2019 Was A Breakout Year For B2B SaaS Startups in Germany

There was not a single public B2B SaaS company in Germany as of 2018. (Wirecard is publicly traded but does not have the subscription business model typically associated with SaaS).

If the list of publicly traded B2B SaaS companies is limited to one single company, what about the pipeline of privately held B2B SaaS companies? As of 2018 only two events would have stood out: Celonis became a SaaS unicorn, and IoT company Relayr exited for 300 million. Aside from that — nothing. Nada. Nimic. Rien. Nichts.

Privately held Celonis continues to grow on a global scale and the latest round now values Celonis as a ‘duocorn’ worth more than €2 billion. The company has complemented the three person founder team with senior executive hires to get ready for an IPO. There still are no other private B2B SaaS unicorns Germany, and there is no other SaaS company which is valued more than €500 million at the time of writing.

On the positive side: 2019 saw a flood of funding pour into the most promising B2B startups, and the largest SaaS players cumulatively raised $900 million in just their last funding rounds (it is worth noting that some of these investments were spent on secondaries and the money funneled into the companies was less than the amounts listed below and communicated to the public).

Five companies appear to be valued as high or higher than Relayr at their $300 million exit in 2018:

The list of highest valued B2B SaaS companies is rounded out by Proglove, PowerCloud, Contentful, Wundermobility, and KONUX which are currently valued between $300 million and $200 million (the SaaS list excludes Auto1 which buys and sells actual cars and Adjust whose revenue model is based on transactions).

This confirms that marquee investors will provide the ammunition for Series B and subsequent rounds if they believe that these companies can become global category leaders with a clear path to exit: Accel is an investor in both Celonis and Personio. Insight Partners invested in Staffbase in addition to Commercetools and Lean IX.

And there is an abundance of seed and series A capital available from German venture capital firms to fuel the fire.

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