French ecommerce solution PrestaShop raises €6.75 mln

The French ecommerce software company PrestaShop raised 6.75 million euros of investment capital last week from XAnge, Seventure Partners and Serena Capital. The extra capital will be used to conquer other markets, accelerate product development and improve technology. PrestaShop got 3 million euros with a previous funding round in September 2011.

Next European countries: UK and Poland
Co-founder Bruno Lévêque told Frenchweb the €6.75 million investment will be used to release the open source ecommerce software in ten more countries. The international expansion is likely to start with strategic countries, like the United Kingdom and Poland. The United States still remain a priority as PrestaShop claims a US business worth of several million euros. The internationalization of PrestaShop will be executed by hiring business developers and country managers on the one hand, and starting local partnerships on the other hand.

Investor Seventure Partners is especially positive about the fact PrestaShop has shown “such tremendous growth and profitability in the past year. “Drastically increasing revenues leveraging an open source freemium model is very impressive,” says Jonathan Cohen-Sabban, partner at Seventure Partners. “PrestaShop is redefining the way merchants can do business on a global scale and we are looking forward to a highly successful year.”

PrestaShop is currently negotiating with two partners that are in the Fortune 100. Once these agreements are signed, merchants will be able to use extra modules without having to pay for them. In its home country France, PrestaShop is being used by about 41,000 shops, which corresponds to approximately one third of the ecommerce software market in France. According to the website Builtwith, PrestaShop even owns half of the total market. Globally the software is used for 165,000 online stores. PrestaShop has a vivid community of 600,000 members and its software has been downloaded more than 3 million times. The latest version (v1.6) is fully mobile with its new app and responsive design.

About PrestaShop
PrestaShop was founded by Bruno Lévêque and Igor Schlumberger in 2007. It currently has about sixty employees based in Paris and twenty in Miami. In April 2011 Benjamin Tezner was hired as CEO to make PrestaShop the world´s number one ecommerce solution. So far, it sales grew with 40% to €8.5 million last year