A Banner Year for M&A only Five Months In
With Salesforce announcing its intent to acquire Informatica & Google’s announced acquisition of Wiz, 2025 is the best year in the last six in terms of M&A value.1
These massive acquisitions, totalling more than $32b propel 2025’s year-to-date number to decade highs - exceeding the fast-money pre-Covid days of 2020.
But the total number of acquisitions with disclosed deal values (typically a few hundred million or more) is also greater than any year in the decade. At this rate, the total number of M&A could be twice the average in the last five years.
The IPO market remains relatively quiet. However, the recent quarterly earnings reports from Cloudflare, Snowflake, Microsoft and others demonstrate strength in the enterprise software market. Snowflake raised guidance for product revenue & Microsoft did as much for next quarter.
Combined with some hope of clarity in trade policy, perhaps the second half the year will shower more liquidity on startupland - a welcome reprieve to the parched conditions of the past few years.
1 These figures include both announced and closed. Sometimes announced acquisitions take 12 to 18 months to pass US, UK, & EU regulatory scrutiny. And so this is a bit forward looking of an analysis.