How Long Does It Take To Get to A Billion+ Acquisition in SaaS? About 10 Years

A little while back, Coupa did its first $1B+ acquisition, of 18+ year old Llamsoft.?It took Llamasoft?18 years?to get to $100m ARR, and 18 years to a $1B+ exit.?It inspired me to update a post on how long in SaaS it takes to get to a $1B acquisition.

Unicorns are being minted faster than ever.?But … are things even faster these days to a $1B?exit??Solid cash on the table? And the answer now, even with faster funding rounds, seems to be about the same.?A decade.

There will be a lot more billion+ acquisitions in Cloud and SaaS, if only because there are more decacorns to buy them. Salesforce, PayPal, Adobe, Shopify and Zoom are now worth $100B+.?Hubspot and Twilio and Coupa and Wix are worth $10B+.??They all can buy something, or really?several?startups like Twilio has, for $1B+ now:

So how long does it take to get acquired for a billion??There’s not quite as much data as with IPOs and unicorn VC rounds.?But it looks like about a decade, which is what you’d expect.?And for every Divvy that gets there in a stunning 5 years, there are also seemingly just as mange Innoyze and Acquia-type $1B+ exits that take 10, 14, even 25 years (!):

Looker, Velocity and iZettle got there fast, in 6-7 years.?Auth0 got to a $6.5B acquisition by Okta is just 8 years (to signing).?ClickSoftware took 22 years, by contrast!

(Note: the above list isn’t perfect, and I took out public SaaS companies that were acquired, and only included a limited number of PE deals.?But it gives you a sense).

There are 500+ and Cloud unicorns today and there will soon be 100 public SaaS and Cloud companies?But being acquired for $1B+ is a little different … it’s some big tech company coming up with a?ton?of cash (sometimes stock, but you get the point) to buy you.?It’s a bigger deal than a VC firm investing at $1B pre-money, in many ways.

But there will be a bunch more $1B+ acquisitions coming in SaaS.

You can’t get there in just a few years.?Go long.