3i today announces a €2.6m investment in Twenga SA, a next generation shopping search engine, enabling consumers to compare, review and purchase the most complete range of products online. The company was founded in 2006 by Bastien Duclaux and Cedric Anes with the backing of a group of business angels including Jean- Noel Lebrun (ezlogin.com), Alain Cremer (Meilleuregestion) and Christophe Cremer (Meilleurtaux).
Twenga offers consumers the broadest choice of products for sale online. Twenga’s platform relies on a large-scale infrastructure and highly sophisticated software that manages the indexing, categorisation and clustering of millions of online offers.
Unlike its existing competitors, Twenga does not simply display offers from a limited number of web merchants who pay for a listing, but actually references tens of thousands of online merchants. Twenga also lets consumers customize how they see their search results, sorted by user popularity, price, or by one of many highly specialized search results filters.
Twenga currently operates in France (www.twenga.fr), Germany (www.twenga.de), Italy (www.twenga.it), Poland (www.twenga.pl), Spain (www.twenga.es), and the UK (www.twenga.co.uk). These websites welcomed 7 million visitors in November 2007 and indexed over 40 million offers from 25,000 merchants.
Bastien Duclaux, CEO of Twenga, comments : “3i immediately recognised the value of what we are building. The money we have raised will allow us to extend our offer throughout the geographies in which we operate”.
Jean-Noel Lebrun, Chairman of the company, adds : “The powerful technology that Twenga has developed enables us to offer a service which massively simplifies the shopping experience; simply put, users can shop across all merchants and all products
in one single place.”
Jean-David Chamboredon, Partner at 3i, comments : “The Twenga team has created a highly impressive business to date. There’s real demand in the market for an easily searchable and comprehensive shopping database like the one Twenga is building. We expect high user adoption growth in the coming quarters”.
