Alphabet’s VC arm backs little-known SAP rival Odoo, boosting valuation to $5.3 billion
Fabien Pinckaers, CEO of Belgian-based enterprise software startup Odoo.
Odoo
Odoo, a startup taking on SAP in the realm of enterprise software, boosted its valuation to 5 billion euros ($5.3 billion) in a secondary share round led by Alphabet‘s venture fund and Sequoia Capital.
The Belgium-based company develops open-source enterprise resource planning software, with over 80 applications available on its platform offering businesses tools for accounting, customer relationship management, human resources and e-commerce and website building.
Fabien Pinckaers, CEO and co-founder of Odoo, told CNBC in an interview this week that his company didn’t have a need to raise any primary capital as it is “cash profitable” and growing revenue at a rate of 50% year-over-year. Enterprise resource planning, he said, is “still a very fragmented market.”
“The reason everybody [has] failed [in this market] is that it’s quite complex,” Pinckaers told CNBC. “Small companies have complex needs from accounting to inventory, to website, e-commerce, point-of-sale. It’s a lot and they don’t have budget, and they need something that is simple and affordable.”
“Nobody succeeded to get both,” he added. “You have complex products like SAP that run well for large companies. But it’s complex and expensive.”
Andrew Reed, partner at Sequoia Capital, added that the market Odoo is addressing “just requires more gestation time than most startups both because the core system is very complex, and making it simple to use for small businesses and various countries is no small feat.”
Humble beginnings
Odoo “is not your traditional Silicon Valley tech story,” according to Reed.
Pinckaers opened the company’s first-ever office 22 years ago on a farm in Belgium. That was all he could afford at the time. Later, as the company started bringing in revenue, Odoo opened two additional offices in Belgium, home to the firm’s research and development, support and technical teams.
Today, Pinckaers resides in India with his family. He’s lived there for a year now, working to expand the company’s presence there, hiring more people, increasing marketing and broadening Odoo’s overall partner network.
Odoo had billings of 370 million euros last year and is on track to top 650 million of billings in 2025 — after that, the company is hoping to top the 1 billion-euro billings milestone by 2027. Billings — or the total sum of all invoices for a given year — is Odoo’s preferred metric for tracking annual revenue performance.
Around 80% of Odoo’s business today accounts for open-source software, with the remaining 20% coming from software licensed for a fee, Pinckaers said. Open source refers to a type of software that allows users to access the underlying code — most often free of charge — which they can then modify and adjust.
In no rush to IPO
Despite Odoo now being at the scale of an IPO-ready business, Pinckaers said he’s in no rush to take the company public. If anything, remaining private has given Odoo flexibility to stay focused on investing for the long term, he said.
Odoo’s private backers aren’t in a rush for the firm to go public, either. Alex Nichols, partner at Alphabet’s CapitalG, told CNBC that he’s not worried about “IPO timing,” adding that factors like public market conditions are ultimately “out of our control.”
Pinckaers built the business to the size it is today primarily by bootstrapping — that is, growing without raising external funding. Odoo hasn’t had to raise primary capital from investors in a decade, opting instead to let early investors and employees sell shares in secondary sales.
The last time Odoo secured primary funding was in 2014, when it raised $10 million in a Series B round. Prior to the latest secondary round, Odoo was most recently valued by investors at 3.2 billion euros.
Odoo’s other backers include the likes of private equity firms Summit Partners, Noshaq, and Wallonie Entreprendre, which all sold a portion of their shares to CapitalG and Sequoia as part of the 500-million-euro investment announced on Wednesday.
Even after selling a portion of its shares, Summit remains Odoo’s largest institutional shareholder. Pinckaers himself has never sold his own personal shares.
Technology
Cognition to buy AI startup Windsurf days after Google poached CEO in $2.4 billion licensing deal
In this photo illustration, a man seen holding a smartphone with the logo of US artificial intelligence company Cognition AI Inc. in front of website.
Timon Schneider | SOPA Images | Sipa USA | AP
Artificial intelligence startup Cognition announced it’s acquiring Windsurf, the AI coding company that lost its CEO and several other senior employees to Google just days earlier.
Cognition said on Monday that it will purchase Windsurf’s intellectual property, product, trademark, brand and talent, but didn’t disclose terms of the deal. It’s the latest development in an AI talent war, as companies like Meta, Google and OpenAI fiercely compete for top engineers and researchers.
OpenAI had been in talks to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion in April, but the deal fell apart, and Google said on Friday that it hired Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan. Google is paying $2.4 billion in licensing fees and for compensation, as CNBC previously reported.
“Every new employee of Cognition will be treated the same way as existing employees: with transparency, fairness, and deep respect for their abilities and value,” Cognition CEO Scott Wu wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. “After today, our efforts will be as a united and aligned team. There’s only one boat and we’re all in it together.”
Cognition didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Windsurf directed CNBC to Cognition.
Cognition is best known for its AI coding agent named Devin, which is designed to help engineers build software faster. As of March, the startup had raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of close to $4 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Both companies are backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Other investors in Windsurf include Greenoaks, Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst.
“I’m overwhelmed with excitement and optimism, but most of all, gratitude,” Jeff Wang, the interim CEO of Windsurf, wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Trying times reveal character, and I couldn’t be prouder of how every single person at Windsurf showed up these last three days for each other and for our users.”
Wu said that the acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees are “treated with respect and well taken care of in this transaction.” All employees will participate financially in the deal, have vesting cliffs waived for their work to date and receive fully accelerated vesting for their, according to the memo.
“There’s never been a more exciting time to build,” Wu wrote.
WATCH: Google snatches Windsurf CEO after OpenAI deal dissolves
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg looks on before the luncheon on the inauguration day of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second presidential term in Washington on Jan. 20, 2025.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
Meta on Monday said it has removed about 10 million profiles for impersonating large content producers through the first half of 2025 as part of an effort by the company to combat “spammy content.”
The crackdown is part of Meta’s broader effort to make the Facebook feed more relevant and authentic by taking action against and removing accounts that engage in “spammy” behavior, such as content created using artificial intelligence tools.
As part of that initiative, Meta is also rolling out stricter measures to promote original posts from creators, the company said in a blog post.
Facebook also took action against approximately 500,000 accounts that it identified to be engaged in inauthentic behavior and spam. These actions included demoting comments and reducing distribution of content, which are intended to make it harder for these accounts to monetize their posts.
Meta said unoriginal content is when images or videos are reused without crediting the original creator. Meta said it now has technology that will detect duplicate videos and reduce the distribution of that content.
The action against spam and inauthentic content comes as Meta increases its investment in AI, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday announcing plans to spend “hundreds of billions of dollars” on AI compute infrastructure to bring the company’s first supercluster online next year.
This mandate comes at a time when AI is making it easier to mass-produce content across social media platforms. Other platforms are also taking action to combat the increase of spammy, low-quality content on social media, also known as “AI slop.”
Google’s YouTube announced a change in policy this month that prevents content that is mass-produced or repetitive from being eligible for being awarded revenue.
This announcement sparked confusion on social media, with many users believing this was a reversal on YouTube’s stance on AI content. However, YouTube clarified that the policy change is aimed at curbing unoriginal, spammy and repetitive videos.
“We welcome creators using AI tools to enhance their storytelling, and channels that use AI in their content remain eligible to monetize,” said a spokesperson for YouTube in a blog post to clarify the new policy.
YouTube’s new policy change will take effect on Tuesday.
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