The founder of OVH Octave Klava has just announced the acquisition of the French search engine Qwant.
It had been in the air for several months. The French search engine Qwant, founded a decade ago, was the object of Octave Klava’s interest. A project announced at the beginning of spring, and which has just materialized.
A takeover completed
That’s it ! Qwant is going to have a new owner. The founder of OVH, European cloud leader, has just announced on Twitter the operation, organized around a new entity: Synfonium. The latter will be made up of the cloud computing specialist Shadow and therefore of the French search engine, and will itself have two owners.
The first will be the Caisse des dépôts et des consignations (CDC), which will own 25% of the company’s capital. The remaining 75% will be held by the Jezby Venture & Deep Code investment fund, which belongs to Octave Klaba. As the French billionaire explains in his Twitter post, “ the closing will take place this summer “, while the strategic details of the new company will be revealed at the start of the school year.
Towards a European adventure?
The ambitions of the businessman are great. Synfonium is thus only the first step in an adventure that it wishes to be European, and which should lead to the collaboration of the major tech players from the old continent to produce a giant similar to GAFAM. This should include ” a search engine, free services, the collaborative suite, the social login “, or quite simply services that would compete with the Microsoft 365 and Google suite.
A dream of European sovereignty for the distant moment, when we know that Qwant is, for example, dependent on Microsoft’s Bing search engine for its results. Octave Klaba is aware of this. ” The path is long, complex and expensive, but there is a real expectation to have this platform in the Cloud SaaS EU which respects our values and our European laws “, he explains. This will not prevent him from trying the experiment!
Download
- Rich and user-friendly interface
- Qwant Junior well thought out
- Real R&D for a real competitor
After a first trial based on Bing, Qwant did not choose the easy way out by developing its own algorithms to compete with Google. A colorful and positive atmosphere emerges from this engine, and this is already a crucial point for retaining the Internet user. He alone will judge the relevance of the results.
After a first trial based on Bing, Qwant did not choose the easy way out by developing its own algorithms to compete with Google. A colorful and positive atmosphere emerges from this engine, and this is already a crucial point for retaining the Internet user. He alone will judge the relevance of the results.
Source : Octave Klaba on Twitter
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