It’s not just in America that empires big and small are born and die on Twitter. It is on the social network that Octave Klaba, boss of the large French group specializing in hosting OVHcloud, announced, Tuesday, April 11, the start of negotiations to buy the French search engine Qwant. Mr. Klaba clarified that the discussion “exclusive” must be done jointly with the public group Caisse des dépôts et consignations (CDC).
With @caissedesdepots, we entered into exclusive discussions to buy @Shadow_France and @Qwant_FR and pro… https://t.co/vDrb0qg902
The partnership between the Roubaix businessman and the CDC, baptized Synfonium, plans to offer “transparent access to the best European cloud-based collaboration services”specifies the press release published by Shadow on Tuesday.
“Transparent access” to “European” online services
This acquisition would complement another made previously by Mr. Klaba. In 2021, the Paris Commercial Court had already entrusted the recovery of Shadow to hubiC, owned by Octave Klaba. The company, founded in 2015, specializes in cloud gaming (game on demand), and cloud computing (hosting of remote computing resources for individuals). It had raised more than 100 million euros in its early days, without being able to finance the servers which would have enabled it to accommodate more customers.
Qwant, a French search engine created in 2013 on promises of respect for privacy and independence from the Californian behemoths, has so far failed to find its economic model. The “European Google” even had to partner in 2019 with the American Bing to provide some of the results of its users’ queries, and to its parent company, Microsoft, as an advertising agency, before joining with the Chinese Huawei as part of a financing of 8 million euros, in 2021.
Synfonium plans to“add other services to the platform”in order to provide a “transparent access” to online services “European”the statement said.