Breaking down the “Odoo Exceptionalism”

At this point, it’s no surprise that we are huge fans of Odoo and their team. Having first invested in their 2024 secondary transaction at a €5bn valuation alongside CapitalG and Sequoia, we’ve had the privilege of closely tracking the company’s progress, something that led us to double down with a follow-on investment a few months ago, at a valuation surpassing €7bn.

The machine that Fabien, Odoo’s founder and CEO, and his team have built is exceptionally well-oiled and truly one of a kind – relentlessly geared toward sustaining 40–50% growth at scale, which is no small feat given Odoo is now above €600m in recurring revenue. Their combination of ambitious growth mindset with pragmatism and humility is only one of the things that make Odoo exceptional.

Odoo is challenging what people could call commonly held beliefs. Only two-year old AI native companies can see hyper growth? Odoo is showing reacceleration signs at scale, now adding more than €20m net new ARR per month. It’s impossible for European tech companies to scale globally today? Odoo is headquartered in Belgium, but its biggest market is the US, followed by a diverse list of countries across Europe, the Middle-East, Latin America and Asia, with none accounting for much more than 10% of revenue. Open-source projects cannot be properly monetized? Odoo is not only scaled but also profitable, selling to all sizes of customers across the planet while leveraging its OSS community to accelerate product development and customization.

Feeling inspired by their story and team, we decided to share the reasons that make us, as investors but also as tech enthusiasts, so excited about their story.

The people behind it 

Founder and CEO Fabien Pinckaers’ longstanding ambition of building a generational-defining company is aspirational and admirable, and the driving force behind Odoo’s engine. Few anecdotes better illustrate this ambition than his purchase of the domain sorrySAP.com in Odoo’s early days.

Fabien not only manages to delegate extensively and effectively (hiring and onboarding 3k people per year isn’t an easy task), to put on the firefighter hat wherever needed (he moved with his family to India for one year, and since then the country became #1 for Odoo in web traffic volume), and to set up a true bottom-up “scale-up mentality”, while making everything sound easy and seamless.

He is also known for being extremely down to earth. An avid reader, he once shared his long and diverse list of book recommendations, while giving us a ride in his company car to take us from one Odoo farm to another. These ranged from scale-up classic “Zero to One” to more fun “112 gripes about the French”. Passionate about the product, he still finds time to answer technical questions on LinkedIn or email, even helping our own compliance team set up our e-learning module.

This culture of excellence, humility and perceived effortlessness permeates the C-suite and the company as a whole. Having served beer at the bar of Odoo Experience, we witnessed it firsthand – a 40k-people event organized by less than 10 employees, who make everything look just so easy! Operating at scale is part of their DNA.

The value it brings

Since inception, Odoo’s mission has been to offer the highest-quality software at the most affordable price – the best cost-to-benefit ratio any customer could find in the market. Not only one specific software; its more than 80 proprietary modules include ERP, CRM, accounting, HR and payroll, website building … essentially anything a business needs to operate. All of this is accessible for just €20-30 per user, per month.

All the  different bricks are natively integrated (no clunky API connectivity, everything runs on a single stack), so information flows natively and seamlessly across all apps. The product is also entirely customizable, and customers can integrate more than 45k add-ons available in Odoo’s marketplace, the largest in B2B software globally, followed by Netsuite’s. Think of an additional use case or functionality (e-commerce connection to Shopify, Woocommerce? MCP server? Power BI connector? beautify Gantt charts?), chances are someone has already built it for you.

Coupled with flexible hosting options, a simple and intuitive user interface, and a dense network of partners helping with implementation and maintenance, Odoo stands out as the most user-friendly and affordable business enablement software – which explains why its adoption keeps spreading like wildfire.

And not only within the very small business segment where they started. Two years ago we were already seeing mid-market companies replacing Netsuite and Hubspot with Odoo, achieving 60-80% annual cost savings. This process has only accelerated as Odoo created dedicated mid-market GTM and support teams, and as the distribution partners also move upmarket (looking for better economics), resulting in six-digit ACVs becoming common. Nothing illustrates this move upmarket better than the recent eight-digit ACV contract with Partena, for whom Odoo will be processing 10+ million pay slips annually, still at a fraction of cost per unit compared to payroll competitors.

The open-source moat

Since inception, Odoo’s mission has been to offer the highest-quality software at the most affordable price – the best cost-to-benefit ratio any customer could find in the market. Not only one specific software; its more than 80 proprietary modules include ERP, CRM, accounting, HR and payroll, website building … essentially anything a business needs to operate. All of this is accessible for just €20-30 per user, per month.

All the  different bricks are natively integrated (no clunky API connectivity, everything runs on a single stack), so information flows natively and seamlessly across all apps. The product is also entirely customizable, and customers can integrate more than 45k add-ons available in Odoo’s marketplace, the largest in B2B software globally, followed by Netsuite’s. Think of an additional use case or functionality (e-commerce connection to Shopify, Woocommerce? MCP server? Power BI connector? beautify Gantt charts?), chances are someone has already built it for you.

Coupled with flexible hosting options, a simple and intuitive user interface, and a dense network of partners helping with implementation and maintenance, Odoo stands out as the most user-friendly and affordable business enablement software – which explains why its adoption keeps spreading like wildfire.

And not only within the very small business segment where they started. Two years ago we were already seeing mid-market companies replacing Netsuite and Hubspot with Odoo, achieving 60-80% annual cost savings. This process has only accelerated as Odoo created dedicated mid-market GTM and support teams, and as the distribution partners also move upmarket (looking for better economics), resulting in six-digit ACVs becoming common. Nothing illustrates this move upmarket better than the recent eight-digit ACV contract with Partena, for whom Odoo will be processing 10+ million pay slips annually, still at a fraction of cost per unit compared to payroll competitors.

The leverage from partners

A product does not scale on its own – it spreads. Spearheading the spreading efforts, Odoo has more than 9k partners today, acting day and night to sell, implement, maintain and advertise Odoo across continents. From small, local system integrators in India to international Big Four accounting firms, the network of partners is among the densest in the software ecosystem and represents a distribution moat extremely hard to replicate.

The gamification of the partnership motion is well thought out and involves both carrots (commissions and incentivization packages can become very interesting for more premium partners) and sticks (Odoo also competes against certain partners, forcing them to enforce high-quality service levels). Partners are incentivized to climb the tiering ladder by increasing the number of new users and Odoo-certified personnel, and by improving retention. As a result, partners organize local events themselves – subsidizing the marketing budget and lowering CAC.

By combining indirect and direct sales channels, strong inbound (the main motion) and maturing outbound, and by targeting both small and large customers, Odoo is a masterclass of what sales excellence looks like – executing all GTM strategies concomitantly and globally.

The AI tailwinds

We see growth reacceleration at scale as the latest confirmation of something we believed from day one – that Odoo is well positioned to win in the AI era. Repository of productivity, sales, financial, HR and other enterprise data, Odoo acts as a system of records and operating system for more than 600k businesses – which also rely on Odoo or on its partner network for implementation and ongoing maintenance. Having all the data centralized and natively integrated between functions is the necessary pre-requisite for a successful deployment of AI – something that the leadership team realized early on.

Odoo 19 embeds AI features across all apps and brought forward agentic capabilities, letting users automate workflows on top of a familiar interface, saving them time and resources. The upcoming launch of Odoo vibe coding will take their AI to the next level, and it feels like a natural extension of Odoo’s longstanding value proposition of being highly customizable and flexible (its no-code app creator Odoo Studio has been a success for quite some time). If vibe coding alone is already a powerful tool, vibe coding on top of 80 proprietary apps and thousands of add-ons will allow the new wave of “non-technical developers” to move even further.

Only scratching the surface 

The flywheel is clearly in place: Odoo’s code and product only get better over time, not only thanks to AI, but to the increasing engagement of the open-source community and partner ecosystem. New products continue to be launched. All sales channels are scaling with stable unit economics, across diverse customer segments and geographies – while, quite interestingly, the GTM team acknowledges that growth is mainly product-led. “The best product always wins. It sells itself”. Inbound demand is just so strong that, even with AI, it can be challenging to avoid letting leads fall through the cracks – the best problem an enterprise software company can have.

Odoo’s rising momentum stems from a singular combination of a winning product and a large, expanding addressable market (estimated north of $100bn), which continues to grow as they launch new products and AI converts labor TAM into software TAM. And its playbook echoes scaling strategies already proven in other companies such as Figma (open-core, community-driven ecosystems creating collaborative workflows – scaled to $1.3bn annualized revenue) and Canva (price- and UX-led democratization of a software category – scaled to $3.5bn revenue). By focusing on compounding at scale, Odoo is showing all the signs of what generational-defining businesses in-the-making look like. We couldn’t be more excited to continue partnering with them.