Similar to venture investments, M&A activity slowed in August with lower average acquisition prices and far fewer deals. Despite high-profile exits for Twitch and Tim Hortons, total acquisitions dropped nearly 15% from July.
According to CrunchBase data, companies spent over $52B acquiring 65 companies. This figure doesn’t include the 120+ acquisitions with undisclosed amounts, and is notably less than July’s $167B through 100 acquisitions, with similar undisclosed numbers.
The biggest acquisition of the month was American fast food giant Burger King acquiring Canada’s Tim Hortons in an $11B cash-and-stock deal, but not without controversy. Meanwhile, Intermune, a biotech company focused on pulmonology and orphan fibrotic diseases, was also acquired for a high amount by Swiss pharmaceuticals giant Roche in an all-cash transaction valued at $8.3B. Reports of Google preparing to acquire popular game-streaming service Twitch had gamers on their toes, but Amazon ultimately won out agreeing to pay $970M in cash. According to CrunchBase data, Twitch had raised $35M from investors including Bessemer and Alsop Louie.
While it may have lost out on Twitch, Google still managed to acquire five smaller companies in August that apparently passed the tech giant’s “toothbrush test.” Even though financial terms were undisclosed for the deals, CrunchBase data indicates that most of the acquired companies are focused on mobile and only received early stage funding before being acquired. Directr, a mobile app that lets users create movies on their phones, raised $1.7M; Emu Messenger, a messaging app with a built-in assistant, raised $1.5M in a single seed round last year; and Jetpac, a mobile travel recommendation app, raised $2.4M through a Series A round. Both Zync Reader, a cloud-based visual effects storage and rendering platform, and Gecko Design, a product design firm, were also acquired by Google but has no disclosed funding data in CrunchBase.
Other acquisitions from tech giants this month include Yahoo! acquiring both restaurant discovery app Zofari and ad-fraud prevention software ClarityRay; Twitter acquiring social media data provider Gnip; and Facebook acquiring data security software company PrivateCore.
According to CrunchBase data, companies in food, biotechnology, and games had the highest cumulative acquisition prices this month. In terms of number of deals, companies in business services, enterprise software, and manufacturing (particularly packaging) had the most M&As this month, but many biotech, food, games, health, marketing, advertising, and curated web companies were also swooped up.
For more acquisitions, be sure to check out our ever-growing Acquisitions page.
Photo via Flickr user Waldemar Merger
