These Are the Top 5 Marketing Software Deals of the Past Year
2020 was a year of large financing rounds and acquisitions in the software business - what the most important deals say about the industry
The year 2020 was dominated worldwide by the Corona pandemic. One of the few winners: the software industry. Zoom and others videocall tool providers make home office possible in the first place, digital payment methods are becoming increasingly important and teams have to keep up to date on current events even without sitting together in the same office. We show the five most remarkable software stories of the year 2020 and show why the deals around Slack, Pipedrive, Klarna & Co. are groundbreaking.
Already in 2011, investor legend Marc Andreessen wrote his essay "Why Software Is Eating the World". Not without reason his words are quoted a lot again. Andreessen predicted at that time that software companies will disrupt entire industries in the next ten years. Nine years later we can say: The man was right. And not only that, we too have entered the software game in a certain way. At OMR Reviews you can find reviews for 300 software tools. Consequently, these deals and developments show how software dominated the world in 2020.
The big business with co-working software
One of the industries that is currently being turned upside down is the complete office world. The Corona pandemic is normalizing work from home and pushing Co-Working tools even more. One of the winners is Slack with a total of 750,000 corporate customers (of which 112,000 pay for the service). The communication tool with which team members should be able to communicate easily internally has only one problem: big competition from Microsoft. Its Slack response "Teams" now has 75 million daily active users - Slack can only claim about twelve million.
As a helper in distress proves Salesforce CRM at the end of 2020. The software giant buys Slack for just under 28 billion US dollars. The company's final valuation was still around 17 billion dollars. The acquisition represents the eighth largest deal in the technology sector ever. But what does Salesforce CRM want with Slack? Many experts assume, that Slack is supposed to become more of a tool that also simplifies communication between companies and not just within teams. This way Salesforce could at least optimally integrate the tool into its existing CRM solutions. Slack has been trying to become an email alternative for some time now and with the help of Salesforce CRM there is a chance to take up the battle again with Microsoft Teams, which so far had the edge here.Why Pipedrive is a Unicorn "Designed to keep you selling" announces Pipedrive on its website. The tool from Estonia helps companies to keep an eye on their sales processes step by step. In November 2020,
Pipedrive
is at the center of a sales deal itself: The US private equity firm Vista takes a majority stake in Pipedrive - for a rumored ten-figure sum. The value of the company is 1.5 billion US dollars due to the deal. This makes Pipedrive Europe's most recent unicorn with a SaaS model (Software as a Service).Compare CRM tools nowThe Pipedrive deal is symbolic of the boom in such SaaS models. Even smaller and medium-sized companies need the services that cloud software offers today - managing sales contacts, Customer Relationship Management, keep all company data available etc. The subscription models of SaaS providers mean recurring revenues with high margins (the development of the software is expensive, the scaling less so) for companies like
. Contrary to what some experts predicted, the Corona pandemic has given SaaS providers even more of a push because even more companies worldwide had to switch from traditional software solutions to the cloud.Are Fintechs Europe's secret weapon?If a symbol is needed for European startup success stories, the name of a Swedish company often comes to mind: Spotify. But there is now a second worldwide player from the north. Since a financing round of 650 million US dollars in September 2020 the payment service provider
Klarna
is worth about 10.65 billion US dollars. A look at the numbers shows why the company is worth so much: 90 million registered users, of which eleven million in the USA. 200,000 merchants have integrated the software. Every day, Klarna processes a million transactions.Klarna stands out - as here in Berlin - again and again with colourful campaigns.Here too, Corona has given an extra push. More online transactions mean more Klarna usage. In addition, Klarna's invoice model - order now, pay later - is still relatively new in the USA and is now being occupied by the Swedish company. In Europe, Klarna already has a firm grip on the bill-to-order market with major partners like H&M, Zalando & Co. All in all, Fintechs have become a glimmer of hope for the European startup scene. Companies like Revolut from the UK,
N26
from Germany, Wise from the UK (founded by two Estonians) or Adyen from the Netherlands are worth billions.E-commerce beneficiariesWe are talking about a significantly higher valuation at Stripe - another payment provider. The US company handles payments for merchants as well as corporations like Spotify, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, Slack and Booking.com - of course in a subscription model for customers (SaaS). Stripe is currently in talks with investors about a financing round that could drive the company's value to 70 to 100 billion US dollars. This would make
Stripe
the most valuable venture capital-funded startup in the US. Anyone who currently combines a SaaS model with booming E-commerce services has apparently bet on the right horses.And speaking of booming e-commerce: The German company Spryker also enjoyed fresh capital in 2020. More precisely about 100 million euros from the prominent US investor TCV and existing investors like Project A. Spryker also combines SaaS with digital commerce - but simply calls the whole thing PaaS for "Platform as a Service". 150 corporate customers worldwide now use the tool to manage their e-commerce activities.One crisis winner is still missing
We don't want to forget the big pandemic winners like the videoconferencing tool Zoom. The company's stock price rose last year from 60 US dollars to now 349 US dollars per share. At one point, the price was even at 559 US dollars. This makes Zoom currently worth 100 billion US dollars. But the co-working tool will still have to compete with Microsoft Teams and
Slack
, which are also working intensively on better integration of video calls.You want to see which of the described software solutions are most popular with the OMR community and are really worth their money? Then check out OMR Reviews and get detailed information before buying Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack
Martin kümmert sich vor allem um neue Artikel für OMR.com und den Social-Media-Auftritt. Nach dem Studium der Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaft ging er zur Axel Springer Akademie, der Journalistenschule des Axel Springer Verlags. Danach arbeitete er bei der COMPUTER BILD mit Fokus auf News aus der digitalen Welt und Start-ups. Am Wochenende findet Ihr ihn auf der Gegengerade im Millerntor.
