Google M&A History and Trends

As Google celebrates its 15-year anniversary this month, we wanted to dive into some recent trends around its M&A history given some of the company’s most significant areas of focus came as a result of its acquisitions (YouTube and Android as two examples). Since the start of 2007, Google has disclosed 102 acquisitions or acqui-hires ranging from social mapping applications to payments tech platforms to email clients. Prior to being acquired by Google, the 102 acquired companies raised over $900M in aggregate venture capital funding across 123 financing rounds. The two busiest years over the period were 2010 and 2011, when Google acquired over 50 different startups.

Of the Google acquisitions that received funding, 22% were acquired immediately after their seed round, while 17% of companies were acquired after raising Series A funding. Only a handful of venture-backed startups acquired by Google made it to the Series D stage or growth equity stages. The average amount of time between first funding and acquisition was 3.0 years. And the average number of funding rounds for Google-acquired companies since 2007 was just 2.1 rounds.

While the majority of its acquisitions since 2007 have been for U.S.-based companies, Google has not been afraid to look internationally for M&A. Nearly 1/4 of its acquisitions were internationally-based, with Canada seeing the highest number of Google-acquired startups including mobile music streaming service PushLife and locker storage vendor Bufferbox. Within the U.S., 61% of Google’s acquired firms were based in California. 10% of acquisitions were of New York-based companies.  Interestingly, venture capital hub Massachusetts has had fewer Google acquisitions than Washington.

Google has made a strong push on mobile and its recent acquisition activity reflects its mobile strategy. Since 2007, Internet Software & Services made up 64% of its acquisitions. 17% of Google’s acquisitions have come in the Mobile Software & Services space, but over 80% of those mobile acquisitions have come since 2010 including recently acquired Bump Technologies and mobile data startup Behavio.

A number of different investors have backed three startups acquired by Google since 2007. Y Combinator tops the list of investors by portfolio exits to Google, followed by “hyperactive” multi-stage funds Seqouia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Below is a full list of the investors that have backed three or more startups acquired by Google since 2007.

• Y Combinator
• Sequoia Capital
• Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
• Benchmark Capital
• Joshua Schacter
• Draper Fisher Jurvetson
• Mitch Kapor
• BlueRun Ventures
• SV Angel
• Felicis Ventures
• Goldman Sachs

If you liked this analysis, check out our related research on Twitter’s M&A trends and a look at Facebook, Groupon and Zynga’s pre- and post-IPO M&A histories.