Paris-based Twenty secures €4.7M to advance its open-source CRM

Paris-based Twenty, the company behind open-source CRM, announced on Tuesday that it has secured $5M (approximately €4.7M) in a seed funding round led by Runa Capital.

Other participating investors include the founders of HubSpot, Front, Cal.com, Sentry, and Photoroom, among others.

The company will use the funds to further grow its open-source community, enhance its product, and expand deployment among Enterprise clients. 

Twenty: Open-source CRM

Led by Félix Malfait, Charles Bochet, and Thomas Colas des Francs, Twenty is an open-source CRM (Customer Relationship Management), that lets companies bring all their customer data and workflows into one central hub.

“Packaged software today tends to make companies more alike,” says Twenty co-founder and CEO Felix Malfait.

“To truly stand out and create something unique, companies need more than just off-the-shelf solutions. Twenty will offer a path to real, differentiated value. This is a CRM for those who want to build something that truly stands out and own it end-to-end.”

With over 280 active contributors (LTM), Twenty stands out among the 220+ million public GitHub repositories.

As per the company’s claims, only 157 repositories have reached this level of contributor activity, and behind these, there are only 26 private product-focused tech companies, like Laravel, Supabase, Clickhouse, Automattic, or Vercel.

The investor

Based out of Luxembourg, Runa Capital is an international venture capital firm that invests in deep tech (AI/ML, open source, and future computing), enterprise software, and fintech infrastructure.

From 2010 to 2022, Runa Capital raised over $500M and invested in more than 100 companies in Europe and North America, including Nginx (acquired by F5 Networks for $700 million), Brainly, DrChrono, Lendio, Mambu, MariaDB, Pasqal and Zopa. 

“Open source is a powerful approach for highly extendable areas where enterprises require customisation: own data sources, workflows, AI models, hybrid deployment, and security. This applies not only to cloud and data infrastructure but also to large business suites like CRM or ERP,” says Konstantin Vinogradov, a General Partner at Runa Capital.

“OSS might be the best way to disrupt its established closed-source leaders there, with their proprietary and outdated developer ecosystems. We have been highly impressed by Twenty’s founders and their bold vision from the start, and the outstanding open-source traction since then has confirmed that they are on the right track. It is a privilege to support them in building an open-source alternative to Salesforce,” adds Vinogradov.