Monday, March 15, 2021

The largest SaaS exits for German startups and investors in 2020

The attractiveness of an ecosystem is driven by the investors ability to achieve liquidity for their investments, and for stock owning employees to get a return on the risk of joining a startup. In the majority of the cases this is through M&A, and in some cases through going public in the form of IPOs, SPACs, or direct listings. 


Source: pxhere.com


Here are the largest 2020 SaaS exits of German companies and for German investors. 

  • $1.5 billion: The valuation of Estonian based Pipedrive after Vista Equity Partners acquired a majority stake. Berlin based Paua Ventures was the Series A investor in this leading CRM provider.

  • €700 million: transaction value of the Thinkproject acquisition by private equity firm EQT. Thinkproject is a Munich based provider of Construction Intelligence Software and was founded in 2000. TA Associates invested in a prior private equity round in 2017 and now sold a majority stake to EQT.

  • $500 million: Instana was acquired by IBM in November for an estimated $400 million purchase price plus a $100 million earn out. Instana provides Application Performance Management with a special focus on observability. Instana was founded in Germany in 2015, and Target Partners was a Series A investor.

  • $360 million: Avira was acquired by Norton Lifelock in December. Avira had just been acquired by Investcorp for $180 million in April. This provider of antivirus software is based in Tettnang, Germany.

  • €200 million: Exasol, an analytics database provider based in Nuremberg, went public on the Frankfurt stock exchange in May. Mountain Partners was an early investor. More on Exasol here.

  • €136.5 million: Ubimax, an AR solutions provider for wearables, was acquired by Teamviewer in July. Westcott LLC and Fielmann Ventures were the main investors.

There are several large IPO candidates in the pipeline for 2021: UiPath where Munich based Earlybird was the first investor, and Munich based Celonis where Accel and 83North were early investors.

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