Oodrive, French Leader in Storage

With its recent VC round, Oodrive SAS got great visibility, more aligned with the real success and status of the company.

Let me dig a bit and illustrate my points.

The company was founded in 2000 by Stanislas and Edouard de Rémur and Cédric Mermilliod. Started as a pioneer in storage SaaS, the mission has evolved to be now a provider of secure online file management solutions for companies.

Oodrive, with 350 employees in 7 countries, is a strong believer of the partner ecosystem with more than 1,000 active partners.

In term of capital structure, in 2007 Iris Capital took 25% of the company for €4 million and then sold that stake in 2013 to Keensight Capital (Keensight was R Capital Management from the Rothschild group). In 2011, Time for Growth invested €7.5 million and Tikehau Capital, MI3 and NextStage has ingested very recently €65 million for a total raised by Oodrive about €76.5 million so approximately $81 million. It is so far the highest round for a French company in that technology segment, demonstrating that there is a life outside Bpifrance. The three founders continue to be in majority in the capital structure.

The revenue trajectory is strong with €25 million realized in 2012, €37 million in 2015 and more than €40 million in 2016. Oodrive has multiplied by three its revenue during the last five years having collected around €160 million during the same period. This is by far the highest cumulative revenue and annual revenue for a French storage company.

The company claims to cover 80% of the CAC40 market index and globally its solutions are adopted by 1 million enterprise users and 15,000 customers in 90 countries.

During this 17 years of existence, Oodrive has acquired a few companies: Mayetic in 2006, BlueBackUp in 2008, Omnikles in 2011, CertEurope in 2012, CommonIT in 2013 and Active Circle in 2014. The product line has been improved to address new emergent and demanding data management challenges for enterprise especially around security, compliance, scalable storage and long-term data preservation thanks to Active Circle technology and product. This last acquisition invites us to consider Oodrive as a software-defined-storage player with many dozens others.

Clearly, Oodrive is the French storage leader proven by the employee numbers, revenue, capital raised in France, partners and customer based.

These few facts will probably invite some potential acquirers to consider seriously Oodrive as a good prey.

French storage start-ups