Two men who had sold a small company to a retail giant spent three years inside that giant, and then walked out to build what they had seen there.
Philippe Corrot and Adrien Nussenbaum met in 2004. Two years later, in 2006, they founded Splitgames, a consumer marketplace. In November 2008 Fnac, the French retailer, bought it. That could have been the end of the story, a tidy exit and a comfortable job. Instead the pair were asked to build Fnac's own marketplace and led it for about three years.
That is the quiet hidden detail of Mirakl's origins: the founders did not dream up a marketplace for retailers in a garage. They learned it from the inside, watching a big, established brand let outside sellers onto its shelves, and seeing what it needed. When they left Fnac they created Mirakl, in 2011 or 2012 depending on which record you read, with a simple promise. Any retailer or business could run a marketplace without building the technology itself.
The money followed in careful steps. A 30 million dollar Series A led by Elaia came in November 2012, then 20 million dollars in 2015 led by 83North and Felix Capital, and 70 million in 2019 from Bain Capital Ventures. The pace changed in 2020 when Permira led a 300 million dollar round that valued the company above 1.5 billion dollars. A year later Silverlake led 555 million dollars at a valuation above 3.5 billion.
The company set up in Paris and later in the Boston area, and reached roughly 750 employees across a dozen offices. In 2020 it launched dozens of new marketplaces, and when the pandemic hit it built StopCovid19.fr, a platform that helped distribute about 300,000 litres of hand sanitiser and 320,000 face masks in under a week. It kept buying capabilities, from invoice automation to retail media and, in 2025, a product aimed at shopping by AI agents.
Business volume across customer marketplaces passed 8.6 billion dollars in 2023, and recurring revenue crossed 100 million dollars in 2021.
Little is public about the founders' childhoods, so this is mostly a story of work. The takeaway is practical: the best product idea can come from the job you take after you sell your first company, if you pay attention to what the big customer cannot do for itself. They did not leave Fnac with a theory. They left with three years of watching the problem up close, and that turned out to be worth more.