Last week, Y Combinator held Demo Days for their Summer 2021 cohort. This is a large graduating class: 377 startups from 47 countries. You can read a quick overview of all 377 companies on TechCrunch, broken down into part One and part two.
I read through all 377 and discovered 47 that I will include in the martech landscape. Here is the list: 47 new martech companies from latest Y Combinator cohort – the counter-consolidation narrative lives on – Chief Marketing Technologist (chiefmartec.com)
Now, I'm sure some of you will be skeptical and skeptical about how many of these will survive in the market – especially companies that compete with major leaders like Shopify (although , there is always a turning point that can give them an advantage in a regional or domain specialty).
However, what I appreciated about this Demo Day “event” was that it had enough coverage to make people stop and realize how many startups continue to pursue new ways to innovate. new – even in markets, like martech, that already have significant competition.
Some of them will make it to the big leagues. Case in point: two years ago, you might have thought the event platform space was saturated and mature – but then Hopin came along and became one of the fastest growing SaaS products in the history of the world .
My view is that while consolidation is happening, diversification is also thriving.
Yes, there has been a lot of martech M&A activity this year. LUMA's Q2 2021 Market Report reported 83 high-tech acquisitions in the first half of the year. (For those considering last year's technology market landscape of 8,000 solutions, that number is about 1%.)
The biggest of these deals will certainly end up in the headlines you see from widely covered press releases. When you see a few of them in quick succession, it's easy to draw the conclusion, “Ah, ha! Martech is consolidating. ” Because that's what we see.
And, hey, there is truth in that belief. An acquisition is a merger of individual companies. In the long tail of all the technology companies in the world, this consolidation drives growth at the “head” of the tail.
But as this Y Combinator event reminds us, that's not the whole truth. Because at the same time martech is consolidating, it is also expanding. This doesn't sound paradoxical at all, when you realize that unified platforms allow for greater diversification and specialization of applications on them. And platforms that support such developers are hot!
While searching for the image above, I came across an article I wrote 9 years ago on this exact topic: Is Marketing Technology Consolidating or Diversifying? Since that was the year my tech market landscape had only ~350 companies and we're now at over 10,000 companies, I'd say we've answered that pretty clearly.
It's a decade later, and the original martech startup soup is still bursting with new life.
Translated by: Phan Cong Duy
