Who Owns Odoo?

Odoo traces its origins to 2002, when Fabien Pinckaers, then a computer science student in Belgium, founded a company called Tiny sprl to build open-source business software. The product launched as TinyERP, was renamed OpenERP in 2005, and spent its first decade building an integrated suite of business applications as an open-source alternative to SAP and Microsoft Dynamics at a fraction of the cost.

The company's community strategy made it unusual: the core software stayed open-source under the LGPL license, while a paid Enterprise edition added proprietary features, hosting, and support. This open-core model let Odoo build a global ecosystem of implementation partners and developers who extended the platform while the company monetized the commercial layer.

In 2014 the company renamed the product and itself Odoo, a name Pinckaers has said was chosen for its sound rather than meaning, with the story about the name's origin invented for the press. The rebrand marked a shift from developer tool to mainstream business software, and growth accelerated sharply through the 2010s as the suite expanded into CRM, e-commerce, point of sale, HR, and marketing alongside core ERP.

The 2020s brought scale and scrutiny. Odoo's growth rate ran at roughly 40 to 50 percent annually for over 20 years, employee count climbed past 7,000 by 2025, and the company opened offices across Southern Europe, North America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Odoo 19 launched in 2025 with natively integrated AI features. The company reported FY2025 audited revenue of 545 million euros, up 28 percent, with billings exceeding 650 million euros and more than 170,000 customers. It plans to reach 1 billion euros in billings by 2027 and 10,000 employees the same year.