Dear Clients and Friends,
Our report found here contains an update on m&a deals, values, and trends in the dozen+ segments of the information technology industry that we follow, and sometimes lead. Please click here for our July Market Update.
Mark van Rijmenam, Founder of Datafloq and one of the global Big Data influencers, recently published his top tech trends in the InfoTech space. Please click here for that. Mark is a smart guy and sometimes makes me think. In his post, Mark referenced the coming “4th Industrial Revolution”. He didn’t coin the phrase. Klaus Schwab founder of the World Economic Forum wrote a book about the 4th Industrial Revolution in 2016. It’s coming.
There isn’t enough room here to describe this 4th Industrial Revolution. It builds on the “Information Revolution” that began in the 1970s, and now incorporates the “Digital Revolution” that began in the 1980s – and continues. It leverages innovations that came out of the Second Industrial Revolution, which began in the late 1800s and brought us the telephone, electric lights, the first public electric utility and more. Of course the Second Industrial Revolution was built on the first one, which began in the late 1700s and brought us manufacturing process that led to a shift from mostly rural agrarian societies to urban industrial ones.
Our smarter clients are preparing for – and sometimes leading the way into the 4th Industrial Revolution. It’s all about leveraging all that came before together with 21st century advances in fields such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, nano-tech, biotech, robotics, IoT and more. It’s not exactly about Blockchain, prescriptive analytics, Big Data, 5G wireless, mobile apps, cloud computing or even Edge Computing (which may well someday replace cloud computing.) It’s about confluence and integration of all these and more in ways we are just beginning to imagine – embedding technology within societies and even the human body in ways we can barely fathom. China has 4th Revolution building blocks squarely in its sights. So does Silicon Valley.
We’re not there yet and there is plenty of room for trouble. Most IoT devices are still too insecure to inspire trust. Many AI-based tools still too subject to misuse and manipulation. There are privacy issues that make heads spin. But the 4th Industrial Revolution is coming and our smarter clients are positioning themselves to leverage it.
Our latest M&A Market Update can be found here. A few of the more interesting recent info tech m&a transactions over the past month include:
- Microsoft (NYSE:MSFT) agreed to acquire GitHub for $7.5bn,
- Workday (NASDAQ:WDAY) agreed to acquire Adaptive Insights for $1.6bn, valuing the company at an implied 13.5x LTM revenue,
- PayPal (NASDAQ:PYPL) agreed to acquire HyperWallet for $400mm,
- Dataminr (New York, NY) raised $392mm in funding at an implied valuation of $1.6bn from new investors Morgan Stanley,
- Valor Equity Partners and Vulcan Capital, CrowdStrike (Irvine, CA) raised $200mm in a Series E round led by General Atlantic, Institutional Venture Partners and that included return investor Accel Partners valuing the company at more than $3bn,
- Strategic Funding (New York, NY) raised $105mm in a debt funding round from undisclosed investors, Nets (Ballerup, Denmark) agreed to acquire a majority stake in Dotcard for PLN 255mm (~$85mm).
