Full Year 2021 Online & Mobile Industry Trends

2021 Key Highlights

The largest deal in the E-Marketing & Search segment in 2021 was Intuit’s acquisition of Mailchimp, an email marketing firm, for $12 billion. This was the highest value acquisition ever completed by Intuit.

There were 878 financially sponsored transactions with an aggregate value of $150.86 billion, representing 25 percent of the total volume and 42 percent of the total value, respectively.

2021 Key Trends

Total transaction volume in 2021 increased by 17 percent over 2020, from 2,978 to 3,488.

Private equity backed volume improved by 33 percent during this timeframe, from 659 to 878. Strategic volume increased by 13 percent, from 2,319 to 2,610.

Total transaction value in 2021 gained 43 percent over 2020, from $251.39 billion to $359.19 billion.

The median revenue multiple rose from 2.7x in 2020 to 4.0x in 2021. The median EBITDA multiple moved upward from 11.9x in 2020 to 13.8x in 2021.

The segment with the largest rise in volume in 2021 over 2020 was SaaS & Cloud, which improved 34 percent, from 1,065 to 1,424 deals.

M&A Market Overview

Berkery Noyes tracked 9,567 Online & Mobile transactions between 2019 and 2021, of which 1,776 disclosed financial terms, and calculated the aggregate value to be $628.82 billion. Based on known transaction values, we project values of 7,791 undisclosed transactions to be $210.90 billion, totaling $839.72 billion worth of transactions tracked over the past three years.

Disclosed median enterprise value multiples for all segments combined in this report during the last 36 months were 3.0x revenue and 13.0x EBITDA.

Over the past three years, deals in the $10-$20 million range received a median enterprise value multiple of 2.4x revenue, compared to 5.4x revenue for those in the $160 million and above range.