Who is David Balland, the man kidnapped with his wife in Vierzon?

The case has been making headlines for two days in local and national media. David Balland, co-founder of Ledger, a cryptocurrency company headquartered in Vierzon, was kidnapped for a ransom before being found by law enforcement. But who is this Vierzon entrepreneur and why was he the target of a kidnapping?

The story of David Balland is above all that of a start-up success story. Now 36 years old and originally from Corrèze, David Balland studied at SupInfo Orléans, while living in Vierzon. There he obtained a Master’s degree in Information Science. With two friends and associates, Joël Pobeda and Vanessa Rabesandratana, in 2011 he launched a music streaming platform called RadioceRos. It was with this first company that David Balland and his two partners became interested in cryptocurrency.

The entrepreneur is in fact looking for a way to avoid very high bank transaction fees, preventing him from generating profits on subscriptions to the music streaming platform he had just created. He then looks at cryptocurrency.

“We then realized that music is a saturated environment, but that in cryptocurrency, it was the time to get started“, says David Balland on the YouTube channel Extra-Muros two years ago. The three entrepreneurs then created a system for marketing physical cryptocurrency, and sent their first customers USB keys with cryptocurrency accounts by post .A way to make bitcoin easier to access.

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The company was then called Chronocoin.fr. They were thus spotted by another cryptocurrency company, BTChip, founded by Nicolas Bacca, who offered them the opportunity to use their smart card system to develop. It is the coincidence of the Vierzon network which writes the rest of the story. “Joël Pobeda one day realized that he lived in Eric Larcheveque’s childhood home in Vierzon, that’s how a first bond was created“. It was with this meeting that Chronocoin.fr and BTChip merged with the company of Eric Larcheveque, also in the cryptocurrency world. He manages the Maison du Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency counter based in Paris. The three companies then decided to merge in 2014 to become Ledger, the result of eight partners.

Ledger is growing quickly to become the world leader in secure physical cryptocurrency wallets. Start-ups have in fact reproduced the same principle as the bank card, but for cryptocurrency. Under the leadership of David Balland, Ledger has experienced remarkable growth, reaching a valuation of 1.3 billion euros in 2023. This unicorn – an unlisted start-up whose valuation based on very significant growth potential exceeds the billion dollars – has taken up residence in Vierzon.

“When we started RadioceRos, we worked from home. Then we met the community of the town of Vierzon to whom we presented the project. They offered us a small rental of five offices in the newly built Sologne technology park, north of Vierzon. The rent was relatively affordable for a small start-up“, says David Balland on the talk show Extra-Muros.

“We helped them equip the site with fiber optics. Confidence grew, they followed us at the time when cryptocurrency did not necessarily have good press and was not necessarily known. When we needed a larger office when we created Chronocoin, they helped us. When we went back to see them after a few months of Chronocoin’s operation to tell them that we were merging with two other companies, that we needed three more offices, a meeting room and a production room to make safes- strong numerically, they still followed us. Ledger has experienced very significant growth, in 2016 we sold a few thousand units. In 2017, we reached one million. We still had to change buildings and the community always supported uss”.

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After several moves and premises that were always saturated, Ledger ended up building the factory which she still operates today. The company therefore has offices in Paris, New York, London, Geneva, Montpellier, Grenoble… and Vierzon.

In 2020, however, the start-up experienced a first setback. It is the subject of a massive data leak. It was sanctioned in October 2024 with a fine of €750,000 by the National Commission for Information Technology and Liberties (Cnil) for failing to sufficiently secure its customers’ data.

In 2023, the start-up had to part with 12% of its workforce, justified by a difficult macro-economic context, we could read at the time from our colleagues at Berry Républicain.

To recruit within Ledger, David Balland first recruits from his friends who attended the same school as him and more broadly, from his network. Ledger’s presence in Vierzon gave him the idea of ​​launching a digital engineering school in Cher, alongside Franck Jeannin and Eric Larcheveque.

Algo Sup moved to Bourges in 2017, before the project was presented to the town of Vierzon. “You don’t need to be in Paris to set up an engineering school. Students can enjoy the Vierzon setting. It’s quiet, with a quality of life that you don’t have in the city“. Because David Balland is a fervent defender of the small town of Cher.

“In Vierzon, we have all the advantages of the countryside and the advantages of the city. We have fiber optic networks that are developing and real estate is not expensive“, he spoke on Extra-Muros.

For two years now, David Balland has no longer been with the Ledger company, admitting to having grown tired of it. He returned to his first love, creating software. Still with his Vierzon partners Joël Pobeda and Vanessa Rabesandratana, David Balland developed an artistic center in 2019, « The Center », to develop accessible exhibitions in the metaverse, including virtual museum tours here.

Those around him describe him as someone “very humble, remained simple, generous. He’s always been a real geek. His success never went to his head. He is so nice“. Although wealthy, David Balland has not left Vierzon where he has lived for 16 years now and which he is particularly fond of. He was also kidnapped from the house he occupies with his wife at his home in Méreau , just a few kilometers from Vierzon Because although he seems to lead a normal lifestyle, David Balland has, like his associates, a well-stocked cryptocurrency portfolio, worth several million euros.

Enough to arouse the desire of the perpetrators of the kidnapping committed this Tuesday, January 21. Ledger continues its rise, and has sold more than seven million devices in more than 180 countries and in 10 languages. It secures 20% of the world’s digital assets, and has more than 100 institutional clients.