So long time friend of SaaStr Tomasz Tunguz, now heading his own VC fund Theory Ventures, has again summarized a lot of data into a few great charts. This time, on Mergers & Acquisitions.
My biggest take-away: there are barely more than 50 acquisitions of $50,000,000 or more, at least disclosed one, in software of U.S.-based startups each year. And that’s fairly constant for the past decade, outside of the 2021 bubble.
Tomasz’s main point is that the dollars are only going up due to an increase in mega deals.
But for founders, the bigger take away is that over the past decade, the amount of software M&A isn’t going up, even as the number of SaaS startups has exploded.
This makes it even harder, at least statistically, to get acquired for $50m+.
While I’ve seen this data sliced in many ways, I still thought the raw number of smaller deals must have gone up. After all, there are so many more SaaS and Cloud leaders worth $1B+ that there wer a decade ago.
But M&A isn’t up. By dollars, yes. But not by deal count.
A reminder again it’s a business of outliers. Even more so now than ever.
