Track record · 2010 – 2022
Advercity, administrative information at scale.
Before Melba Capital came Advercity: a start-up from Saint-Étienne co-founded in 2010 with Arnaud Bailly and Grégory Vacher, which became one of France’s leading publishers of administrative information websites, then the Auxilium group.
Advercity in figures
- 8M
- monthly visitors across the group's sites
- 14M+
- page views per month
- 80+
- websites published
- €7M
- revenue expected in 2022 (€5.3M in 2021)
- €3.4M
- raised from Siparex Entrepreneurs in late 2022
- ~30
- employees in the group, plus some fifty external phone operators (2022)
Sources: advercity.fr, Bref Eco (January 2023), Le Progrès (December 2022), Le Journal des Entreprises (November 2019), company registry.
From a town-hall directory to the Auxilium group
- 2010
Advercity is founded
Arnaud Bailly, Grégory Vacher and Eddy Fayet found Advercity in Saint-Étienne and launch Annuaire-mairie.fr, the directory of French municipalities.
- 2011–2018
An international network of sites
DB City, a multilingual database of world cities, then local editions: Cidade Brasil, Los Municipios (Mexico), City Directory and Trámites USA (United States), Mairie.net, Vos Démarches.
- 2019
External growth
Acquisition of Web Editions, then of Webbel's business and demarchesadministratives.fr for €2.7M: Advercity becomes a major player in online administrative information.
- 2020
Move to Saint-Chamond
The group moves to Saint-Chamond and builds a phone-based assistance service for administrative procedures.
- 2022
Auxilium and Siparex come in
Creation of the Auxilium group (Advercity, IntFormalities, Buenforta), acquisition of aide-sociale.fr and a €3.4M raise: Siparex Entrepreneurs takes 30% of the capital, the three founders keep the majority together. The group joins Bpifrance's SME accelerator.
Sites created or acquired
A selection from more than 80 sites, in France and abroad.
Annuaire-mairie.fr
Launched in 2010
The founding site: contact details, officials, procedures and statistics for every French municipality.
Visitdemarchesadministratives.fr
250,000–300,000 visitors a day (2022)
Practical guides to procedures: ID card, passport, vehicle registration, civil status.
Visitaide-sociale.fr
175,000 visitors a day (2022)
The guide to social and financial benefits in France: rights, conditions, simulators.
VisitWhat this venture taught us
Expertise that now feeds every one of our products.
SEO at very large scale
Millions of pages generated from public data (municipalities, procedures, benefits), structured for Google, across several languages and countries.
Audience monetisation
Advertising, online assistance services and phone support: a profitable model built on massive organic traffic.
Acquiring and integrating sites
Identifying, valuing, buying and relaunching existing sites, including demarchesadministratives.fr and aide-sociale.fr.
Structuring and fundraising
From a three-founder start-up to a group of some thirty employees, with the Auxilium holding and a private-equity investor on board.
Today
Since Siparex came in at the end of 2022, the founders are no longer operational: the Auxilium group is run by Pierre-Antoine Moulin. Eddy Fayet has put this experience into Melba Capital and new products.