Das sind die 10 größten privaten B2B SaaS Startups Deutschlands

In den USA gibt es über 100 private B2B Startups mit Einhornstatus. 2020 sind schnell wachsende Startups wie Snowflake, JFrog und Palantir an die Börse gegangen, und schon im Januar 2021 steht der Börsengang von Qualtrics an. Welche sind die wertvollsten B2B Startups in Deutschland? 

Quelle: Berlinstadtservice.de

Der in den USA schon lange anhaltende Triumphzug der B2B Startups dehnt sich auch nach Deutschland aus. 2020 wuchsen die Bewertungen vieler Unternehmen weiterhin, und in der Folge gesellten sich zu Celonis zwei weitere B2B Einhörner: Sennder im Speditionsbereich und Contentful im Content Management. 

Danach kommen mit Spryker, Lean IX und Personio drei weitere Startups mit einer Bewertung von ungefähr einer halben Milliarde US-Dollar. Die Liste wird abgerundet durch PriceFx, Scoutbee, Signavio und Commercetools, die jeweils zwischen 300 und 500 Millionen US-Dollar wert sind. 

Fünf der top zehn Startups sammelten 2020 Geld von Investoren ein. Die größten Finanzierungen gab es für Spryker mit 130 Millionen US-Dollar, und die restlichen Investitionen bewegten sich zwischen 65 und 80 Millionen US-Dollar. US Amerikanische und Europäische Investoren wie TCV, Sapphire, Accel, Goldman Sachs und Apax Digital stellten dieses Kapital bereit. 

Die überwiegende Mehrheit der Startups bietet Anwendungssoftware für Geschäftsnutzer an, und nur Lean IX ist vollständig auf das IT Management und die Entwickler als Zielgruppe fokussiert. Die jüngsten Startups mit Gründungsjahr 2015 sind Sennder, Personio und Scoutbee, dagegen wurde Commercetools bereits 2006 gegründet.

Das durchschnittliche Gründerteam bestand aus drei Mitgliedern. Leider sieht das Bild dunkel aus was die Vielfalt unter den Gründer betrifft. Während in Silicon Valley ungefähr die Hälfte der Startups von Einwanderern gegründet wird, liegt dieser Anteil bei der deutschen Stichprobengröße bei geschätzt weniger als zehn Prozent. Noch schlimmer ist es dann beim Frauenanteil in den Gründungsteams - unter den 29 Gründern gab es keine einzige Frau. 

In der Vergangenheit haben erfolgreiche Startups in vielfältiger Weise von Netzwerkeffekten profitiert. Diese Netzwerkeffekte werden in erster Linie durch die Konzentration von Kapital und Talent, und insbesondere oft von technischem Talent, verstärkt. Nimmt man sich wieder die USA als Beispiel, dann sind dort fast 80% des Wagniskapitals in den fünf Großraumregionen Silicon Valley/San Francisco, New York, Boston und Los Angeles konzentriert. Andere große Top Ten Städte wie Chicago, Houston, Phoenix spielen hier nur eine geringe und letztendlich zu vernachlässigende Rolle. In Deutschland existieren solche Netzwerke in nennenswertem Maße in Berlin und München, und es ist nicht überraschend, dass jeweils vier der top zehn ihren Standort in Berlin und München haben. 

Die Zahl der Einhörner ist somit sehr überschaubar, und auch die Kandidatenliste zukünftiger Einhörner. Es bleibt zu hoffen, dass möglichst viele dieser Startups an die Börse gehen werden, diese Firmen als zukünftige Käufer von Startups agieren werden und ihre Mitarbeiter als Gründer und Investoren neuer Startups auftreten werden und damit das gesamte Startup Ökosystem schneller wächst.


This blog post has also been published in English.

The 10 Largest Private B2B SaaS Startups in Germany

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.

The Four Questions to Ask After a Black Swan Event

A local crisis which started on the Balkans in July 1914 spiralled into a fully fledged world war within a short period of a few weeks .

After a four year impasse on the western front the German Army spectacularly collapsed in in late summer of 1918. What was then called the Great War ended on armistice day November 11, 1918. 

Picture credit: etftrends.com

The German General Staff was dissolved by the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. Only five months later the General Staff's clandestine successor organization 'Truppenamt' under Hans von Seeckt launched 57 committees to distill the learnings from the Great War.

The output of the committees were short, concise studies which addressed four questions 

1. What new situations arose that had not been considered before?
   
   
2. How effective were pre-war views in dealing with these situations?
   
   
3. What guidelines were developed for new weaponry during the war?
   
   
4. Which new problems put forward by the war have not yet found a solution?
   

The T-4 training section of the Truppenamt was given responsibility for collecting and reviewing the work of the 57 committees. 109 officers and former officers were appointed to chair the committees and more than 400 officers were involved the effort . The training section then edited the committee reports for use in army manuals and regulations. 

The Great War was a watershed event which affected everyone's life. 

Which questions will you ask after the next Black Swan event?

 

_______________________________________________

Source: James S. Corum, The Roots of Blitzkrieg

Satellites, Biology and Big Machines - My Investment Activities in 2019

I had 17 companies in my portfolio at the beginning of 2019. Consistent with my pace in previous years I made three new investments across a wide spectrum of B2B software spaces: 

• Geosite is an enterprise SaaS platform for spatial data that leverages the proliferation in satellite imagery sources and distributed sensor systems.
  Founder and CEO Rachel Olney came up with the idea when she studied the impact of the availability of small satellites on the military. Geosite now is on a mission to make geospatial data available to a broad range of businesses.
  
  
  
• Turbine models the inner mechanisms of cancer to discover novel protein targets and precision biomarkers.
  I was introduced to Szabi and the team via Jens-Philipp Klein from Atlantic Labs in June 2018 and was simply blown away by the team’s vision to radically change drug discovery. 

• Remberg digitizes asset service processes for manufacturers, service providers and operators.
  Fellow angel investor Manuel Grossmann introduced me to co-founder and CEO David Hahn and the team back in April 2018. David, Hagen, Cecil and Julian quickly navigated through multiple pivots and are now acquiring customers at lightning speed.
  
  
  

Throughout the year I met with hundreds of startups and had in-depth discussions with about a dozen. Finding the right market and building a true MVP often takes longer than the founders are anticipating, and being able to distinctly describe the use case - buyer, user, value proposition and ROI - is as challenging as ever. The majority of interesting companies are bringing software to new industries and new buying centers, although I also met a few interesting founders who have invented a better mousetrap (Zoom, anyone?).

I worked with many of the more recent investments and helped in positioning, fundraising, hiring, mentoring, GTM, and intros to my network.

Fewer companies than expected from my portfolio raised additional funding: Assuming that there should be a funding event every 18 months, I could have expected up to eight raises in 2019. Yet only three of my existing portfolio companies raised and I was invited to participate in two of these. Decisionnext raised a Series A, and two other companies raised bridge extensions at significantly higher valuations. There were no markdowns in my portfolio. 

On the downside: Employeechannel (formerly known as Navera formerly known as Trustnode) called it quits eight years after founding and multiple funding rounds. 

My resolutions for 2020: Keep investing and find teams and companies that address previously unexplored spaces and have the potential to own a category. 

Image sources: wikipedia, NIH, hydraulicpress.com

2019 Was A Breakout Year For B2B SaaS Startups in Germany

The BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index (EMCLOUD) tracks 48 SaaS companies. Some are industry stalwarts such as Adobe, others are recently IPO’d companies such as Slack and Zoom. The EMCLOUD index rose 47% in 2019 and far outperformed any other indices including the tech heavy NASDAQ. 

 

There was not a single public B2B SaaS company in Germany as of 2018 . (Wirecard is publicly traded but does not have the subscription business model typically associated with SaaS). This embarrassing situation finally changed when Teamviewer went public in September 2019 at a share price of €25.30 and ended the year at €31.88, an increase of 26%. Teamviewer was founded in 2005 and is a leader for remote access and desktop sharing are in the transition from an on premise to a SaaS model. Teamviewer’s expected 2019 revenues are approximately €400 million and the end of year market capitalization stands at €6 billion.

The next largest relevant exit in the B2B space was Data Artisans’ sale to Alibaba for $90 million.

If the list of publicly traded B2B SaaS companies is limited to one, what about the pipeline of privately held B2B SaaS companies? As of 2018 only two things would have stood out: Celonis became a SaaS unicorn, and IoT company Relayr exited for 300 million. After that - nothing. Nada. Nimic. Rien. Nichts.

 

Privately held Celonis continues to grow on a global scale and the latest round now values Celonis as a ‘duocorn’ worth more than €2 billion. The company has strengthened its executive ranks to complement the three person founder team in the quest to get IPO ready. There are no other private B2B SaaS unicorns, and there is no other SaaS company that is valued higher than €500 million at the time of writing. 

2019 saw a flood of funding pour into the most promising B2B startups, and the largest SaaS players cumulatively raised $900 million in just their last funding rounds (It is worth noting that some of these investments were spent on secondaries and the money going into the companies was less than the amounts listed below and communicated to the public). 

Five companies appear to be valued as high or higher than Relayr at their $300 million exit in 2018: 

• Personio provides an HR suite for SMBs and vaulted ahead to a  $300+ million valuation after a large €60 million round in December 2019 after a prior round just in January.

• Signavio is a global leader in business process management, also raised a large round, although much of it was a secondary sale by the existing shareholders and only a smaller amount went into funding the growth of the company. The founders still own a very significant share of the company.

• Sennder also raised two large rounds in July and April of 2019.

• Scoutbee has been on an absolute tear since its founding in 2015 and has closed a large round in December after a prior raise only six months earlier. What first looked like a Web 1.0 era supplier listing tool on steroids is quickly evolving into a strategic sourcing vendor.

• Commercetools had been flying under the radar since its acquisition by REWE 2015, but Insight Partners saw an opportunity to acquire the company from REWE. It does not appear that any money went directly into funding further growth right now.

The list of highest valued B2B SaaS companies is rounded out by Proglove, PowerCloud, Contentful, Wundermobility, and KONUX which are currently valued between $300 million and $200 million (the SaaS list excludes Auto1 who buy and sell actual cars and Adjust whose revenue model is based on transactions as opposed to subscriptions). 

2019 was a ‘golden’ year for startups in Germany to raise growth capital. The five largest B2C players (Flixbus, GetYourGuide, Frontier Car Group, N26  and SumUp) collectively raised €1952 million where each investment was larger than the $290 million raised by Celonis.

Marquee investors will provide the ammunition for Series B and beyond if they believe that these companies can become global category leaders with a clear path to exit: Accel is an investor in both Celonis and Personio. Insight Partners invested in Staffbase in addition to Commercetools and Lean IX. 

And there is an abundance of seed and series A capital available from German venture capital firms to fuel the fire.

Image credit: investing.com

Rocks Ahead For Cloud Companies in 2020?

2019 was another stellar year for the overall stock market (DJII ending at 28,462 up 22% from 23,328), even better for technology stocks (NASDAQ ending 8,946 up 35% from 6,635), and best for emerging cloud software and services companies (BVP/Nasdaq emerging cloud EMCLOUD ending at 1205.4 up 47% from 823.4). 

So there are ample reasons for cloud software companies to be happy. But was the wealth evenly spread? 

The first half of 2019 saw more than half a dozen IPOs in B2B SaaS: Medallia, Cloudflare, Dynatrace, Slack, Fastly, Zoom and Pagerduty all performed well immediately after their IPO.  However, the stock price of most of these companies stock prices performed far worse than any index by year end. The unweighted average share prices declined 15% between IPO and the end of 2019, and five out of seven were trading below IPO. 

Company	Share price EoY compared to IPO Percent	Market cap $ million, EoY
Cloudflare	-5%	$5.2
Dynatrace	6%	$7.4
Medallia	-16%	$3.8
Slack	-42%	$12.4
Fastly	-16%	$2.0
Zoom	10%	$18.6
Pagerduty	-39%	$1.9

WeWork’s implosion in October effectively closed the IPO window for everyone else for the remainder of the year. Bill.com was the only company to squeeze their IPO in before the very end of 2019. 

While the IPO market took a break large enterprise SaaS companies continued to consolidate via acquisitions. The software analytics space in particular went through a generational wave of acquisitions reminiscent of the first round of M&A in 2005/2006. This time the buyers were Salesforce (Tableau), Workday (Adaptive Insight) and Google Cloud (Looker) instead of SAP, IBM and Oracle. 

Hyperscalers Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and AliCloud have still largely been absent from making huge acquisitions. The growth and size of the hyperscalers far exceeds that of most other software companies, and their firepower will eventually be deployed towards more acquisitions higher up the software stack. Google Cloud’s acquisition of Looker may be the first indicator.

Clearly, there is enough money in the venture capital ecosystem to fund every startup that is worthy.The abundance of capital has trickled down from the large growth fund such as Softbank Vision to seed funds where seed round sizes have tripled since 2012. But the Softbank/WeWork writeoff has demonstrated that large funds are struggling to achieve their target returns. The Softbank Vision Fund has reportedly dialed back on its investment strategy of supersized rounds, and several of their portfolio companies have gone into restructuring mode. 

Are all of these events indicators of more down rounds to come?

Image credit: renemagritte.org

Why Every Startup Should Create Its Own New Category

Category leaders capture the majority of the available profit pool, and investors seek to find future category leaders. Peter Thiel’s ‘Zero to One’ book is about how to build companies that create new things and eventually become a monopoly. Investors also look for new categories because it is virtually impossible for a startup to unseat a current category leader.

But how to create a new category?

Founders should look for a net new problem and they should devise a net new solution. The only way to find this new problem is by talking to customers.

Category creation requires developing a concept and planting a story in people's brains. Customers may not understand that they have a problem and therefore may not have a budget. A new point of view replaces the current customer point of view. And customers may be puzzled because they haven't thought about it. In fact, there may not be any easily identifiable customers and the ultimate act of category creation results in a new role in a company. Box's Aaron Levy said 'you need to find a demographic and a customer that no other software company is paying attention to in a modern way, and your job is to make them be heroes.'  

The solution has to be not only better, but different and unique. Being different comes from proprietary insight and can be based on technology differentiation, network effects, or a structural competitive advantage. Peter Thiel asks founders one key question: ‘What important truth do very few people agree with you on?’

The existence of a band aided solution at the customer is a good sign that there is a category waiting to be productized. And a sufficiently large number of these cases is evidence that now is the perfect time for the category to be created.

Talking to existing channels is unlikely to generate new insights since they serve current solutions and address known problems and customers.Advisory firms such as Gartner and others will only validate new software categories when a category has become large enough for their own customers and competitors are emerging.

Qualtrics realized that their customers started to tweak the software and use it as a customer experience and employee experience solution; the original market research use case dropped to the third rank. CMO Kylan Lundeen said 'We realized we were not in the survey business, we were in the business of helping people manage the experience they provide to their most important stakeholders.' Qualtrics was acquired for $8 billion by SAP in 2018.

The best categories have no or few competitors. There is little noise and there are no preexisting notions and once a new category has been identified the work only starts. The new category needs to be positioned and an ecosystem around it has to be created. The message needs to be authentic at scale for the users and customers to evangelize it. Leadership of this movement has to extend beyond the company and include the competition.

Peter Thiel has said ‘... the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas’.