OK folks, it’s not a scoop, as the press release announced all details a whole week ago on September 22nd. What is strange however is that the blogosphere hasn’t talked about them at all: nothing on technorati, icerocket, Google’s blogsearch ! And the deal is nevertheless beautiful.
3 great entrepreneurs started direct-energie.com about 2 years ago, one year before the French market got deregulated for SMEs. Their business model is basically to sell electricity cheaper than the historical player. They achieve that through better cost structures, better consumption estimates and viral marketing. They started their commercial operations about a year ago, and they have already 40,000 clients in just one year and expect to double that next year, expect to hit 50m euros turnover this year and 150m euros next year ! The company alerady has 40 people working in it, and the team will hire an additional 10 next year. They had raised almost 8m euros already in A-series, bringing overall financing to over 15m euros.
I hear from the grapewine that they are going public next year as well! Is it because it’s not a web 2.0 and just a utility company that no one is talking about them?
Well if you do speak French (again… I know), watch their interview as it’s pretty exciting. The guys are working real hard, and they really deserve their success. And the grapewine also tells me that Fabien is one of the three finalists of the Best young manager of the year award to be announced next week. We’ll see!
Note: video taped on September 10th, around 9pm in Paris, France.
Update on 4/10/05: the prize for best young IT Manager of the year was given tonight to ... the founder of glowria, Mihai Crasneanu, where I just spent 8 months as interim CEO ! Congrats Mihai.
Last year's winner was Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet, co-founder of PriceMinister.com with Pierre Krings, a fellow INSEAD alumn.
