decide out of these 12 quotes and decide which one to keep. And basically, there’s no big brand that you can trust, to just provide you with a photographer, in your region at the price and level of service you want. And that’s we’re trying to build on the on-demand side of the business.

JBS: How is Artificial Intelligence (AI) used inside of Meero’s platform?

TR: We use AI on all the process of training, booking, and managing photographers which makes the whole process way more efficient. We also use AI to automatically select and edit the pictures that photographers send us—that’s why we ask photographers not to edit the photos because we’ll be doing it ourselves, for free, using algorithms and our own internal team of photo experts. So first, to select the ones we keep, which very difficult because it’s very subjective and to do that we need dozens of millions of images to train the algorithm for that. Then you keep 12 and out of these 12 pictures, let’s say they are real estate pictures, you need to straight up the verticals because you shoot with a wide-angle lens. Then you need to go into all the color correction settings, the white balance, the blue balance, the yellow balance, the contrast, etc. And in the end, you want all the pictures to look the same, even if they were taken by different photographers or cameras. For example, you want the white be the same white and this is very difficult, that’s why nobody’s doing it apart from us. So it’s a mix of geometry and machine learning. Out of the 600 employees at Meero, we have a technical team of 80 people which is responsible notably for the AI development and that is working closely with the art department (25 people) which is in charge of going through every editing and every image that comes to the platform every day and selecting the ones we want to keep and the ones that need to be improved which then feed the algorithm with this. Because you don’t want to feed the algorithms with bad pictures, otherwise, the machine learning will not be able to learn anything.

JBS: Do you need a huge database of photos for the algorithm to work properly?

TR: So far, we’ve been working with 500,000 pairs of photographs. So it’s not huge. But, to work nicely on 500,000 pairs, you need to have between 10 and 20 million pairs that you can go through and select the best. And the question is how do you get 20 millions pairs of photos before and after editing? The way is to go and shoot homes which we can do it because we have clients that are asking us to shoot their homes. Otherwise, we won’t get the data. So if you want the whole thing to work, you need first to have a business that goes and shoots, then you need an R&D group working on the AI, and then you need a photo department that selects which photos deserve to go to the algorithm and helping the AI team. You need these 3 pillars that’s why it takes time.

JBS: Who do you see as your main competitors?

TR: Globally, in the photography industry, you have hardware companies like Canon and Nikon, and software companies like Adobe, but in between, you have a huge market of professional photography services valued at $100 billion, and there is no one there. So we’re trying to become the category definer like Google is for search or Airbnb for travel. Of course, for each part of our business like master classes or our on-demand service, there are local competitors but nobody with our vision or scale that’s why we could raise so much money so quickly.

JBS: How did you get the idea to start an online marketplace to help photographers? Are you a photographer yourself?

TR: No, actually, at the very beginning, I wanted to help artists. My wife is a dancer and I’ve been in the art industry for a very long time and I was I wanted to try to help them because I’ve been building businesses my whole life. So that’s my, my brain gets around innovations that actually I wanted to try to do something for artists overall and for dancers at the beginning. But while digging this topic three years ago, I realized that the first target should be photographers because there was nobody on it and it made more sense business wise. And the thing right now is we need to find a way to go back from photographers to the other kind of artists so that we can have the everyone in that industry. And that’s something we need to do in the next three years. So for the software, for example, I wanted it to also be useful for artists as a whole the painters, the actors, dancers, but that’s something I have not yet found yet.

JBS: What’s Meero’s business model?

TR: It’s a revenue share model. We pay the photographers between $45 and $200 per hour depending on the mission, and we’ll receive 25% of what the client pays.

JBS: So it’s like an Uber for photographers?

TR: I’m going to tell you why it’s not. It’s very easy. Uber’s mission is to change transportation in the world, you can see that on the front page of their website. So actually, if they could get rid of drivers, that’s why they’re working on self-driving cars, or pay the drivers two times less, they will. While Meero’s mission is to help photographers with money and tools so they can focus more on their art, on what they like and want to do and not just on getting gigs to survive. So we’re trying to pay them more for example: in two years we tripled the amount we’re paying them every month. We pay photographers, on average, close to $80 per hour, which is far more than the $12 per hour an Uber driver gets. But above all, it’s not the same mission: we’re investing in photographers with our foundation, in the community, in documentaries, masterclasses, and free software. We want to improve their life, not to make them more miserable.

JBS: How are you going to use the $230 million you just raised?

TR: All the free tools and services on the photographer’s side are pure investment, and cost tens of millions dollars per year. Then we need to develop the on-demand service and keep growing: It’s a $100 billion market and we’re doing not even 1% of it. Obviously, we need to go way faster with the new verticals and expand geographically. So we are 600 employees right now we’ll be closing the year with close to 1200 employees in Paris, New York, Bangalore, Shanghai, and Tokyo. And right now we’re opening Singapore, Rio and Los Angeles. We’ve tripled headcount from last September to now, from 200 to 600 employees, and now we need to double again!



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