Dive Brief:
- Recent research from Venture Beat covering funding, acquisitions and IPOs for more than 80 martech startups and over 250 VCs in Q3, has found $3.8 billion in deals.
- The study covered 23 martech categories, and analytics blew away the field far more than doubling data infrastructure, the category with the second-most dollar value in deals.
- Venture Beat offered the caveat that the actual figure is most likely much higher because their research doesn’t include undisclosed acquisitions, angel investment or friends and family investments.
Dive Insight:
Even though Q3 reached $3.8 billion in martech deals, with higher dollar amounts across the board than Q2, the number of deals was actually lower, and there were more diverse funding partners and investors than previous quarters. According to Venture Beat, this all adds up to indications that martech is becoming more attractive to VCs.
Interestingly, fresh funding is running a little ahead of consolidations, with 31 early A or seed stage investments and 24 acquisitions over the three months of the study. Jon Cifuentes, research analyst, writing at Venture Beat, said, “This means for every consolidation, at least one brand new company popped up in its place. This is up from Q2 and could point to increased investor optimism moving forward.”
Analytics was a billion dollar category, and the biggest change in any category was marketing operations which doubled the Q2 amount.