Mmhmm
Valuation: $107.35 million, according to PitchBook
Mmhmm is building an app intended to allow people to virtually share their screen in a video call and remain in the picture at the same time, as Business Insider's Katie Canales reports , and was founded by by ex-Evernote CEO Phil Libin.
The company is still very young and in October raised a $31 million round of financing led by Sequoia Capital.
Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi told Business Insider in August she thinks Mmhmm could be a good acquisition target for Microsoft to build out its popular Teams workplace chat app and "help with the huge number of kids who like to do videos while playing Minecraft."
LoopUp
Market cap at the time of this writing: Nearly $60 million (trades on the London Stock Exchange)
LoopUp offers a subscription-based conference and remote meeting service. Raul Castanon-Martinez, a S&P Global Market Intelligence analyst, told Business Insider in September that the London-based company could help Microsoft bolster its Teams communications app.
"Microsoft has been on the offensive in the past few years looking to counter the challenge from emerging [software as a service] providers such as Slack and Zoom that have disrupted the communications and collaboration space," Castanon-Martinez said at the time. "A key area that could support this strategy is to expand the telephony capabilities in Teams."
LoopUp recently launched a Microsoft Teams integration, and Castanon-Martinez said Microsoft could acquire the company to compete against key industry players like Cisco and RingCentral.
Castanon-Martinez also said Microsoft might follow up recent telecom acquisitions, such as Metaswitch Networks and 5G startup Affirmed Networks, with another acquisition in the space, Raul Castanon-Martinez, a S&P Global Market Intelligence analyst.
Potential candidates, he said, include "communication platform as a service companies" like France-based Wazo, New York-based Voximplant and London-based Infobip.
Superhuman
Valuation: $260 million as of June 2019, per PitchBook
Superhuman builds an app intended to help users empty their inboxes in what it bills as "the fastest email experience ever made." Unlike most other email apps, it's not free — rather, it requires a $30/month subscription to use. In return, users get access to all kinds of email decluttering tools, including a conversational view that makes email look like a text message, as well as powerful keyboard shortcuts.
Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi in August said Superhuman could help Microsoft "modernize" its Outlook email app.
Automation Anywhere
Valuation: $6.8 billion, according to PitchBook
Robotic process automation — which helps companies automate repetitive tasks like data entry — is a fast-growing market, and it's a type of acquisition Futurum Research analyst Daniel Newman could be in the cards for Microsoft.
Automation Anywhere could be a likely candidate for a Microsoft acquisition "due to market momentum and pre-IPO nature," he said in September. Its leading competitors include startup UiPath, as well as Microsoft itself .
Dropbox
Market cap at the time of this writing: $9.76 billion
Dropbox builds a popular cloud-based file storage service. Microsoft already has a similar service with its OneDrive – but it wouldn't necessarily be acquiring Dropbox for its features.
"With over 500 million users, Dropbox doesn't necessarily add volumes to its current OneDrive capabilities, but it brings an enormous loyal user base and its revenues with it," Futurum Research analyst Daniel Newman said in September.
UiPath
Valuation: $10.2 billion, according to PitchBook
UiPath builds helps businesses automate common and routine tasks through robotic process automation technology, competing with the likes of Automation Anywhere and Microsoft itself.
The startup this month confidentially filed paperwork to go public. Newman said UiPath is among the most likely potential RPA acquisitions for Microsoft.
Crowdstrike
Market cap at the time of this writing: $47 billion
Microsoft could buy cybersecurity company Crowdstrike, RBC Capital Markets said in its 2020 software outlook report, and combine the company's products with its own to provide security to customers of all sizes, from small businesses to large enterprises.
RBC in the report published in January said Microsoft could sell the combined security product on its own or as a bundle through the company's Office 365 cloud-based suite of productivity tools. Microsoft's security spending, RBC noted back then, has reached $1 billion annually.
RBC analyst Alex Zukin confirmed the firm still believes Crowdstrike is a potential Microsoft acquisition target as of August. "Generally we think the company remains a very keen and opportunistic acquirer of very high quality assets at compelling price points," he told Business Insider.
Microsoft, for its part, has recently taken big steps to renew its push into the cybersecurity market , positioning itself to take advantage of the boom in remote work by helping to provide tools to help secure and manage a distributed workforce.
Twilio
Market cap at the time of this writing: $57 billion
Twilio builds a cloud communications platform intended help developers write apps that can send text messages and make phone calls.
"Twilio makes a lot of sense because it is broad based with a seemingly endless array of use cases," Morningstar analyst Dan Romanoff told Business Insider in August.
Microsoft could add "name brand" acquisition targets such as Twilio, Romanoff said, to its Microsoft 365 suite of business software applications, Azure cloud computing business, or Dynamics customer relationship management software.
But with Twilio valued so richly at about $37 billion, Microsoft would likely have to pay a hefty price for Twilio. "It's hard to imagine MSFT doing a deal that big," Romanoff said.
Twilio has been a favorite among analysts' potential Microsoft picks. RBC Capital Markets in a report earlier this year said that Twilio would be a good buy for Microsoft in order to embed Twilio's voice, messaging and email communication into Microsoft's consumer and business applications — and bring along the more than 7 million developers who use Twilio.
Piper Sandler said around the same time Microsoft could acquire Twilio could enhance Microsoft Azure's developer ecosystem. Piper Sandler did not respond to a request about whether their view of a potential Twilio acquisition has changed since January.
DocuSign
Market cap at the time of this writing: $42.76 billion.
DocuSign helps companies sign and manage agreements electronically.
It's one of the companies Morningstar analyst Dan Romanoff says Microsoft could acquire and add to existing businesses such as Microsoft 365 suite of business software applications, Azure cloud computing business, or Dynamics customer relationship management software.
"DocuSign makes some sense also given the greenfield opportunity and DocuSign's broad appeal," Romanoff told Business Insider in August.
But the price to acquire DocuSign would be steep and likely more than Microsoft wants to spend on acquisition of this kind. Romanoff expects Microsoft will mostly do deals for less than $1 billion.
Workday
Market cap at the time of this writing: $58 billion
Workday's human resources and financial management platform is used by 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies, according to RBC Capital Markets 2020 software outlook report.
Buying Workday would "provide [Microsoft] entry into what we believe is going to be the most durable cloud growth market outside of the public cloud," which it said is cloud enterprise resource planning.
Analysts at Piper Sandler agreed earlier this year that Workday could be a potential acquisition market as Microsoft only has less than 5% of the so-called "human capital management" market that Workday is in.
RBC analyst Alex Zukin confirmed the firm still believes Workday is a potential Microsoft acquisition target as of August, but Piper Sandler did not respond to a request about whether its analysts still see the potential for a deal happening between the companies.
Futurum Research analyst Daniel Newman also believes Workday is a good target for Microsoft.
"I see cloud [enterprise resource planning] and [human capital management] continuing to heat up and Workday would come with an inspired list of customers and recurring revenues," he said in September.
AutoDesk
Market cap at the time of this writing: $65.89 billion
AutoDesk sells software to industries including construction and engineering, and Microsoft has been making a big push to target specific industries with its products.
"With eyes on upleveling its productivity and extended reality solutions, I think Autodesk could be an interesting play for Microsoft," Futurum Research analyst Daniel Newman said in September.
VMware
Market cap at the time of this writing: $59.57 billion
Futurum Research analyst Dan Newman in September said Microsoft could consider swooping in and acquiring VMware.
"With hybrid cloud being hot and VMware being one of the most utilized software suites to bridge on-prem and cloud, this could be a game changer for Azure and its hybrid cloud ambitions," Newman told Business Insider.
VMware could be valued as much as $100 billion in a potential acquisition, Newman said, so "there won't be a lot of suitors."
The future of VMware is a hot topic, with Business Insider's Ben Pimentel reporting that it could be a good fit for Amazon, IBM, Oracle, or Google , too.
Salesforce
Market cap at the time of this writing: $205.55 billion
"On the most ambitious end of the spectrum, Microsoft could acquire Salesforce," Futurum Research analyst Daniel Newman said in September. "However, I believe their momentum in the overlapping spaces may have given the company confidence to make a run on their own."
Salesforce is continually brought up as a potential Microsoft acquisition target, but it's one that seems unlikely, given Salesforce's size. Microsoft's largest acquisition to date was $26.2 billion, for which it bought LinkedIn.
It could be an even more attractive buy for Microsoft after Salesforce acquired popular corporate workplace chat app Slack , a big competitor to Microsoft's own chat app Teams.
Piper Sandler analyst Brent Bracelin earlier this year said Salesforce would be an attractive acquisition because Microsoft had a small market share of front-office applications — the market term for software that helps salespeople and service reps keep track of their customers, which is an area where Salesforce specializes.
Such a deal "would elevate Microsoft as the software-as-a-service alternative to Oracle, IBM, SAP and [Amazon Web Services]," Bracelin wrote in the note. The deal, however, has a "low likelihood given sheer size of potential deal and willingness to sell," Bracelin said.
In other words: As much as a deal might make sense on paper, don't hold your breath.
Via PakApNews