Before it had a logo or a salesperson, the company had a word. Lengo, from Swahili: objective. Jérémie Peiro and Mickaël Froger added a W for the web and, on 1 July 2009, registered Lengow in Nantes, a city better known for shipyards and bicycles than for software.
The objective they chose was unglamorous. Every online shop that wanted to sell on a price-comparison site or marketplace had to send its catalogue in a different format, with different rules, again and again. Mistakes meant rejected listings and lost sales. Peiro and Froger built a tool that took one catalogue and spoke every language.
Money came in small pieces. In April 2010 they raised €210,000. In July 2011 came €1.2 million, with Alven Capital among the backers. Neither sum was enough to waste. Nantes was a long way from the Paris investors, and the founders learned to grow on modest cheques while merchants slowly moved from one sales channel to many.
Then the market caught up with them. As Amazon, Google Shopping and a thicket of regional marketplaces became part of every retailer's plan, feed management stopped being a back-office chore and became a growth lever. In 2012 Lengow won an international e-commerce award. In 2013 it launched its own Ecommerce Day, an annual event that turned a small vendor into a name among French retailers.
In September 2015 the company raised €10 million and reached for the United States and China. It reframed itself from a feed tool into an e-commerce automation platform, and in 2016 it joined an accelerator programme in China and opened an incubator of its own. Expansion was not painless. A 2013 press report claimed the company was investing in around fifteen European countries to stifle competition, a charge that sat awkwardly with its friendly image.
In early 2021 the American private-equity firm Marlin Equity Partners took a majority stake, and in April 2022 Lengow bought Netrivals, a pricing and market-analysis tool, to widen what it sold. The numbers since show the strain of a maturing niche: revenue of €16.7 million in 2023 with a €10.8 million net loss, then €15.5 million in 2024 with a €1.77 million profit.
The lesson is not about hockey-stick growth. Lengow found a boring, repeated pain, solved it for thousands of merchants, and survived long enough to be worth buying. For a first-time founder, the plain objective, the lengo, can be enough to build a company on, provided you are still standing when the market finally needs it.