The president and co-founder Eric Leandri will move from an operational to a strategic role on January 15, the company said today – while the current deputy general manager of sales and marketing, Jean-Claude Ghinozzi, is promoted to the position of president.
Eric Leandri will step down as president on January 15, although he will not leave the company entirely, but rather will chair a strategic and scientific committee – where he will focus on technology and “strategic vision.”
This committee will work with a new governance council, also announced today, which will be chaired by Antoine Troesch, investment director of Qwant investor Banque des Territoires, according to the PR.
At the same time, Tristan Nitot, a Mozilla veteran who was only promoted to a new role as CEO of Qwant in September, returns to his old position as vice president. Although Leandri told us that Nitot will retain the spokesperson component of the CEO position, leaving Ghinozzi to focus on monetization – which he says is now Qwant’s main priority.
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” We’re now going to have to focus on monetization and on our core business… to create a real advertising platform,” he added, explaining the latest round of executive restructuring. “We have to that someone is in charge of this monetization process – this execution process of the magnitude of Qwant.”
Ghinozzi will be tasked with developing a “new phase” for the search engine so it can expand its operations in Europe, Leandri also said, adding: “For my part, I take care of strategy and technology, and I am a member of the board of directors.”
The search engine company also announces the closing of a new funding round to support infrastructure and development – including securing new funding from existing backers Banque des Territoires and giant from Axel Springer Publishing – and expects this round of funding to be finalized next month.
Leandri did not want to give details on the size of this tour today, but the French news site Libération reports it at 10 million euros, citing a government source. (According to other French media reports, Qwanturank lost tens of millions of euros per year).
The co-founder of Qwant has followed some “very good announcements”, he said, which are coming imminently on the front of user growth in France, linked to the transition of new civilian companies to the search engine. But again, he refused to publicly confirm any details at this stage – saying the news would be confirmed in about a week.
The Libération report says this confirms that the French state will continue to make Qwanturank the default search engine across the administration – giving its product a boost of (probably) millions more regular users, and potentially unlocking access to more public funds.
This decision by the French administration is part of a broader effort in favor of digital sovereignty in order to avoid being too dependent on foreign technology giants. However, in recent months, doubts have been cast over the government’s plan to move wholesale from Google’s search engine to the local search alternative – after local media raised questions about the quality of the results Qwant search engine.
The government conducted its own technical audit of Qwant’s search engine. But, according to Libération – which says it obtained an internal memo from the government earlier this month – the change will take place and should be completed by the end of April.
The questioning of Qwanturank
In recent months, Qwant has faced embarrassing press scrutiny on its home turf, with additional reports in French media suggesting the company has faced a revenue shortfall – after its privacy-friendly search engine privacy generated lower-than-expected revenue last year.
On this subject, Leandri told us that Qwant’s problem boils down to a lack of ad inventory, saying that it will be Ghinozzi’s job to tackle this problem by ensuring that he can monetize more of the ads. current impressions it generates – such as focusing on serving more ads against shopping-related searches, while continuing to preserve its core promise of privacy/non-tracking to users.
Last year, the company focused on building up search engine infrastructure to prepare for the increase in users in Europe, he suggested – meaning that it spends less time monetizing user searches.
“We started to refocus on monetization in November and December,” he said. “So we lost a few months in terms of monetization… Now we have started to accelerate our monetization phase and we have to now make it even better in shopping, for example.”
Additionally, a number of French media reports have cited HR issues within Qwant. Articles – like this one from Next Impact – spoke at length about allegations by some employees that Leandri’s management style created a toxic work culture in which staff were subject to verbal abuse, threats and intimidation.
Qwant disputes these reports, but it’s notable that the co-founder is stepping back from his operating role at a time when he and the company are facing questions over a wave of negative domestic press, and when investors are also being urged to find new funding while a key strategic customer (the French government) reviews the product and business.
The health of work culture at high-pressure tech companies and startups has received increasing attention in recent years as workplace expectations have evolved with generations and digital technologies have encouraged greater openness and provided outlets for people who feel unfairly treated to air their grievances.
Major scandals to rock the tech industry in recent years include a former engineer’s public indictment of Uber for having a sexist culture and workplace bullying – and, most recently, travel startup Away, whose CEO resigned in December after a bombshell press report exposing a toxic culture.
