There were four SaaS Unicorns in Germany in 2020 - how long will it take to get to 10?

There are 100+ B2B SaaS companies in the US today. The BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index lists more than 50 companies with valuations in excess of $1 billion, and there are many more private unicorns in the pipeline. How do German SaaS companies compare?

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Teamviewer was the first SaaS unicorn to go public in 2019 and are now trading at a €8.9 billion market cap. Even more impressive, a 55% EBITDA margin and 15% revenue CAGR in Q3/2020 combine to a 70%  Efficiency Score, far exceeding the Bessemer rule of 40 and the median score of 35% across all US listed SaaS companies. Teamviewer also shows the importance of publicly traded companies for the ecosystem when they acquired Ubimax.

There are three privately funded SaaS unicorns in Germany: Celonis, Sennder and Contentful. Tricentis from Austria needs to be added if the scope is extended to all German speaking countries.


Another seven private SaaS companies are valued at between $300 million and $500 million (the complete list of the top ten SaaS companies can be found here).


Thinkproject, a Munich based provider of Construction intelligence software founded in 2000, sold a majority stake to private equity firm EQT at an estimated €700 million transaction value.


Exasol, an analytics database company from Nuremberg, was also founded in 2000. Exasol went public at a market cap of €200 million in May and ended up trading at €647 million (close to $800 million) at year end. Exasol generated €21.6 million in revenues in 2019 and posted a 35% year-on-year ARR growth in Q3/2020. This growth is far less than the observed 75% for unicorns at that revenue mark. Since EBITDA is slightly negative the estimated Efficiency Score was likely around 30%, significantly below the rule of 40.  

It seems unlikely that the startups in the pipeline can grow even faster. All of them raised significant growth capital recently, and there is ample funding available in the market as recent funding rounds for B2C startups demonstrate. B2C fintech N26 raised a $570 million Series D and e-scooter startup Tier Mobility a $250 million Series C. And in November a new €10 billion (around $12 billion) state fund was announced to back German startups over the next ten years, with a view to attracting an additional €20 billion in private VC investment. 


In the past decade it has taken SaaS unicorns an average of 8.5 years to grow from $1 million to $100 million in ARR. It will take at least three years for there to be 10 SaaS unicorns in Germany assuming that every single startup in the pipeline executes flawlessly.