When we examine any year in enterprise M&A, it’s tempting to highlight the biggest, gaudiest deals — and there were plenty of those in 2020. I’ve written about 34 acquisitions so far this year. Of those, 15 were worth $1 billion or more, 12 were small enough to not require that the companies disclose the price and the remainder fell somewhere in between.

Four deals involving chip companies coming together totaled over $100 billion on their own. While nobody does eye-popping M&A quite like the chip industry, other sectors also offered their own eyebrow-raising deals, led by Salesforce buying Slack earlier this month for $27.7 billion.

Yet in spite of the drama of these larger numbers, the most interesting targets to me were the pandemic-driven smaller deals that started popping up in May. Those small acquisitions are the ones that are so insignificant that the company doesn’t have to share the purchase price publicly. They usually involve early-stage companies being absorbed by cash-rich concerns looking for some combination of missing technology or engineering talent in a particular area like security or artificial intelligence.

It was certainly an active year in M&A, and we still might not have seen the last of it. Let’s have a look at why those minor deals were so interesting and how they compared with larger ones, while looking ahead to what 2021 M&A might look like.

Early-stage blues

It’s always hard to know exactly why an early-stage startup would give up its independence by selling to a larger entity, but we can certainly speculate on some of the reasons why this year’s rapid-fire dealing started in May. While we can never know for certain why these companies decided to exit via acquisition, we know that in April, the pandemic hit full force in the United States and the economy began to shut down.

Some startups were particularly vulnerable, especially companies low on cash in the April timeframe. Obviously companies fail when they run out of funding, and we started seeing early-stage startups being scooped up the following month.

We don’t know for sure of course if there is a direct correlation between April’s economic woes and the flurry of deals that started in May, but we can reasonably speculate that there was. For some percentage of them, I’m guessing it was a fire sale or at least a deal made under less than ideal terms. For others, maybe they simply didn’t have the wherewithal to keep going under such adverse economic conditions or the partnerships were just too good to pass up.

It’s worth noting that I didn’t cover any deals in April. But, beginning on May 7, Zoom bought Keybase for its encryption expertise; five days later Atlassian bought Halp for Slack integration; and the day after that VMware bought cloud native security startup Octarine — and we were off and running. Granted the big companies benefited from making these acquisitions, but the timing stood out.

AWS, Amazon’s flourishing cloud arm, has been growing at a rapid clip for more than a decade. An early public cloud infrastructure vendor, it has taken advantage of first-to-market status to become the most successful player in the space. In fact, one could argue that many of today’s startups wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without the formation of cloud companies like AWS giving them easy access to infrastructure without having to build it themselves.

In Amazon’s most-recent earnings report, AWS generated revenues of $11.6 billion, good for a run rate of more than $46 billion. That makes the next AWS milestone a run rate of $50 billion, something that could be in reach in less than two quarters if it continues its pace of revenue growth.

While the cloud division’s growth is slowing in percentage terms as it comes firmly up against the law of large numbers in which AWS has to grow every quarter compared to an ever-larger revenue base. The result of this dynamic is that while AWS’ year-over-year growth rate is slowing over time — from 35% in Q3 2019 to 29% in Q3 2020 — the pace at which it is adding $10 billion chunks of annual revenue run rate is accelerating.

At the AWS re:Invent customer conference this year, AWS CEO Andy Jassy talked about the pace of change over the years, saying that it took the following number of months to grow its run rate by $10 billion increments:

Image Credits: TechCrunch (data from AWS)

Extrapolating from the above trend, it should take AWS fewer than 12 months to scale from a run rate of $40 billion to $50 billion. Stating the obvious, Jassy said “the rate of growth in AWS continues to accelerate.” He also took the time to point out that AWS is now the fifth-largest enterprise IT company in the world, ahead of enterprise stalwarts like SAP and Oracle.

What’s amazing is that AWS achieved its scale so fast, not even existing until 2006. That growth rate makes us ask a question: Can anyone hope to stop AWS’ momentum?

The short answer is that it doesn’t appear likely.

Cloud market landscape

A good place to start is surveying the cloud infrastructure competitive landscape to see if there are any cloud companies that could catch the market leader. According to Synergy Research, AWS remains firmly in front, and it doesn’t look like any competitor could catch AWS anytime soon unless some market dynamic caused a drastic change.

Image Credits: Synergy Research

With around a third of the market, AWS is the clear front-runner. Its closest and fiercest rival Microsoft has around 20%. To put that into perspective a bit, last quarter AWS had $11.6 billion in revenue compared to Microsoft’s $5.2 billion Azure result. While Microsoft’s equivalent cloud number is growing faster at 47%, like AWS, that number has begun to drop steadily while it gains market share and higher revenue and it falls victim to that same law of large numbers.

OneTrust, the four-year-old privacy platform startup from the folks who brought you AirWatch (which was acquired by VMmare for $1.5 billion in 2014), announced a $300 million Series C on an impressive $5.1 billion valuation today.

The company has attracted considerable attention from investors in a remarkably short time. It came out of the box with a $200 million Series A on a $1.3 billion valuation in July 2019. Those are not typical A round numbers, but this has never been a typical startup. The Series B was more of the same — $210 million on a $2.7 billion valuation this past February.

That brings us to today’s Series C. Consider that the company has almost doubled its valuation again, and has raised $710 million in a mere 18 months, some of it during a pandemic. TCV led today’s round joining existing investors Insight Partners and Coatue.

So what are they doing to attract all this cash? In a world where privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA are already in play, with others in the works in the U.S. and around the world, companies need to be sure they are compliant with local laws wherever they operate. That’s where OneTrust comes in.

“We help companies ensure that they can be trusted, and that they make sure that they’re compliant to all laws around privacy, trust and risk,” OneTrust Chairman Alan Dabbiere told me.

That involves a suite of products that the company has already built or acquired, moving very quickly to offer a privacy platform to cover all aspects of a customer’s privacy requirements, including privacy management, discovery, third-party risk assessment, risk management, ethics and compliance and consent management.

The company has already attracted 7,500 customers to the platform — and is adding1,000 additional customers per quarter. Dabbiere says that the products are helping them be compliant without adding a lot of friction to the building or buying process. “The goal is that we don’t slow the process down, we speed it up. And there’s a new philosophy called privacy by design,” he said. That means building privacy transparency into products, while making sure they are compliant with all of the legal and regulatory requirements.

The startup hasn’t been shy about using its investments to buy pieces of the platform, having made four acquisitions already in just four years since it was founded. It already has 1,500 employees and plans to add around 900 more in 2021.

As they build this workforce, Dabbiere says being based in a highly diverse city like Atlanta has helped in terms of building a diverse group of employees. “By finding the best employees and doing it in an area like Atlanta, we are finding the diversity comes naturally,” he said, adding, “We are thoughtful about it.” CEO Kabir Barday also launched a diversity, equity and inclusion council internally this past summer in response to the Black Lives Matter movement happening in the Atlanta community and around the country.

OneTrust had relied heavily on trade shows before the pandemic hit. In fact, Dabbiere says that they attended as many as 700 a year. When that avenue closed as the pandemic hit, they initially lowered their revenue guidance, but as they moved to digital channels along with their customers, they found that revenue didn’t drop as they expected.

He says that OneTrust has money in the bank from its prior investments, but they had reasons for taking on more cash now anyway. “The number one reason for doing this was the currency of our stock. We needed to revalue it for employees, for acquisitions, and the next steps of our growth,” he said.

UiPath, the robotic process automation startup that has been growing like gangbusters, filed confidential paperwork with the SEC today ahead of a potential IPO.

“UiPath, Inc. today announced that it has submitted a draft registration statement on a confidential basis to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) for a proposed public offering of its Class A common stock. The number of shares of Class A common stock to be sold and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. UiPath intends to commence the public offering following completion of the SEC review process, subject to market and other conditions,” the company said in a statement.

The company has raised more than $1.2 billion from investors like Accel, CapitalG, Sequoia and others. Its biggest raise was $568 million led by Coatue on an impressive $7 billion valuation in April 2019. It raised another $225 million led by Alkeon Capital last July when its valuation soared to $10.2 billion.

At the time of the July raise, CEO and co-founder Daniel Dines did not shy away from the idea of an IPO, telling me:

We’re evaluating the market conditions and I wouldn’t say this to be vague, but we haven’t chosen a day that says on this day we’re going public. We’re really in the mindset that says we should be prepared when the market is ready, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s in the next 12-18 months.

This definitely falls within that window. RPA helps companies take highly repetitive manual tasks and automate them. So for example, it could pull a number from an invoice, fill in a number in a spreadsheet and send an email to accounts payable, all without a human touching it.

It is a technology that has great appeal right now because it enables companies to take advantage of automation without ripping and replacing their legacy systems. While the company has raised a ton of money, and seen its valuation take off, it will be interesting to see if it will get the same positive reception as companies like Airbnb, C3.ai and Snowflake.

Technical manuals and other product content may not be the first things that come to mind when you are thinking of software. But if you’ve ever found yourself in a pickle or just need some help getting something to work correctly, you know how vital they can be, and also how frustrating it can be if you cannot find what you are looking for.

Today, a startup called Zoomin, which has built a platform that uses AI to help companies get their technical documentation in order, and natural language to help better understand what answers people are looking for, so that those content troves can be used better and across more environments, is announcing that it has raised $21 million, and picked up a strategic investor, as it comes out of stealth.

“We are focused on product content assets — manuals, guides, and so on — the most boring assets at every company,” Gal Oron, the CEO and co-founder, joked. “To us, it’s all gold because this is actually the information customers are looking for.”

Bessemer Venture Partners, strategic backer Salesforce Ventures and Viola Growth are leading the funding, which actually came in two parts while Zoomin — founded in Israel but now with operations and its CEO also in New York — was still under the radar.

“We have done no PR for the last four years,” said Gal Oron, who co-founded the company with Joe Gelb and Hannan Saltzman. “It’s because we’ve been very busy developing product and signing our first customers. Now, after having dozens of very big customers and nice traction, we felt like this was the time to go.”

The startup now counts Imperva, Dell, Automation Anywhere and McAfee among its customers, with the companies using the Zoomin platform to better organise their content into something that can be used by both customer service agents helping people with issues, and by customers themselves if they opt to try the DIY option, wherever they might be seeing information: be it on a website, in a customer forum, over email or chat, or in a piece of software or an app itself.

The challenge that Zoomin is going after goes a little something like this: technical content is a boring yet necessary component for using software and hardware, especially when a user comes up against any kind of hitch.

The issue is that a lot of it has been written in fits and spurts, and often in a way that might not be easy for the average user to access or understand, with no easy and quick way of drilling into the content to find what you are specifically looking for. And a lot of it exists in disparate places and these days, the entry points for where a user might be looking for that information might also be as fragmented as the places where the content lives.

“Dell has no way of controlling where you might engage with a product,” Oron explained. It might be on Dell’s site, in its software, on a forum, on social media, and so on.

Zoomin aims to provide what Oron describes as a personalised experience for users wherever they may be searching. By that, he means that Zoomin learns what a user is working with, and what that user typically searching for, in order to connect them more quickly with the right answers. In an app, this might take the form of a widget that appears for help. On a forum, it might more likely be by way of an agent who is participating, using Zoomin’s engine to find the right answers to respond to questions.

For Zoomin, this has so far applied primarily to the world of B2B customer service: its product is used to organise and “orchestrate” knowledge for its customers to in turn provide to business/enterprise customers. But Oron notes that it could be just as applicable, and may well see traction over time, with non-business consumers, too, since at the end of the day they are all consumers, he noted.

“We like to think of ourselves as consumerizing the experience,” he said. “We want to make it as easy as buying on Amazon or browsing Netflix.”

The wider area of “knowledge base management” or knowledge orchestration is often part of a larger customer service play, an unsurprisingly the companies that have products in a similar area include the likes of Zendesk and Hubspot. Other tech companies building solutions to help organise knowledge bases include companies like ProProfs, Helpjuice and Instrktiv.

Salesforce is an interesting strategic investor in that regard: it hasn’t build something like this itself in its community and service clouds, so Zoomin is a close partner to provide that option. (The startup also integrates with a number of other platforms like Oracle’s service cloud, Zendesk, Jira, SharePoint and more.)

“Salesforce Ventures supports bold ideas put forward by enterprise cloud companies, so we are thrilled to support Zoomin on their journey to improve how product content is experienced. We believe in the innovative team at Zoomin and their vision of increasing content accessibility,” added Alex Kayyal, partner and head of Salesforce Ventures International.

Investors are especially interested in the role that a company like Zoomin might be playing these days in particular: with customer service enquiries higher than ever before as more of us are working remotely, it puts a big strain on systems to triage and answer questions. This presents an opportunity.

“The era of digital transformation has clearly reached product content,” said Amit Karp, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners in a statement. “As technical product content continues to grow exponentially, Zoomin allows enterprises to leverage this content as a strategic asset.”

Zoomin is not disclosing valuation at this stage.