Railsbank has been named on the 2020 Accel Euroscape list which contains the top 100 European and Israeli cloud companies at SaaStock EMEA Online.
To put together the list, which was unveiled recently at SaaStockEMEA, more than 1,500 European and Israeli private SaaS companies across 20 countries were surveyed.
The list was part of a report entitled 2020 Accel Euroscape Decacorn Unleashed which was co-authored by Varun Purandare and Candice du Fretay, and published initially on Tech.eu
It makes the point that it is a great time to be a cloud entrepreneur in Europe, with the cloud ecosystem growing much faster than anyone could have anticipated
Very special year
The authors of the report make the point that it has been a “very special year”, mainly because of a number of key trends.
Firstly, we have entered a new era, one that can be labelled The Rise of the Giants, as software companies have enjoyed significant acceleration over the last ten years. And there are now eight software companies north of a $100bn market cap, representing $2.7tn of market value. What’s more the momentum is building, with an estimate that Cloud will overtake on-premise software by 2025, when the entire software market should be worth around $1 trillion. And Europe is joining the race with its first Cloud giants. UiPath became the first European Cloud decacorn in July and Visma, a Norwegian company, became the world’s largest ever software buyout with a plus $12bn valuation.
Silicon Valley state of mind
Secondly, cloud entrepreneurs are embracing the “Silicon Valley state of mind” and Europe has shown even greater acceleration. Accent has increased its investments five-fold in the last five years, backing close to 50 cloud companies of which seven have already become unicorns.
Thirdly, all this momentum is being seen in the public markets, with the average revenue multiple now plus 17 times, close to ten times higher than during the 2008 crisis! Which begs the question, Is the sky the limit for Cloud public stocks?
Although there have only been a few significant large investment rounds, the entire amount invested in private cloud companies in Europe and Israel in 2020 has grown close to 30% so far to $9-9.5bn, which is nearly half the some $20bn invested in US-born cloud companies.
Five trends
As for the future of the cloud ecosystem in Europe, five trends have been identified:
work-from-home (with many companies choosing to go fully remote);
doctors at home (telemedicine services will continue to be very popular);
hyperautomation (Bots and citizen developers transforming the Enterprise);
fintech stack moving to the cloud (API-first platforms disrupting banks and insurance companies);
security (enterprises moving to zero trust architectures).