2 Million Users, a €10 Billion Founder, and an AI Server Inside Odoo

Two Million Users and a €10 Billion Problem

Odoo crossed 2,113,916 paying users, "faster than planned" in Ray Carnes' words. Not free installs. Paying.

Put that number next to what happened three weeks earlier.

Fabien Pinckaers, Odoo's founder, posted that a proposed Belgian wealth tax would force him to leave the country. His math, in his own words: he owns just over 50% of Odoo, valued at roughly €10 billion. A 0.6% annual tax on that stake is more than €30 million a year. His net income is about €10,000 a month. You cannot pay a €30M tax bill out of €120K of income without selling shares, and selling shares means losing control of the company.

The post pulled 13,143 reactions and 811 comments. It turned into a national argument, complete with a face-to-face meeting with the politician who proposed the tax.

THE BOTTOM LINE

When you pick an ERP, you are betting on the vendor still being here in ten years. Odoo just gave you two data points that it will be. Two million paying users retires the "is Odoo big enough" question. The founder drama is the tell: nobody threatens to flee over a company that might not make it.

Odoo News

Odoo shipped a native AI MCP server. This is the one to pay attention to. Fabrice Henrion dropped an R&D peek showing an MCP server built into Odoo: any MCP client (Gemini CLI, Claude Code, n8n) can search, read, or write Odoo data with dedicated AI tools. 329 reactions on a technical post about a protocol most people can't spell. 

Third-party MCP servers already exist. That is not the news. The news is that Odoo SA built this one. A community connector is a workaround. A native server is a stamp from the mothership, and that stamp is what moves a protocol from "some devs are experimenting" to "this is how you integrate Odoo now."

Odoo 19.4 is out and Odoo 20 rewrites security. 19.4 landed on GitHub and Runbot (release notes to follow). The bigger news is a change coming in Odoo 20: ir.access merges the two systems that currently control who can see and do what, access control lists and record rules, into a single model. Ray Carnes framed the payoff for gurus: permissions only go up (adding a role never silently cancels existing access), installing a new app won't break your security policy, and there's one place to debug access errors instead of two. Automated migration scripts are included.

If you've ever chased an Odoo access bug across two different parts of the codebase, this is the rare rewrite that makes your life easier. Learn it before you migrate.

19 Prince News

DC Roadshow recap. I was in Washington DC for two Odoo events back to back. 50 people showed up for the evening demo, another 35 for the Accounting Academy. DC pulled a heavy government-contracting crowd, and the theme I kept hearing was the same one: incumbent vendors keep raising prices. Odoo's flexible hosting options let it meet a range of security standards, which for that audience is the whole game. See everyone in SF in September.

The tool factory. Odoo has 77,803 modules and still can't do a few basic things, so I shipped three free ones this month:

1. A newsletter subscribe block, because the native snippet is bare (no styled call-out, no name field).
2. An announcement bar. A client needed to warn visitors about a shipping change and, with no proper place to put it, typed it into their homepage H1. For two weeks the biggest text on their site was a delivery notice instead of their pitch. So I built one: rotating messages, a dismiss button that remembers, scheduling, no custom tables. GitHub, LGPL, clone and go.
3. Odoo Online support for my AI site builder skill. I took the Rubber Ducky Remodel demo live on Odoo Online for the first time, a few API assumptions broke, and I fixed them. Odoo Online is now a first-class target alongside Odoo.sh.

The rule I keep coming back to: build it the Odoo way, not the bolt-on way. Zero custom tables, lives in the editor, upgrades cleanly.

Help wanted. I'm expanding the roster of people I refer clients to, and right now I need a warehouse and inventory Odoo expert who has physically worked a warehouse. Operators, not configurators. North America preferred, right person anywhere. If that's you, reply.

Quick Hits

The App Store crossed 77,803 modules. Up 3,692 in 24 days, roughly 1,077 a week. That's slower than last month's ~1,600/week pace but still relentless. The AI-generated module flood is the new normal. A big app store is not a complete product, it's a big pile of things to evaluate.

OCA launched its own Apps Store. The Odoo Community Association shipped a new collaborative Apps Store (built with Akretion) alongside a full site redesign on July 2. A community-run marketplace for community modules is a healthy counterweight to the official store's volume problem.

Shopify made agentic commerce the default. Shopify's Summer '26 Edition (June 17) turned on the Universal Commerce Protocol for every store, so AI shopping agents can read catalogs and build carts by default. Every platform is racing to be agent-addressable. Odoo's MCP server is the same bet from the ERP side.

France got Open Banking payments. Odoo integrated Powens for Open Banking payment initiation in Accounting, shipping in 19.3. Regional, but it's the kind of native banking connection that keeps Odoo's per-app pricing looking cheap next to the incumbents.

Cheers!

Darren from 19 Prince