Resurrecting Qwant: New Owners Bet On GenAI To Provide Answers

For many seasoned executives, being asked to take the helm of privacy-focused search engine Qwant might seem like the most thankless of tasks. After more than a decade of failed promises, Qwant had earned a reputation as a mismanaged dud.

When OVHCloud founder Octave Klaba bought Qwant in 2023, the company was on its very last gasp and any hopes of building a European search competitor to Google appeared to be, well, laughable.

Enter Olivier Abecassis. After more than two decades of leading digital and innovation projects at French broadcaster TF1, he was looking for a new challenge when Klaba asked him to review Qwant's business and work on the transaction. Abecassis was intrigued by the opportunity to work on tech M&A and so jumped in.

By the time the complicated deal closed, Klaba tapped him to be CEO, overseeing a digital portfolio that would include Qwant, the previously acquired cloud gaming Shadow, and the parent company created over both, dubbed Synfonium.

This all begs the question: What potential did this duo see in Qwant that almost no other human on the planet did?

"There were 2 things," Abecassis said in a recent interview. "Building a search engine in 2024 is simpler than it was 10 years ago based on the ability to train models and access large data sets. Back then you had to get all the servers and build the capacity to scale. Today, the market is not the same and the technology is not the same. But also, we believe the search industry has been the same for 20 years. You do a query and you get a list of links with ads on the side. We think GenAI is a great opportunity to reinvent search. It's a good time to come to the market with a different solution."

Qwant and Ecosia, Sitting in a Tree

To learn about the long and tortured history of Qwant, you can read a deep dive I wrote for Sifted in the summer of 2023:

Here's the tl;dr version: Qwant, launched in 2013 as a French search engine emphasizing user privacy, initially garnered significant support, including over €50 million in public funds. Despite this backing, it faced challenges such as technical dependencies on U.S. and Chinese technologies and mounting financial losses. By 2022, auditors highlighted its precarious financial state, with only €10.5 million in available funds.

In response, Klaba acquired Qwant to integrate it into a broader vision of a European cloud services platform, aiming to offer alternatives to dominant U.S. tech giants. Klaba’s had previously acquired Shadow, a once-promising cloud gaming company, out of bankruptcy court in 2021. Now Klaba wanted to throw Qwant into the mix and eventually roll out such products as cloud storage, docs, email, and gaming.

Flash forward to November 2024, and a surprise announcement: Qwant had formed a new joint venture with Germany's Ecosia, a climate-focused search engine that plants trees when people use its search engine.

This was the occasion for my conversation with Abecassis: What was behind this deal? And did this mean that Qwant/Synfonium had abandoned its search dreams?

Abecassis' response: Nope.

The root of the deal lay in the challenge the team faced in rebuilding Qwant. One of the knocks against Old Qwant was that its search results came primarily via a partnership with Microsoft, despite the founders' promise to create a sovereign, private-focused rival.

Under Klaba and Abecassis, the goal was to gradually rebuild Qwant's infrastructure to reduce its dependency on Microsoft – though not completely eliminate it.

Abecassis said the previous ownership made a strategic mistake by over-promising on independence. That was never achievable, he said.

"Frankly, in 2019, building a search engine was not affordable for Qwant and it never was," he said. "The mistake was not to explain that and try to hide it. Qwant has been focused on privacy. And the team had worked hard on a solution with Microsoft that meant it didn't share data with Microsoft."

Even now, New Qwant will need a third party to help with long-tail search results. Still, the transformation at New Qwant was underway when Microsoft dropped a bomb: It was dramatically raising its search API rates. Suddenly, the timeline Qwant had to make its transition had become much shorter. This change also hit other search engines like Ecosia that relied on Bing.

"18 months ago, Microsoft changed access to Bing's search API," he said. "They increased the price without any good reason. All of us realized that we were so dependent on Microsoft that their strategy change could kill us. We can try to build a new business, but we can disappear one day if Microsoft changes the rules. We decided we should not be in the passenger side but that we should be in the driver's seat."

So Qwant and Ecosia teamed up to create a 50-50 joint venture called the European Search Perspective (EUSP). Qwant will transfer the search indexing infrastructure it was building as well as some of its engineers and data scientists. Ecosia is making a cash contribution.

The EUSP will operate as a separate business that then licenses the search infrastructure to any European search platform. Because Ecosia operates as a non-profit, the separate JV will be able to raise capital from investors in a way Ecosia can not. Qwant and Ecosia will continue to operate separate consumer-facing search businesses that still compete with each other.

Abecassis will continue to be CEO of Qwant while also running EUSP and Shadow, though he said these businesses remain separate for now.

Qwant 2.0

That still leaves the main Qwant riddle to be solved: How to reinvent search into a meaningful product?