Bruno Lévêque is a co-founder of PrestaShop and worked as its developer. The software started in 2005 as a student exercise called phpOpenStore. Five students worked on the project: Igor Schlumberger, Lévêque, Denis Roussel, Marc Rossi and Laurent Basso.
The project was renamed PrestaShop, a blend of presto and shop. In 2007 Schlumberger and Lévêque created the company in Paris. The software was free and open source from the start, and the business earned money from modules and themes sold on its marketplace.
Staff grew from 17 to more than 100 between 2010 and 2012. The company opened a Miami office in 2011 and counted 100,000 merchants. In March 2014 it raised about €6.75 million.
Version 1.7 came out in 2016 after a major rewrite. In November 2021 MBE Worldwide acquired PrestaShop, and version 9 followed in 2025.