OutSystems is the Portuguese-founded low-code platform vendor that has, for two decades, argued that enterprise apps should be assembled visually rather than hand-coded. Paulo Rosado co-founded the business in 2001 out of Lisbon, targeting the enterprise IT market rather than citizen developers.
Today OutSystems serves more than 700,000 developers and thousands of enterprise customers across banking, insurance, government and logistics.
The product bundles visual app modelling, a deployment pipeline, application lifecycle management and a runtime that compiles models into standard web and mobile apps. A 2018 $360M round led by KKR and Goldman Sachs crystallised the company's unicorn status, and a Series I led by Tiger Global and Abdiel in 2021 valued OutSystems at $9.5B.
The legal parent is OutSystems, Inc., a Delaware C-Corp; the Portuguese operating entity, OutSystems - Software em Rede, S.A., remains the engineering heart of the company and continues to hire heavily in Lisbon despite a full US commercial presence and global offices in London, Tokyo and Atlanta.
OutSystems illustrates the Portuguese unicorn redomicile pattern at its cleanest. The product was invented in Lisbon and is still built there, but the legal holding company is a Delaware C-Corp - OutSystems, Inc. - which is what KKR, Goldman Sachs, Tiger Global and Abdiel actually invested in. The Portuguese S.A.
sits below the Delaware parent as a wholly owned operating subsidiary that licenses IP back, pays Portuguese payroll tax on its engineering team, and claims SIFIDE II R&D tax credits against local corporate tax.
Why Delaware rather than Portugal? Portuguese corporate law does not comfortably accommodate the preferred-share, anti-dilution and liquidation preference machinery that late-stage growth investors expect. Delaware does, plus its Chancery Court produces predictable case law on fiduciary duty and minority protection.
It also makes an eventual US IPO - which OutSystems has telegraphed repeatedly - significantly easier, because the registrant is already a US person for SEC purposes.
The pattern was reinforced by Web Summit's 2016 move to Lisbon, which dramatically increased US VC attention on Portuguese companies, and by the NHR regime (Non-Habitual Resident) which pre-2024 offered a 20 percent flat rate on qualified income for inbound executives. Lisbon became cheap to hire in, attractive to senior expats, and suddenly close to European and US capital.
OutSystems was an early mover; Talkdesk, Remote, Feedzai and Unbabel all followed versions of the same structure. The Portuguese operating entity also benefits from EU market access, GDPR-native product positioning and a multilingual talent pool that is unusual by US standards.
Operationally yes - OutSystems was founded in Lisbon in 2001 and still runs its core engineering there - but its holding company is OutSystems, Inc., a Delaware corporation.
Not yet. It has raised from KKR, Goldman Sachs, Tiger Global and Abdiel at a $9.5B valuation and is widely considered an IPO candidate.
Delaware is the standard jurisdiction for US-style preferred share structures, VC term sheets and future IPOs. Portuguese corporate law does not cleanly support multi-class preferred stock.
It sells a low-code platform that lets enterprise teams build, deploy and maintain custom web and mobile applications visually rather than by hand-coding each layer.
