On the verge of bankruptcy, Qwant obtains a reprieve from the European Investment Bank


Almost ten years after its creation, the future of Qwant is still uncertain. The French search engine would even have come very close to bankruptcy, according to information from The Informed. Faced with the urgency of the situation, the company obtained a rescheduling of its debt from the European Investment Bank (EIB) to deal with “a mountain of debt”reveals the economic media.

Qwant

Available for all web browsers as well as on Android and iOS mobile devices, Qwant is a French and ethical search engine that protects the privacy of its users.

  • Version :
    4.0.4
  • Downloads:
    1332
  • Release date :
    09/27/2022
  • Author :
    Qwant
  • Licence :
    Free license
  • Categories:

    Internet

  • Operating system :

    Android, Google Chrome extension, Microsoft Edge extension, Mozilla Firefox extension, Online service All Internet browsers, iOS iPhone / iPad

The EIB had decided to support Qwant with 25 million euros in 2015. But the search engine was unable to repay this year the 15 million euros that the EIB had to recover, explains The Informed. Therefore, “public authorities are coming to the rescue again to save the famous French Google which never worked”writes on Twitter Gilles Tanguy, founder and editorial director of The Informed.

Since its launch, Qwant has faced difficulties, both technical and financial. And for good reason, positioning yourself as an alternative to Google is not easy, even more so when internal divisions are slowing down the project, as revealed by a survey by Mediapart in 2019.

In the eyes of Guillaume Champeau, legal director of Clever Cloud, the evil is deeper. “One day the media will realize that Qwant never had a problem of overfunding, but of underfunding. The State has come to compensate for the lack of European private investment to create a European engine, which we need”, he said in particular. Before adding: “To depend on Americans or Asians to tell us according to their own criteria what is interesting and relevant on the Internet when we are looking for information is a democratic and strategic problem. So yes, the public authorities came to supplement Qwant’s meager private funding, but the reality is that much more would have been needed.

To give some oxygen to its finances, the tricolor company was notably recapitalized at the start of 2020 by the Caisse des dépôts and the German group Axel Springer, before obtaining 8 million euros in convertible bonds from Huawei in 2021. As a reminder, the company has never reached profitability since its creation in 2013, despite a reduction in losses in recent years (net loss of 9.1 million euros for a turnover of 11.9 million euros in 2021).



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