Cloud Europe 2017: The Factory is Cranking
Published
Sep 19, 2017
Written by
Accel
Europe is fertile ground for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies, as shown in our comprehensive look at SaaS last year, “SaaS Wars – Europe Awakens”. Since then, momentum has only accelerated, and we’ve published a fresh edition of the top 100 European SaaS companies in conjunction with SaaStock 2017.
But, first, let’s take a look at the overall health of the SaaS industry.
12 cloud IPOs in the past 2 years: One from Europe
SaaS companies are thriving in the public markets, with their aggregated market cap grew 350% since 2011, and 12 cloud companies going public in the past 24 months. These 12 have performed well, with an aggregate $2.6 billion in revenues (growing 39% year-on-year) and $25B of market cap. Compared to Salesforce, the industry leader, the stats were not too dissimilar over the same period: its market cap grew by $19B and its revenue increased by $3.3B.
Looking closer at the 12 companies, we can conclude that it takes a $100m+ revenue run rate and 30-50% growth to go public in the current environment, even if several companies like Atlassian and Cloudera waited to reach $300M+ revenues before going public. However, the companies’ annualised free cash flow showed a big variation, ranging from -$100M for Box and Cloudera to +$100M for Atlassian.