Before it had a brand, it had a placeholder name: phpOpenStore.
It started as a student project at Epitech, the Paris computer science school, with five students named in one account: Igor Schlumberger, Bruno Lévêque, Denis Roussel, Marc Rossi and Laurent Basso. The common thread is the aim: a free, open-source alternative to expensive proprietary shop software, available in French and English from the start.
Money came from add-ons: modules, themes and services sold in a marketplace.
The name changed. Presto is the Italian word for quick; shop needs no translation. PrestaShop was born, and in 2007 Schlumberger and Lévêque created the company in Paris to build a business around it.
The model was unusual. The software was free software from conception. Anyone could download it. Money came from add-ons: modules, themes and services sold in a marketplace. That meant the company was betting that merchants would build their shops on its code first and pay later.
It worked, slowly and then fast. Between 2010 and 2012 the team grew from 17 to over 100. A second headquarters opened in Miami in 2011. By then the platform counted 100,000 merchants. In March 2014 the company raised about €6.75 million, reported abroad as a $9.3 million Series B.
Open source brings its own pain. Version 1.7, the first stable release of the new branch, only arrived in 2016, and the company's free cloud offer from 2015 was gone by 2017. Alexandre Eruimy became CEO in 2018. The Miami office closed in 2019. Meanwhile Shopify and WooCommerce took attention. Even so, a 2019 BuiltWith report gave PrestaShop 32% of French online shops.
In November 2021 PrestaShop joined the MBE Worldwide group, which later renamed itself Fortidia. Version 8 shipped in 2022 and version 9 in June 2025. The company says it joined the European group cyber_Folks in 2026.
For founders, the lesson is in the order. Give the code away first, build a community of thousands of merchants and developers, then sell what they need next. The students who wrote the first lines could not know which of those merchants would stay. Many did.