Cisco was essentially the most lively firm

It’s that point of yr after we look again on the yr’s largest tech M&A offers. Sometimes by this time, the same old acquisitive suspects like Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe, SAP Oracle and Cisco have taken not less than a number of huge swings. However this yr, solely Cisco took a giant chew, finally asserting 11 whole offers.

SAP made a pair smaller offers, however Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle largely stayed on the sidelines this yr. The $61 billion Broadcom-VMware deal introduced in Could 2022 lastly closed final month, and Adobe and Figma agreed to finish their $20 billion deal this month, which has been caught in regulatory limbo because it was introduced in September 2022.

It’s not our creativeness that there are fewer offers from the largest gamers. CB Insights reported zero offers in Q3 this yr from Huge Tech. Examine that with 2019, when there have been 10 such offers in Q3, or with 2020, when there have been eight.

Picture Credit: CB Insights

Maybe the excessive price of borrowing put a damper on the offers we noticed in 2023. Lengthy gone are the times of 2020 when the highest offers totaled $165 billion. This yr it was simply $67.7 billion, the bottom whole we’ve seen since 2019’s all-time low of $40 billion, the second yr we compiled these high deal lists.

It’s value noting {that a} good variety of the offers this yr concerned non-public fairness companies both shopping for firms or promoting them off at a pleasant revenue.

Perhaps the smaller offers involving AI mattered extra, like Atlassian shopping for Loom for $975 million; Salesforce buying Airkit.ai for an undisclosed quantity, one in every of solely two small acquisitions this yr; or Snowflake nabbing AI search firm Neeva, additionally for an undisclosed quantity.

Regardless, right here’s what the highest 10 enterprise offers seemed like this yr from least expensive to most expensive: