Fabien Pinkaers, CEO of Belgium-based enterprise software program firm Odoo.
Odoo
Odoo, a startup firm SAP within the enterprise software program area, raised its valuation to five billion euros ($5.3 billion) in a secondary spherical of shares led by Alphabetenterprise capital fund and Sequoia Capital.
The Belgium-based firm develops open supply enterprise useful resource planning software program, with over 80 purposes obtainable on its platform, providing companies instruments for accounting, buyer relationship administration, human sources and e-commerce, and web site constructing.
Fabien Pinkaers, Odoo’s CEO and co-founder, informed CNBC in an interview this week that his firm did not want to lift seed capital as a result of it was “cash-rich” and rising income at a charge of fifty% year-over-year. 12 months. Enterprise useful resource planning, he stated, “continues to be a really fragmented market.”
“The rationale for all [has] failed [in this market] is that it is fairly complicated,” Pinkaers informed CNBC. “Small firms have complicated wants from accounting to stock, web site, e-commerce, level of sale. It is lots and so they do not have a funds and so they want one thing that is easy and inexpensive.”
“No person managed to get each,” he added. “You might have complicated merchandise like SAP that work effectively for big firms. However they’re sophisticated and costly.”
Andrew Reid, a accomplice at Sequoia Capital, added that the market Odoo is addressing “merely requires extra gestation time than most startups, each as a result of the underlying system may be very complicated and to make it simple for small companies and totally different international locations is not any small feat. “
Humble beginnings
Odoo “is not your conventional Silicon Valley tech story,” in response to Reid.
Pinckaers opened the corporate’s first workplace 22 years in the past on a farm in Belgium. It was all he may afford on the time. Later, as the corporate started to usher in income, Odoo opened two further places of work in Belgium to deal with the agency’s analysis and improvement, assist and technical groups.
As we speak Pinkaires lives in India together with his household. He has been residing there for a 12 months now, working to broaden the corporate’s presence there, rent extra folks, improve advertising and marketing and broaden Odoo’s general accomplice community.
Odoo had invoices of 370 million euros final 12 months and is on observe to achieve 650 million invoices in 2025. – the corporate then hopes to surpass the €1 billion billing milestone by 2027. Billings—or the overall of all invoices for a given 12 months—is Odoo’s most popular metric for monitoring annual income.
About 80 p.c of Odoo’s enterprise right this moment is open supply software program, with the remaining 20 p.c coming from fee-licensed software program, Pinkaers stated. Open supply refers to a sort of software program that permits customers entry to the underlying code – normally at no cost – which they will then modify and repair.
No rush to IPO
Though Odoo is now on the scale of an IPO-ready enterprise, Pinckaers stated he’s in no rush to take the corporate public. If something, staying personal has given Odoo the flexibleness to remain targeted on investing for the long run, he stated.
Odoo’s personal backers are additionally in no rush to take the corporate public. Alex Nichols, a accomplice at Alphabet’s CapitalG, informed CNBC he is not anxious in regards to the “timing of the IPO,” including that elements like public market situations are in the end “out of our management.”
Pinckaers constructed the enterprise to the dimensions it’s right this moment primarily by bootstrapping—that’s, rising with out elevating exterior funding. Odoo hasn’t needed to elevate main capital from buyers in a decade, opting as a substitute to let early buyers and workers promote shares in secondary gross sales.
The final time Odoo secured seed funding was in 2014, when it raised $10 million in a Collection B spherical. Earlier than the latest secondary spherical, Odoo was most not too long ago valued by buyers at €3.2 billion.
Odoo’s different backers embrace firms resembling personal fairness companies Summit Companions, Noshaq and Wallonie Entreprendre, all of which bought a part of their shares to CapitalG and Sequoia as a part of the €500m funding introduced on Wednesday.
Even after promoting a few of its shares, Summit stays Odoo’s largest institutional shareholder. Pinkaers himself by no means bought his private shares.
