What are you looking for?

Whether you're a tech founder or senior executive, embarking on the M&A process can be undeniably daunting. You’ll obviously want to maximise your chances of getting the best outcome from the sale of your company, but how can you ensure you’re on the right path?

We recently wrote about some of the major tech takeovers in 2022 and what they said about larger M&A patterns in the industry. We’ve also looked back at seven key developments across the whole tech world this year. But now that the new year is only a couple of days old (where did the time go?), it’s time to look ahead and consider what major trends are coming our way in 2023.

Well, it’s certainly been a dramatic year in tech, and we’re not just talking about the world’s richest man walking into Twitter HQ holding a sink in his hands. Aside from such headline-making industry shake-ups, there’s understandably been much media commentary about the extent to which investments, valuations and M&A deals have been impacted by the world’s adjustment to the post-pandemic landscape.

2022 has been a rollercoaster for the tech industry, but that was to be expected. After all, this was the year we emerged from the pandemic-fuelled reorganisation of everyday life which had had such an impact on tech use and, consequently, tech investment in 2020 and 2021.

Is global financial volatility causing company CIOs to tighten their belts when it comes to spending on IT & business services? Quite the opposite.

In 2021, the online marketing platform Mailchimp was sold to Intuit for $12 billion, in what was the biggest ever exit by a bootstrapped tech company.

This has been a bumpy year for various tech markets. But if there’s one vertical that’s been weathering the storm, it’s fintech. Exactly a decade on from 2012, the year that, in the words of a recent TechCrunch article, “fintech morphed into a sustained movement that would drastically changed how most people manage their money”, the sector has managed to defy the downturn.

When it comes to the range of solutions offered across countless verticals, the tech industry has never been more diverse. But there’s still plenty of scope for improvement when it comes to gender parity among founders and leaders.

The Proptech M&A Market Report from Hampleton Partners, the international M&A and corporate finance advisory firm for technology companies, reveals that the first half of 2022 saw 55 property technology (Proptech) deals, 57 per cent up on 1H2020 and 12 per cent up on 1H2021 numbers.

Hampleton Partners has advised Omnio.net ApS on its transaction with IBM (NYSE:IBM).