After a lackluster year for enterprise technology venture capital investments, 2017 kicked off with a record breaking quarter for enterprise technology..
After a lackluster year for enterprise technology venture capital investments, 2017 kicked off with a record breaking quarter for enterprise technology startups.
Following 4 straight quarters of decreasing investment, investors poured a record-breaking $5 billion dollars into enterprise technology startups in the first quarter of 2017 alone – a nearly 80% increase from the previous quarter – across a record number of 237 deals.
These enterprise startups – solving problems for world’s largest companies around data & analytics, cloud-native infrastructure, cybersecurity, and AI-powered business applications for the future workplace – are building businesses by capturing some of the close to $3.5 trillion that the Global 1000 and Fortune 500 spend every year on software and technology.
And they’re having a moment. Coming on the heels of Cisco’s massive $3.7B acquisition of AppDynamics right before their public offering earlier this year – and MuleSoft’s 45 percent pop on their first day of trading two weeks ago – enterprise is clearly in vogue.
With Alteryx’s IPO last week, there’s still a robust lineup of enterprise exits coming down the pipeline, including Presido, Okta, and Yext, who have all filed S-1s in preparation of an IPO, and speculation from many more including Cloudera, DocuSign, Domo, and Tenable Network Security.
As a venture fund focused exclusively on enterprise technology, we’ve been following these numbers closely at Work-Bench. Using data from our publicly available Enterprise Startups Funding Database – where every week we track and record all publicly announced enterprise technology funding rounds – we took a look at the record-breaking 237 deals completed in Q1 2017.
