There are over 100 private unicorn B2B startups in the US. Fast-growing startups such as Snowflake, JFrog and Palantir went public in 2020, and Qualtrics will go public in January 2021. Which are the most valuable B2B startups in Germany?
Quelle: Berlinstadtservice.de
The triumphant march of B2B startups in the US is also expanding to Germany. Company valuations continued to grow rapidly in 2020 and as a result, Celonis was joined by two more B2B unicorns: Sennder in the freight forwarding sector and Contentful in content management.
Spryker, Lean IX and Personio are three startups valued at roughly half a billion dollars. The list is rounded off by PriceFx, Scoutbee, Signavio and Commercetools which are worth between $300 and $500 million.
Five of the top ten startups raised money from investors in 2020. Spryker received the largest investment of $130 million, and the remaining investments ranged from $65 million to $80 million. US and European investors such as TCV, Sapphire, Accel, Goldman Sachs and Apax Digital provided this growth capital.
The vast majority of startups offer application software for business users, and only Lean IX is fully focused on IT management and developers as a target group. Sennder, Personio and Scoutbee are the youngest startups founded in 2015, whereas Commercetools was founded back in 2006.
The average founding team consisted of three members. Unfortunately, the picture looks gloomy in terms of founder diversity. Whereas about half of the Silicon Valley startups are founded by immigrants, this share is estimated to be less than ten percent for the German sample size. The situation is even worse when it comes to gender diversity - there was not a single woman among the 29 founders.
Successful startups have historically benefited from a variety of network effects. These network effects are reinforced by the concentration of capital and people, and particularly technical talent. In the US almost 80% of the venture capital is concentrated in the five metropolitan areas of Silicon Valley / San Francisco, New York, Boston and Los Angeles. Other big top ten cities such as Chicago, Houston, Phoenix play only a minor and ultimately negligible role here. In Germany such network effects exist in Berlin and Munich, and it is not surprising that four of the top ten B2B startups are located in Berlin and Munich.
The number of B2B unicorns in Germany is very limited, as is the list of future unicorn candidates. The startup ecosystem will benefit from as many of these startups going public as possible. These companies will become future buyers of startups and their employees will act as founders and investors in new startups.
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