The French entrepreneurs’ fund, ISAI, has just announced that its investing in Commerce Guys, a Franco-American company that develops open source Drupal e-commerce solutions. This is the third investment for the fund run by some 70 French entrepreneurs from these companies, which previously invested in carpooling platform Covoiturage and the high-class online marketplace, InstantLuxe. And while the transaction amount has not been disclosed, I’ll venture a wild guess that it most likely lies between the €500,000 and €1.5 million range – which would be in-line with the rest of ISAI’s investments.
The 20-person subsidiary of AF83 offers a number of solutions for e-commerce sites, including e-commerce website development based on Ubercart and Drupal Commerce, hosting, various functions like recommendation engines, social network integration, mobile website development, etc. Naturally, the open source approach has allowed for the startup founded earlier this year to propose a wide variety of modules to its customers. Plus, with over 1 million sites built on Drupal, certain aspects – like having over 6K modules, being SEO friendly and the ability to resist spikes in traffic – make the open source CMS a viable solution for the e-commerce world.
ISAI, who currently manages some 35 million euros, has said that it would ideally like to invest in roughly 12 companies averaging €1 million per investment. The company’s 1-investment-per-trimester strategy obviously opposes that of French seed fund Kima Ventures, which recently confirmed via Twitter (image below) that the fund will have reached its goal of 100 investments in a year in March 2011. Then again, Kima is investing far smaller amounts than ISAI.
