A Goldman Sachs study published last month estimates the global SaaS market to grow to $106 billion by next year, translating to a 15% growth over the year. Here is an interesting story of MuleSoft, an integration platform provider for multiple SaaS-based enterprise applications that is expected to join the Billion Dollar Unicorn club soon.
Till a few years ago, flash sales sites were the darlings of e-commerce. But soon, as the fad passed, so did their valuation. One of the recent sites to have fallen off the plank is Zulily (Nasdaq: ZU). The Billion Dollar Unicorn club member went public a little over a year ago in a rather successful IPO. But the tables have turned since and the company has seen its valuation crash as the company continues to miss the market’s expected financial metrics.
Twitter’s (NYSE: TWTR) stellar growth story may have faded a bit, but it is still a powerful platform. User growth metrics may not be spectacular, but they exceeded the market’s financial expectations. It appears that things are getting back on track, albeit rather slowly.
A Gartner report on Mobile Payment Transactions estimated the worldwide mobile payment transaction values to have grown 44% to $235.4 billion in 2013. Gartner expects the market to grow to $721 billion by 2017. The mobile payments processing market is dominated by a Billion Dollar Unicorn club member Square.
Another Billion Dollar Unicorn club company is GoDaddy, which has made its place in the Internet domain marketplace by focusing on small businesses, professionals, and individuals. The company is nearly as old as the Internet itself and has come a long way since, but financials remain dodgy, leaving the market unimpressed. >>>
Continuing with our Billion Dollar Unicorn club analysis, here is the story of another interesting company. Chicago-based Cleversafe was founded in 2004 by MIT alumnus, engineer, and serial entrepreneur Chris Gladwin. The company is addressing the growing large scale enterprise storage market, which according to IDC is estimated to grow to $17 billion by the year 2015.
Search giant Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) appears to be struggling a bit. While they are still the leader in US search market by a long mile, the market share is gradually slipping. In the recent results by StatCounter, Google’s share of the US search market continued to drop. As of January 2015, Google accounted for 74.8% market share compared with 77.3% recorded in November 2014. The recently reported quarterly results weren’t impressive either as the company continued to miss both revenue and earning expectations.
If there is one company that has figured out how to tackle the monetization capabilities of the rapidly growing mobile advertising market, that company is Facebook (Nasdaq: FB). The social media giant continues to astound the market with its mobile advertising statistics as it repeatedly outperforms market expectations. The recently ended quarter was no different.
This was a good quarter for Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) and its investors. While it was surprising that Amazon reported a strong operating profit, what was even more surprising was the increased transparency displayed by the company on some of its business segments.
The Billion Dollar Unicorn Club has some interesting stories of companies in the same space reaching Unicorn status through different business models. One such story is that of Egnyte, which like Box, operates in the cloud storage space. But unlike Box, Egnyte operates a leaner ship and offers an enterprise grade product that can command much higher pricing.