SaaS War: Europe Awakens

Software is eating the world, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is eating software. Global SaaS revenues are expected to grow by $19 billion in 2016, an increase of 22% from 2015, while traditional software revenues are shrinking by $10B. Two dollars in SaaS revenues are created for every $1 of software revenues eaten – an impressive stat, but where does Europe stand on the global SaaS map?

Rising tide

When I was in Silicon Valley, I spent most of my time investing in SaaS companies. When I moved back to Europe in 2011, I had to reduce my activity significantly in this area, as there was not enough going on. Five years later, the picture has changed drastically: five of Accel’s 10 most recent investments in Europe have been SaaS companies. SaaS in Europe is exploding in terms of both quantity and quality. Our analysis estimates that the number of SaaS companies created has grown 4x between 2007-09 and 2013-15, and the amount raised by European SaaS companies has more than doubled. As it takes around 10 years for a SaaS company to reach maturity, the explosion we are seeing at the early stage has not yet translated into a significant number of exits. To date, there have been only four major European SaaS exits (all IPOs), including QlikTech in 2010, Wix in 2013, Zendesk in 2014 and Mimecast in 2015. The combined market cap of these companies today is around $9B. By comparison, the US has seen around 60 SaaS IPOs with a combined market cap of close to $140B ($50B of this is Salesforce).

The Accel EuroScape

To better understand the new generation of SaaS companies, we took a systematic look at more than 1,000 SaaS startups across 12 countries to create the “Accel EuroScape” – a list of the top 100 most promising SaaS companies in Europe and Israel.