There has been a growing number of backend-as-a-service (BaaS) vendors enabling mobile and app developers to link their apps to a back-end cloud infrastructure and features including push notifications and social media integration.
And VCs are paying attention.
In our earlier research, we noted that venture capital financing was pouring into young startups across the developer tools marketplace from debugging platforms to code sharing networks. And a host of companies that offer backend-as-a-service have also received funding. When we strip out funding to Appcelerator, Apigee and Flurry who entered the BaaS market via acquisitions, we see that BaaS startups including Fenox VC-backed Kii, Atlas Venture-backed Kinvey, and Union Square Ventures-backed Firebase have raised $152M in funding across 36 deals since the start of 2010.
The mobile BaaS ecosystem has seen a wave of M&A sweep through. Perhaps the most notable acquisition in the space to date was Facebook’s $85M acquisition of Ignition Partners-backed Parse. Last December, Paypal acquired Stackmob, a Trinity Ventures and Baseline Ventures-backed BaaS development platform. In fact, there have already been five acquisitions of BaaS startups since the start of 2012. Outside of Parse, BaaS acquisitions have been small ball at best, so it will be interesting to monitor whether a venture-backed BaaS startup can scale into a major, potentially IPO-worthy, standalone player in the market.
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