Sebastien Marchon

CEO Rydoo

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Sebastien Marchon is chief executive of Rydoo, a Belgium-headquartered expense management software company whose story is one of a corporate venture that had to learn to survive on its own. Rydoo was assembled inside Sodexo out of two acquisitions — the expense product Xpenditure and the hotel-booking platform iAlbatros — and launched as a combined brand in 2018. Marchon ran the Sodexo business line that housed them before taking the resulting company forward, and in the years since he has steered it through the near-total collapse of business travel in 2020, a narrowing of its remit from travel-and-expense to expense alone, and two successive private-equity majority owners. The business today serves more than 12,000 customers and over a million users across 132 countries in 18 languages, processing upwards of 20 million receipts a year, and Eurazeo took a majority stake in June 2024 on the strength of organic compound growth above 32 per cent.

Career Highlights

• CEO of Rydoo, confirmed in post on the company’s own site as of September 2026.
• Previously vice president of the Mobility and Expense business line at Sodexo Benefits and Rewards Services, the unit that acquired Xpenditure and iAlbatros and created Rydoo.
• Earlier career across business travel, including American Express Global Business Travel and involvement with the Global Business Travel Association.
• Rebuilt the active user base after a roughly 40 per cent collapse in March 2020, returning to pre-pandemic levels by September 2021 and going on to triple annual recurring revenue.
• Reached positive cash EBITDA while sustaining more than 32 per cent organic compound annual growth.
• Launched Rydoo Cards in March 2023.
• Led the company through Marlin Equity Partners taking majority ownership in summer 2021 and Eurazeo doing so in June 2024, with Marlin reinvesting.

Professional Journey

Marchon’s career sits in business travel rather than in software, and that is the right frame for reading it. Rydoo’s own account of him names more than twenty years across American Express Global Business Travel, the Global Business Travel Association — the industry’s main trade body, where the relationship was association-level rather than employment — and Sodexo Benefits and Rewards Services. No titles are attached to the first two in any source that does not derive from LinkedIn, so they are described here without them.

The Sodexo period is where his trajectory becomes legible. Sodexo Benefits and Rewards Services set out in the mid-2010s to enter business travel properly, and bought its way in: iAlbatros for hotel booking, Xpenditure for expense capture. Marchon led the Mobility and Expense business line that owned them, and his public framing at the time was notably unsentimental about what acquisitions actually buy you. Asked about Sodexo’s newly assembled toolkit, he replied that tools are one thing, and that “they are in service of a strategy” — a statement of the obvious that was, in context, a warning against assuming the pieces would combine themselves. In 2018 they were combined, launching as Rydoo, and Sodexo positioned it publicly as a “corp-up”: a startup with a large corporate parent behind it.

The early Rydoo years were expansionary. Within five months of launch the company was announcing new offices in Manila and Lisbon, extending into Asia-Pacific and building a second European hub; by 2019 Lisbon alone had more than thirty people, and the product was placing in the leader quadrant of G2’s expense management grid. Then business travel stopped. In March 2020 Rydoo’s active user base shrank by roughly 40 per cent essentially overnight — an existential number for a company whose product is used when people go places. The recovery took eighteen months, with the user base back to pre-pandemic levels by September 2021, and Marchon’s team used the interval to change what the company was rather than simply waiting. Rydoo emerged pointed squarely at expense management, dropping the travel-and-expense positioning it had launched with, and it came out of the period having tripled annual recurring revenue and reached positive cash EBITDA.

Ownership changed twice in the same span. In summer 2021 Marlin Equity Partners became majority shareholder, taking the company out of Sodexo’s orbit and triggering a substantial internal reorganisation. Marchon stayed, and the product roadmap continued — Rydoo Cards, a smart corporate expense card tying spend capture to the moment of payment rather than to a receipt photographed afterwards, launched in March 2023. Then in June 2024 Eurazeo’s small-mid buyout team acquired a majority stake, with Marlin reinvesting alongside rather than exiting, in the ninth investment of Eurazeo’s PME IV fund. Eurazeo’s stated basis for the deal was organic compound annual growth above 32 per cent, annual recurring revenue above €20 million, and a client base of more than 3,000 midsize and enterprise accounts spread across 132 countries. Marchon’s own comment was about capability rather than price — that Eurazeo’s technology expertise, value-creation experience and global reach made it “the ideal partner for this new chapter”.

He has continued to run the business under Eurazeo, alongside a leadership team including chief financial officer Aidana Zhakupbekova, chief revenue officer Fernando Amaral, chief commercial officer Delphine Callens and chief product officer Sebastian Vanhecke. The company operates remote-first, a structure Marchon has defended in terms of trust rather than cost — “we trust our people, which gives them the confidence to innovate” — and he writes regularly under his own name for Rydoo’s CFO Corner on SaaS scaling, expense management practice and the application of AI to finance operations.

Education

No education record was found for Sebastien Marchon in any source acceptable to this project. Detailed education claims do circulate, but every one traces to LinkedIn-scraping contact aggregators, which are excluded as a data source here, and none could be corroborated independently. The field is left empty by policy rather than for lack of any claim.