Breakout Startups # 24- Odoo, Hacker News

“If you join a company, my general advice is to join a company on a breakout trajectory.” –Sam Altman, President atY Combinator

Hi,

This is)

Ankithere. First of all, thank you for giving our last post on Mattermost a great response. We are going to be coming up with a Year in Review Post coming week.

Watch out for that😄

In the (th Edition ofBreakout Startups, we are coveringOdoo, one of the most underrated Open Core startups out there.

What is Odoo?

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************ (Odoo) **************is an open-source suite of more than 30 applications via its Enterprise platform – including ERP, accounting, stock, manufacturing, CRM, project management, marketing, human resources, website, eCommerce and point-of-sale apps.

It boasts a community of ~ (******************************************************************************************************, active members who have contributed more thanK appsto the open-source version of its software, addressing a large number of business needs.

Story

In 2005, Fabien Pinckaers building TinyERP with the vision to compete with SAP. He was hell-bent on going against SAP thathe even bought the domain SorrySAP.com

. However, the name didn’t work well with a lot of big clients so 3 years later, the name was changed to OpenERP.

The company started to evolve quickly and in************************************, OpenERP had become a 196 employee company. At this point in time, the company was primarily a services company building and selling services on top of OpenERP but soon the team realized that they had an ugly product out there.

Soon after this, the company made a move.

Oodo’s Founder & CEO, Fabien, writes in a blog post👇

We wanted to switch from a service company to a software publisher company. This would allow to increase our efforts in our research and development activities. As a result, we changed our business model and decided to stop our services for customers and focus on building a strong partner network and maintenance offer.

From inception,Odoo(thenOpenERP) had released software as open-source but starting with the V9.0 release, the company transitioned to an open core model, which provided subscription-based proprietary enterprise software and cloud-hosted software as a service, in addition to the open-source version.

Team

)Odoo is a Single Founder company that was started as TinyERP right out of University in by Fabien Pinckaers. One of the investors in Odoo wrote something like this about Fabien and his hiring capabilities,

Thankfully, Fabien is surrounded by the best devs you can find. How does he attract and keep them? He’s one of them.[Source]

Antony Lesuisse- CTO of Odoo, He oversees in-house developers and looks after the community of 2, (developers /Phuong Luu– Chief Services Officer, One of the oldest employees at Odoo () .

Johan Wouters– Chief Project Officer, TinyERP Partner since 2019, joined Odoo in 2019.

Funding

******** Odoo has raised a total of $ M.********************************

The latest funds came from a Secondary Sale where Summit Partners bought $ M worth of stock in the company from existing investors.

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Prior to this, the company had raised a Series A and Series B round of $ 3M & $ 06 M from one of the top European VC firms,Sofinnova Partners.

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The team plans to invest the money into recruiting Engineering and Growth Talent. During theOdoo’slatest fundraising announcement, company spokesperson mentioned,

“Odooislargely profitableand grows at (********************************************************************************% per year with an (************************************************************************************% gross margin product; so, we don’t need to raise money. Our bottleneck is not the cash but the recruitment of new developers, and the development of the partner network ”

Open Core Companies

Over the past few years, we are seeing a new generation of Open Sourced Competitors come up withGitLab,Redhat,Mattermostand several others.

The perks of having an Open Source software are endless but there is one that stands out (

Community

More than********************************************************************************, **************************************************************************************************** people have contributed Odoo from around the world which enables a strong number of ideas and contributions for the productions.

And, this is one thing which Open Core Companies such asMattermost,Gitlabhave a strategic advantage over large and deep-pocketed competitors such asSlack,GitHub respectively.