Software as a Service (SaaS) is one of the biggest technology growth areas at the moment. That's reflected in the amounts of capital being pumped into the sector by investors.
A new SaaS Trends Report by Tibco Analytics and venture capital tracker CB Insights shows that funding for SaaS companies was $11.7 billion in 2014, up 70 percent over the past year. SaaS funding has tripled since 2011.
The biggest deal of the last year was Dropbox which received $350 million in extra funding. SurveyMonkey raised $250 million, with online publishing and development specialist Automattic third on $160 million. Cloud storage company Box and security provider Lookout each received $150 million.
Broken down by industry most funding between 2011 and 2014 went to SaaS businesses in the area of business intelligence and analytics (838 deals totaling $6.6 million), followed by CRM and marketing each with around 400 deals totaling over $2 million for each area. Monitoring and security comes next with fewer deals (226) but over $2 million of investment.
Also interesting are the figures for the number of companies exiting venture capital funding, either via mergers and acquisitions or IPOs. Total exits in 2014 were up 66 percent year-on-year. The last quarter of 2014 also saw the highest number of SaaS IPOs in the last four years, companies floating including New Relic and Hubspot. But whilst it's the really big deals that make the news it's important to note that 49 percent of SaaS companies exiting VC funding raised less than $10 million.
Of the companies snapping up SaaS businesses the most acquisitive is Oracle, which went on a $700 million shopping spree to snap up BlueKai and Virtue among others. Next come IBM, Google and Saleforce each of which have made five or more SaaS acquisitions between 2011 and 2014.
The full report with much more information is available to download from the CB Insights website.
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