News: Press Releases, Industry News & Events

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff revealed that the company was “remarkably on track” to having more than a billion AI agents deployed by the end of this year.

This lofty target had originally been announced last year with the big unveiling of Agentforce, the company’s new platform which allows clients to customise and build AI agents able to autonomously execute processes from optimising media campaigns to resolving customer enquiries. The clearly prolific use of the platform by Salesforce clients underscores how rapidly this technology is impacting how human workers carry out their day-to-day tasks. Moreover, it draws attention to a fundamental paradigm shift that’s currently taking place within the Enteprise Software market. 

One of Europe’s most talked-about tech companies right now is Lovable, the Swedish startup which allows users to build apps and websites via prompts. Achieving USD 50m in annual recurring revenue within six months of launching its platform last year, Lovable has at the time of writing over 130,000 paying customers, of which many are enterprise clients paying the highest subscription tier rate. 

Factoring in the USD 22.5m in funding which the company has also racked up to date, it’s perhaps unsurprising that is co-founder Anton Osika has bluntly said “We’re in a great position where we don’t need cash.” Nevertheless, investors are more than ready to provide it anyway, with it being reliably reported that Lovable is now in talks to raise USD 100m, which would potentially value the company at USD 1.5bn and further bolster its position at the vanguard of “vibe coding”. But what is vibe coding exactly?

Dealmaking has been strong in the Enterprise Software sector, with our most recent M&A report showing a significant uptick in transaction numbers in the last reporting period. Amid all this activity, which have been the most prolific buyers whose acquisition strategies have been helping to fuel market momentum? 

Let’s run through the top five players in descending order, as determined by the number of acquisitions between mid-2022 and the start of this year. 

Just over a year ago, we posted on this blog about “why defence tech is no longer taboo”, noting that the grim reality of conflicts and rising tensions around the world had eroded much of the traditional stigma around investing in the sector. We noted how funding for startups such as Mach Industries, ARX and Quantum Systems had in fact “accelerated in recent years, with the importance of defence tech being impossible to deny in an age of dramatic geopolitical turbulence”. 

Now, as we approach the mid-point of 2025, the sector is looming larger than ever on the venture capital landscape, with Jack Wang of VC firm Project A recently telling Sifted that “We’re seeing more founders building in defence tech than ever before”. It’s significant that many hail not from military backgrounds but “instead mainstream tech – from ex-unicorn founders to ex-Palantir engineers.”

Hampleton Partners, the international M&A and corporate finance advisory firm for software and technology companies, has appointed Tom Schmähling as Managing Director.

Based in Germany, Tom has garnered immense experience across a number of senior M&A roles, most recently as Global Head of Corporate Development & M&A at the healthcare company Mediq BV. He has built M&A departments from the ground up, leading global transactions and post-merger integration, and playing a key role in shaping corporate strategies and driving both national and international growth.

Investors and acquirers are showing renewed confidence in e-commerce agencies and service providers, with the most recent reporting period – 2H24 – seeing deal numbers bounce back to reach the second-highest level on record for this space. 

This resurgence has come in the wake of a fairly sluggish period for Digital Commerce as a whole.  As Hampleton Partners’ Sector Principal Ralph Hübner observed in our most recent market report on the sector, while Digital Commerce M&A numbers have been rising, the pace has been “kept in check by the lingering effects of recent macroeconomic headwinds and the stringent requirements of acquirers less willing to take risks in a volatile market environment”. 

As our most recent Enterprise Software M&A Report has confirmed, investor confidence is riding high in the sector. The most recent reporting period saw an 18% surge in the number of transactions, reflecting a strong appetite among acquirers for tech companies meeting the rising demand for software tools which drive workplace efficiencies – whether that’s in terms of customer relationship management, document management or design testing and simulation. 

The leveraging of AI by Enterprise Software companies has certainly fuelled momentum in the sector. However, there has been a notable shift when it comes to the valuations of AI-focused acquisition targets. While such companies continue to be highly sought-after, accounting for 30% of deals closed over the past 30 months, their valuations have dropped precipitously over the last couple of years. Let’s look a little more closely at what’s been going on.

At the start of this year, headlines were generated by research showing that the value of the UK tech industry had crossed the USD 1.2 tn mark. This was a 20% increase since 2023, confirming the impressive resilience of the British market in the face of considerable countervailing factors such as inflationary pressures, geopolitical turbulence and post-pandemic caution on the part of investors.

Now, a little deeper into 2025, the picture continues to be a rosy one, with news that the amount of venture capital raised in the UK in the first quarter was USD 4.2bn. Not only is this 8% higher than what was amassed in Q1 2024, but it’s also bigger than what has so far been raised in Germany, France and Spain combined. 

Our latest Autotech & Mobility M&A Report discusses several key factors impacting the market right now, including the tariffs which the EU last year slapped onto electric vehicles being imported from China. Now, with tariffs back in the headlines thanks to a more widescale tax burden being applied by the Trump administration to auto imports to the US, it’s worth pausing to consider the changes afoot in the autotech sector.

The latest Digital Commerce M&A report from Hampleton Partners reveals that deal activity in the sector has grown for the second reporting period in a row. While the pace of activity has, in the words of our Sector Principal Ralph Hübner, “been kept in check by the lingering effects of recent macroeconomic headwinds and the stringent requirements of acquirers less willing to take risks in a volatile market environment”, there are several key trends which indicate the sector will continue towards a more bullish path.

One particularly significant trend discussed in the report is the strong interest in influencer marketing companies, which have become highly sought-after acquisition targets. While some more cynical media commentators have speculated that the sheer number of lifestyle gurus, travel vlog creators and cooking channel presenters out there has reached saturation point (“peak influencer”), the data suggests that we’re in fact entering a particularly fertile era for influencer partnerships.