Portugal has a new unicorn. This week, Lisbon-born OutSystems reached an evaluation of over $1 billion.
With a €305 million ($360 million) investment from Goldman Sachs and KKR, OutSystems is now valued at over $1 billion and is Portugal’s next unicorn.
OutSystems is widely regarded as the leader in its market due to the breadth and depth of the platform. The company serves thousands of customers globally and is recognized as one of the fastest-growing technology companies with revenues well above $100 million and growing at more than 70 percent annually.
Paulo Rosado
“It’s great to see this funding as validating the founding vision for OutSystems and our thriving business,” wrote OutSystems CEO Paulo Rosado on the company blog.
“It’s even more exciting to think about how we’re going to put this investment to work for you—immediately,” he added.
The CEO continued, “When it comes to app design, we’ll be making big investments in our artificial intelligence and machine learning center of excellence. We’re building the future of developer assistants to empower your teams to design better solutions leveraging data generated by thousands of customers during their application creation, change, and operation process.”
“We found that we could point to every major industry sector and find excited and loyal OutSystems customers who have developed unique solutions and are adopting the platform across their organization,” said Kirk Lepke, Vice President at Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing.
Christian Resch, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing, added: “OutSystems is directly in line with what we seek for new investments: Support of exceptional founders and management teams in innovative businesses that offer a significant opportunity to create long-term value. We are very much looking forward to backing Paulo and the team to further expand this unique business.”
Founded in 2001 and now headquartered in the US, OutSystems is the only solution that combines the power of low-code development with advanced mobile capabilities, enabling visual development of entire application portfolios that easily integrate with existing systems.
“The market potential we see with OutSystems is incredible,” said Mike Pehl, OutSystems board member and Managing Partner at Guidepost Growth Equity. “With customers in over 50 countries and nearly 250 partner integrators developing on the platform, it’s clear the low-code market has reached a tipping point, and OutSystems is the clear leader.”
TechCrunch reported that “Outsystems was originally founded in Lisbon and maintains a large team there but is now HQ’d in Atlanta, USA and has 52 operations around the world.”
Companies such as Toyota, Logitech, Deloitte, Ricoh, Schneider Electric, and GM Financial use the OutSystems low-code platform to rapidly develop custom applications that digitalize and differentiate their business.
The platform can support a wide range of enterprise applications: from large, mission-critical solutions that replace aging legacy ERP/CRM systems, to mobile and web apps for internal processes, to customer experiences like online banking, account enrollment, and customer self-service.
Lucian Schoenefelder, Member at KKR, added: “OutSystems is a perfect fit with KKR’s strategy of supporting best-in-class technology entrepreneurs in their ambition to build global category leaders in large markets. We are very excited to partner with Paulo and his team and will make KKR’s global platform available to support the OutSystems expansion plans.”
Portugal’s 1st Unicorn, Farfetch
In March of 2015, Farfetch became the first Portuguese company to valued at $1 billion.
Read More: A $1 Billion Milestone for the Portuguese Startup Scene
Farfetch was created in 2008 close to Porto, Portugal by a Portuguese founder, José Neves. Legally the company is British and they have offices in London, New York, Los Angeles, São Paulo and Porto but the genetic is all Portuguese.
The Portugese startup’s international success drew the attention of a €300 million startup scaleup investment fund.