It would also prompt a big uptick in valuation from the last recorded valuation for the 10-year-old San Francisco-based company. Figma was valued around $10 billion in its Series E funding led by in June 2021. Its earlier investors, which include and , are poised to do very well from this acquisition.��

The largest technology acquisition prior to this announcement was ’s purchase of n 2014 for $19 billion. And the third largest is ’s purchase of in 2018 for $16 billion.��

This is not the only billion-dollar acquisition for Adobe in recent years.��

The San Jose-based digital marketing and design company founded in 1982 has acquired cloud service companies with a wide range of capabilities in recent years.�� 

Adobe acquired marketing automation platform from which took the company private in 2016 for around $1.8 billion. Adobe paid $4.8 billion in 2018. In the same year, Adobe acquired cloud commerce platform for $1.7 billion.

More recently, in 2020 it acquired enterprise workplace management company for $1.5 billion and in 2021 video collaboration platform for $1.3 billion.

Strong market response

The public markets have not reacted well to the announcement, with Adobe’s stock trending down 17% in a day. Adobe reported $4.43 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2022 showing 13% year-over-year growth. Adobe forecasts that Figma’s recurring annual revenue will be .��

In 2005, when Adobe acquired , a web design software developer and a big competitor at the time, for $3.4 billion in a stock transaction which amounted to 18% of its stock, the market either.��

Still, the Figma acquisition offers clear advantages. With the advent of the cloud and scaled pricing from SaaS businesses, gaining a significant user base through product—and price—differentiation has led to innovation and competition. Incumbents are not always well-positioned to launch lower-priced options at scale. Acquiring your way into that makes ultimate business sense.��

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According , a Seattle-based technology publication, the deal was in the $200 million range, but precise figures were not reported.

Apple, for its part, didn’t have much to say on the matter. The company delivered its standard response when asked about the deal by GeekWire: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

What is Xnor.ai and what does it do? According to , its technology “runs deep learning models efficiently ​on edge devices such as phones, IoT devices, cameras, drones, and embedded CPUs.”

An archived snapshot of the company’s website explains the basics of its technology. “Traditional deep learning models for convolutional network uses 32-bit precision floating point operations processed on GPUs, which are generally cost prohibitive for everyday products. Xnor reduces the precision down to a single bit and processes it using binary operations like XNOR and pop-count, which are standard instructions on low cost CPU platforms.”

The company’s website also stated that “[m]odels already developed include detection, recognition, tracking, segmentation, face recognition, scene classification, pose estimation, image enhancement, emotional recognition, and voice command.”

Researchers at Xnor.ai developed an object detection model they called (aka YOLO), which the company licensed to enterprise customers including internet-connected home security camera company Wyse.

9to5Mac that Wyse told its customers that its Person Detection feature will be temporarily unavailable “due to the unexpected termination of our agreement with our AI provider.” Wyse plans to build out this feature in-house. It’s unclear how many other customers may be affected by the acquisition.

Xnor’s is not the first acquisition Apple has made in the machine learning sector. In August 2016, Apple acquired Turi, which was also based in Seattle, reportedly for around $200 million as well.

Xnor was founded in late 2016 by and as a spinout from the Allen Institute For Artificial Intelligence (AI2), which was founded and backed by late Microsoft executive Paul Allen. AI2’s first successful spinout was , a natural language processing workflow technology company which for an undisclosed amount.

Xnor raised $14.6 million in prior venture backing, according to Crunchbase data. Its last round, led by , was announced in May 2018.

This is Apple’s first disclosed acquisition of 2020.

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If you’re the last minute booker? . Want easier expensing? . Crave a tech-enabled, amenity-rich hotel? Mint House. And if you’re the manager that needs to streamline all your employees travels together? . Or . Or . Or , again.��

As you can see there’s no shortage of startups in the travel space. And behemoths like are taking notice. Just yesterday, the online travel company acquired , a platform that offers short term corporate rentals. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.��

And a few months before this acquisition, Airbnb scooped up , a San Francisco startup that helps corporate travelers make last-minute bookings. The company, which claims it will go public eventually, has bought more companies this year already (4) than it did in total last year (1).��

The chart below shows the acquisition pace Airbnb has been on in the last year.��

Beyond acquisitions, Airbnb investment history . The company has put money into Oyo, a hotel startup in India that manages budget hotels, as well as , a coworking service targeted toward women.��

I have two bets regarding Airbnb’s startup appetite. First, it may be able to scoop up smaller startups but it needs to diversify as its late stage competition grows. Last month, for example, San Francisco based company Sonder raised $210 million to make hospitable short-term rentals. And China’s raised $250 million a few months before that to offer global travel services. And we haven’t even brought up other rivals like and .

Long gone are the days that Airbnb was just a platform that connects people to a . So Airbnb’s play to tap into a market like business travel, which will only grow as the global economy strengthens, makes sense. For competitive reasons, it’s logical that Airbnb is investing time and money into acquiring smaller, corporate-travel focused competitors.��

My second, and final wager stems from Airbnb’s potential IPO. If it ever does choose to go public, the company is slowly adding new brains and more revenue to its operations.��

And if these bets work out in the company’s favor, its public debut will be a little more hospitable.

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The tech behemoth recently acquired , a Redwood City-based digital health startup for an undisclosed amount, according to citing “a person familiar with the deal” and . (When we say recently, it’s believed the acquisition actually took place in late 2018, according to CNBC, but was only recently leaked.)

Founded in 2015, Tueo Health raised over its lifetime, according to its Crunchbase profile. The company, whose name comes from the Latin word “meaning to observe, care for, and maintain,” is focused on asthma management.

According to conducted by Stanford University with two of the startup’s co-founders, Tueo’s “system includes a non-contact sleep sensor and a smart phone application that given [sic] parents access to data and guidance about their child’s condition.”

We’ve reached out to Apple and will update the story if the company gets back to us.

Presumably, Apple is interested in incorporating the startup into its products and most likely into the Apple Watch.

According to CNBC, Apple has only made two other healthcare-related purchases, including the 2016 buy of and the 2017 acquisition of , a sleep sensor maker.

Below is a chart of the number of known startup acquisitions the Cupertino-based company has made since 2011. CEO that Apple actually has been buying companies “every two to three weeks” and “has acquired 20 to 25 companies in the past six months.” However, Apple has notoriously kept quiet about many of its purchases, explaining the deal count difference between what Crunchbase has on record and what Tim Cook has told the press.

As you can see in the table below, the company has announced (or leaked) five known acquisitions since the beginning of this year alone, according to Crunchbase data. In March, it picked up , a machine learning startup that helps deliver user-specific content. And in February, Apple acquired not one, but two, startups: (formerly ToyTalk), an eight-year-old AI voice startup, and UK-based , a three-year-old digital marketing startup.

As Apple continues to attempt to diversify and not be so reliant on iPhone sales, we expect we’ll continue to see more acquisitions of startups, especially those focused on services, in the near future.

Disclosure: The author’s husband works for Apple in the Austin office.

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Along the way, it might make sense for a rapidly-growing startup to acquire other businesses as it builds toward massive scale. Recently, Crunchbase News has explored different facets of unicorns—privately-held high-growth technology businesses which achieve a $1 billion valuation—and their acquisition habits. Last month, we found that Airbnb, Automattic, and Pinterest are the most acquisitive U.S.-based unicorns in the market today.  We also found a trend that suggests more recently founded unicorns are acquiring smaller startups earlier on in their own venture’s lifecycle, as compared to older unicorns.

Our focus in these analyses has been on U.S.-based unicorns, mostly because there are so many of them. On , over 190 are U.S. based, accounting for over 40 percent of the total.

We’ll look at whether unicorns are more likely to acquire companies domestically (e.g. from the same country) or internationally (e.g. companies headquartered in a different country). On a country-by-country basis, this may show which countries have more robust startup ecosystems, which can feed back into its most successful upstarts. We’ll start with the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) made by U.S. unicorns before taking a brief look at M&A patterns in unicorns from other countries.

U.S. Unicorn M&A Is Pretty U.S.-Centric

Somewhat unsurprisingly, most mergers and acquisitions happen domestically. Out of the over 300 total unique M&A transactions made by over 100 privately-held U.S. unicorns, the surpassing majority were for U.S. startups.

Crunchbase data indicates that just under four in five acquisitions made by U.S. unicorns involve a U.S.-headquartered startup on the sell side of the transaction. In descending order, the next most common countries for U.S. unicorn M&A deals are the U.K. and Canada (which are more or less tied), followed by Israel, and India, which as a group of four make up roughly 13 percent of deal origins. Just over nine percent of startups came from other countries.2

International Unicorn M&A Is Pretty Domestic, Too

Unicorns outside the U.S. aren’t slouching when it comes to M&A either.

In the chart below, we plot the split between foreign and domestic transactions among international unicorns. The column of numbers to the right of the graphic indicates the total number of M&A transactions analyzed, split by unicorn’s location.

The data indicates that unicorns outside the U.S. tend to follow the same general pattern: most of the companies they acquire are headquartered in the same country. However, while biased in favor of buying domestic, international unicorns are comparatively more likely to acquire abroad.

Even when your product or service can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection and a mobile device, business is pretty localized. This is particularly true of the startup business, which makes sense. The upswing of larger funding rounds at seed and early-stage notwithstanding, startups are resource-constrained, almost by definition. Far-flung business excursions aren’t a big line item in the budget when scaling in your home market is the task at hand. That is, .

World Domination, One Deal At A Time

International expansion makes sense when the market at home becomes saturated, or in a highly competitive market where an advantage is conferred to the first mover.

The ride-hailing market has many examples of this dynamic. Paris-based accounts for ten of the twelve acquisitions in the chart above. (The other two were by music streaming service .) In , it’s easy to see a global strategy at play. The French ride-hailing company bought up several similar service providers in Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Ukraine, and Mexico, all in the service of expanding its international footprint. In 2017, Crunchbase News covered a similar pattern, this time involving direct startup investments, by Chinese ride-hailing giant , which we revisited in May 2018.

Ride-hailing unicorns aren’t alone. In the travel booking and accommodations business , the most acquisitive private U.S. unicorn, also cast the furthest geographical net. Besides all of its M&A deals with American companies, Airbnb also bought a raft of international companies, including: and (Germany), (France), (U.K.) and (Spain).

Raleigh, NC-based video game company has acquired four international companies in 2018 and 2019. These include U.K.-based , Finnish company , Serbian studio , and Vancouver, Canada-based . And as a final example, developer tool-maker is another U.S. company with all-international M&A. Gitlab acquired Norway-based in 2015, U.K.-based in 2017, and Quebec City, Canada-based in 2018.

Perhaps unicorns from smaller countries buy outside their borders more frequently than those who are from larger locales. But it’s certainly true that American unicorns, and there are so many, shop locally. And that’s too bad for some global companies looking for exits to larger startups, as they’ll have to find a buyer in shallower, local markets.

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On Monday afternoon, the companies  they “have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire eero.”

At this time, neither party is disclosing the size of the transaction. Crunchbase data shows that eero raised a fairly sizable sum—at least across several known rounds—from VCs since it was founded in early 2015. The firm’s prior investors include , , , , , and , among .

“We are incredibly impressed with the eero team and how quickly they invented a WiFi solution that makes connected devices just work,” said Dave Limp, SVP of Amazon Devices and Services, in the announcement. “We have a shared vision that the smart home experience can get even easier, and we’re committed to continue innovating on behalf of customers.”

Amazon has acquired a number of other hardware and services companies in the recent past. In December 2017, Amazon bought smart WiFi-connected home security camera startup . Two months later app-connected smart doorbell company for $1 billion.

Eero shares a similar business model with Ring. Apart from hardware revenue, both companies generate additional income from optional monthly software subscriptions to augment the hardware’s functionality.

In eero’s case, ($99 per year) adds some cybersecurity features, ad-blocking, and content filtering for families with kids. Eero Plus comes bundled with VPN protection through Encrypt.me, password management through 1Password, and antivirus screening through Malwarebytes. No word yet on whether that bundle or service package will change under Amazon’s aegis.

Given this M&A history, eero is an intuitive fit for Amazon’s broader smart home strategy. Its ever-expanding family of voice assistant-enabled Echo devices, security cameras, and smart doorbells all connect to one another through home WiFi.

Eero’s tech now has the potential to close a loop for Amazon; owning more layers of the smart home stack (now including the network) may give the ecommerce/web services/grocery/media/smart home conglomerate a lasting ecosystem advantage over other tech giants, which have either eschewed the smart home market entirely or have been slow to adapt.

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Osmo develops and launched its app and a suite of educational toys that interact with its software platform through the camera of an iPad or Kindle Fire tablet. Kids can learn basic problem solving and spatial reasoning with these toys and through the game-like interface of the application.

Prior to its acquisition, Osmo had raised in outside funding, the last of which arrived in . , , and , among , are investors in Osmo. The company will continue operating as a separate brand of hardware and software products after the transaction is complete, according to a statement from the company. Osmo is Palo Alto-based and has about 60 employees.

, co-founder and CEO of Osmo, told Crunchbase News in a phone interview that the deal made strategic sense for both companies and kind of came by surprise.

Three months ago, Sharma said, Osmo had almost closed a new round of funding (for what would have been its Series C), when he met , co-founder and CEO of ���۴���’S. Realizing they had similar backgrounds—both working in educational technology, both hailing from small villages in India—and complementary businesses, acquisition talks proceeded quickly. “We made the decision within a week,” according to Sharma.

“Platform-thinking is in our DNA,” said Sharma, who, alongside his co-founder , quit software engineering jobs at Google to start Osmo. According to Raveendran, ���۴���’S had been focused on “building a content-driven platform” built around what he referred to as “the DNA of learning.” Add to that that Osmo already had traction in a market segment and geography ���۴���’S wanted to expand, and you’ve got a corporate genetic match.

Raveendran said he’s known about Osmo’s product for awhile. ���۴���’S had been working to develop and roll out content for a younger audience, aimed at kids between the ages of three and eight. Accordingly, Raveendran had a professional interest in tracking the market for young kids’ educational products, but he also had a personal reason: “I have a five year-old son, and he’s been playing with Osmo for the past eight months.”

Raveendran said that ���۴���’S currently has “over 1,000 people” working on video content and game development.

“This makes us one of the biggest studios in India,” he said. Raveendran said his company is growing revenues by ten percent month-over-month. The application has 30 million registered students, two million of which pay for a subscription.

Osmo is the first U.S.-based company that ���۴���’S has acquired, but it has made in the past. in the education technology company include , , , and the .

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Campaign Monitor Acquires Two Startups

, an email management provider, has acquired two startups: and . Terms of the deals were not disclosed.

However, the two deals note a broader trend of continued consolidation in the email management and marketing automation space. Both Liveclicker and Sailthru help enterprises manage, customize, and send emails for a number of enterprise companies. Other startups in the space include Autopilot.

It would not be a surprise to see more deals like this happening. Email is playing an increasingly important part of many digital marketing strategies as social networks slowly tamp down the traffic tap. (It’s possible a trends piece on the market Crunchbase News should add to the editorial calendar. We’ll see!)

WorkJam And Peerio

Flexible work environments require flexible communication techniques, and a number of companies have emerged to bring digital office and communication management to the flexible work world.

In another acquisition for Canada, Montreal-based , a digital workplace management startup, has acquired , a workplace communication company, for an undisclosed amount.

Peerio was founded in 2014 in Montreal and received $1.3 million in seed-stage funding from Canada-based early-stage investor, . The company specifically focuses on encrypted communication and file storage. Peerio essentially directly competed with Slack.

This is the first acquisition for WorkJam, which has raised a known total of $12 million from New York-based . It is both acquiring the technology and assets and bringing the Peerio team on board. The platform will be incorporated into WorkJam’s suite of products aiming to increase workplace engagement.

Smartsheet Acquires Slope

You can make spreadsheets smart, but that doesn’t always mean it’s collaborative. , a public company, has acquired , a startup that focused on helping companies “review and approve creative work,” according to its website.

The startup raised $2.6 million. There is no word on the acquisition price. In a , Smartsheet noted that “Slope’s intuitive content review and proofing functionality will let Smartsheet users provide feedback on images, videos, documents and other content, enabling a broad set of powerful use cases that drive collaboration and fit seamlessly into existing workflows.”

Correction: Slope raised $2.6 million, not $1.4 million as originally reported.

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Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. A statement from G2 Crowd states that Siftery’s co-founding CEO , CTO , and the company’s 20 employees will be joining G2 Crowd as part of the acquisition deal. G2 Crowd will be seeking new office space to accommodate its existing San Francisco team and those joining the company from Siftery. Siftery has offices in Bangalore and Kiev; international employees will get to keep their jobs.

G2 Crowd is, primarily, a business software discovery platform. Medical offices looking for new billing programs, startups looking for payroll solutions, and IT teams looking for email security tools can all search for that software on G2 Crowd. G2 Crowd also collects reviews, ratings, and pricing information about each product in its index. G2 Crowd offers paid promotion and data reporting features to software and service vendors.

Siftery, which has amassed a deep set of data about the tools and technologies companies use in their business and infrastructure stacks, brings data and technical expertise to G2 Crowd’s table.

Siftery has raised $4.1 million in known venture funding. Its most recent financing, , was announced in February 2016. include , , , , and , among others.2

G2 Crowd asserts the deal was strategic. A representative from the company told us acquiring Siftery “brings a third pillar to the G2 Crowd business,” extending the company’s scope beyond helping its customers discover and purchase new software.

The merger will also help G2 Crowd’s users track and manage that software. Siftery launched its Siftery Track service in February 2018. According to from the time, Siftery Track “connects to an accounting system or other financial accounts and automatically generates beautiful visualizations of historic and forecasted spend by product, category, or team.”

Through email correspondence, G2 Crowd’s CEO described the acquisition as “a match made in heaven,” punctuating this statement with a smiley face emoticon.

Abel said that Siftery’s co-founders have a vision “for disrupting B2B technology buying and selling” that very closely aligns with G2 Crowd’s. “We agreed that together we can realize our joint vision much more quickly,” Abel wrote. “We both share the belief that by using real-time peer advice and benchmarking technology stack and spend, we can help businesses realize their full potential by recommending the best technology stacks for all businesses and making it really easy for the buyers to connect with and purchase from the best fit vendors. Together we have far more data and AI-driven tools to help realize this vision very quickly.”

Later, he wrote that “[G2 Crowd] will be able to immediately bring the Siftery technology to the two million tech buyers visiting G2 Crowd every month, as well as add 30,000 more products to the G2 Crowd review platform and millions of data-points on best fit technology stacks.”

Abel also said that bringing in Siftery’s product team “will almost double our engineering capacity overnight.” Siftery’s tech, in turn, stands to benefit from G2 Crowd’s “much larger brand and distribution engine […] to dramatically accelerate Siftery’s growth,” Abel said.

According to Abel, “all existing Siftery users will be able to continue to use the Siftery platform as usual.” He said that, for now, G2 Crowd and Siftery’s products “will initially operate independently while we improve the integrations to the core G2 Crowd platform and unify the data structures.”

As for future deals the company might be exploring, Abel takes no options off the table.

“Any other companies that are aligned with our mission are on our radar,” he said. “If they’re helping individuals and teams maximize their potential, through better software decisions, then we’re rowing in the same direction.”

On G2 Crowd’s prospects as a startup, one early investor told Crunchbase News: “Man, I wish we had more money in G2 Crowd.” They said more news about G2 Crowd is coming in 2019.

Seven months into 2017, we’ve seen just one big unicorn M&A deal: . And that was back in January. Two other one-time unicorns acquired this year, data management technology provider and Middle Eastern online retailer , sold for well below their peak private valuations.

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The unicorn M&A scene looks particularly sluggish and valuation-challenged when compared to last year. In 2016, acquirers snapped up five tech unicorns at prices that were higher or about the same as their private valuations (here’s the ). And none of those companies had to first dangle the prospect of an impending IPO, as was the case for AppDynamics, which sold days before its planned public debut.

It’s not just the unicorn space where big deals aren’t happening. So far, this year, (defined here as those that raised $20 million or more in venture investment) have gone on to be acquired for disclosed or reported valuations over $100 million. Meanwhile, in 2016, there were at valuations of $500 million or more.

Still, big new rounds keep getting done in 2017. Over 450 companies in sectors other than life sciences (meaning primarily tech) have raised rounds of $20 million or more, according to Crunchbase data. Of those, at least have been for $100 million or more, up from 75 in the same period last year. A single investor,, has been a backer of 14 companies that raised financings of $100 million or more this year.

What Does It Mean?

So what’s going on? Can this be written off as just a slow period for big venture-backed M&A? Is it a valuation issue? Or are there structural shifts occurring that explain acquirers’ wariness to shell out for big purchases?

“It could be happenstance, or some sectors may be running into resistance due to high multiples,” says , managing partner at early-stage firm . He added that acquirers may also be waiting on the sidelines to see what happens with proposed tax reforms.

A Trump administration plan to may be a factor in delaying M&A. Currently, of dollars in overseas accounts to shelter their earnings from U.S. taxes. Apple alone is estimated to be holding on to a cash stockpile of over $250 billion, most in non-U.S. accounts. The Trump proposal would reportedly cut public companies’ income tax rate to 15 percent from 35 percent. It would also cut the tax on repatriated offshore earnings to 10 percent.

Fast-growing, venture-backed companies are also finding it easier to stay private longer,  making them less receptive to sub-optimal acquisition offers. After all, who needs an exit when SoftBank is offering a fast $200 million?

Unicorns and near-unicorns are also looking to extend their exit timelines by providing some returns to early investors and employees. Rohit Kulkarni, who heads up private investment research for private company marketplace told Crunchbase News he has seen “significantly higher activity in terms of early investors and employees seeking liquidity.”

Typically, Kulkarni says, early investors are looking to sell 10 to 15 percent of their holdings, and employees somewhat more. Such sales are no substitute for an acquisition or IPO exit, but it can help a company retain key employees, satisfy stakeholders, and delay exit by perhaps a year or more.

While big M&A deals aren’t happening, companies can also still tap into a fairly receptive IPO market. Last week’s well-received debut of tech-focused real estate brokerage Redfin showed there are pockets of strong retail investor demand—even amidst suffering in the broader IPO market for some recently-debuted tech shops.