Which types of SaaS are getting acquired most?

Is SaaS M&A actually busy right now?

SaaS acquisitions are extremely active right now: the latest rolling 12-month total reached 2,784 deals, the highest level Software Equity Group has recorded.

That follows an already strong 2025, when SEG counted 2,698 SaaS acquisitions, up 28% from 2,107 a year earlier. Activity has not faded since then. Another 698 deals were announced in the second quarter of 2026, 9.6% more than in the equivalent quarter a year earlier.

This gives us a much better dataset than a market dominated by a few sporadic transactions. We can look across thousands of acquisitions and see which categories keep appearing.

There is one important twist. More deals do not mean buyers are buying everything. Median disclosed SaaS M&A revenue multiples slipped from 4.2x to 4.0x in the latest SEG data, while buyers put more weight on proprietary data, embedded workflows, strategic fit and credible AI positioning. The market currently combines record deal volume with much sharper filtering.

What does “getting acquired most” actually mean for SaaS?

By number of transactions, vertical SaaS, workflow software and data software currently lead; by dollars spent, cybersecurity can look much bigger because a few giant acquisitions distort the total.

A $300 million vertical-software acquisition and Google's $32 billion agreement to buy Wiz each count as one transaction. If we rank categories by money spent, Wiz alone can outweigh dozens of smaller deals. If we want to understand what buyers repeatedly acquire, transaction count tells us more.

Company size creates another divide. Acquire.com's marketplace mainly captures much smaller businesses, where buyers often value SaaS using profit and expected payback. Large strategic buyers such as Salesforce, Google, ServiceNow and Roper can justify acquisitions because a target brings them technology, data, customers or a missing product capability. Acquire's latest report says profit remains the main valuation anchor for most SaaS businesses in its market unless the company has unusual scale, growth and retention.

So we need two answers. For the broader M&A market, category and strategic role matter a lot. For small SaaS, business quality can matter more than category.

Are vertical SaaS companies getting acquired more than horizontal SaaS?

Yes. Vertical SaaS now accounts for a majority of SaaS acquisitions, which is a real change from only a few years ago.

Vertical software represented 54% of SaaS M&A in the second quarter of 2026, compared with 46% in the same quarter a year earlier. SEG's earlier data put vertical SaaS at roughly 44% of transactions in 2024. A category that recently represented clearly less than half of the market now represents more than half.

The behavior of serial acquirers supports the same conclusion. Valsoft, which specializes heavily in vertical-market software, completed 16 SaaS acquisitions in 2025. Volaris completed 30 new acquisitions of vertical-market software businesses in 2025 and has accumulated more than 240 businesses across roughly 40 vertical markets. These are buyers built around repeatedly acquiring software that serves a specific industry rather than chasing whichever broad software category happens to be fashionable.

Why does this model work? A dealership-management platform, laboratory system, municipal billing product or childcare-compliance tool can become part of how an organization actually operates. Customers have processes, employee training, records and integrations built around it.

A generic horizontal tool often has a larger theoretical market. Specialized vertical software can offer something acquirers increasingly value more: a smaller market where leaving the product is genuinely painful.

Which SaaS product categories are getting acquired most?

Analytics and data management and content and workflow management are currently the two biggest SaaS acquisition categories by deal count.

SEG counted 126 analytics and data-management transactions and 123 content and workflow-management transactions in the second quarter of 2026. Together, those 249 deals represented about 36% of all SaaS acquisitions during the quarter. The result is consistent with 2025, when the same two categories combined for almost 38% of annual SaaS M&A volume.

That consistency is more interesting than a one-quarter spike. Buyers have kept acquiring software that either controls important company data or sits inside recurring work.

Sales and marketing SaaS remains a large category, but it no longer leads. SEG recorded 100 sales-and-marketing deals in the third quarter of 2025 before activity fell to 73 in the fourth quarter. Business-management and financial applications also remain active, but neither currently matches the scale of data and workflow software.

SaaS category	Latest position	What buyers are getting
Analytics & data management	126 deals in 2Q26	Data infrastructure, analytics, governance and AI foundations
Content & workflow management	123 deals in 2Q26	Software embedded in recurring business processes
Sales & marketing	Still a major category	Customer acquisition, engagement and revenue workflows
Business management	Regular acquisition activity	Core operational systems
Financial applications	Regular acquisition activity	Accounting, payments, risk and financial workflows

Which vertical SaaS industries get acquired most?

Healthcare SaaS leads vertical-software acquisitions today, with financial-services SaaS firmly in second place.

Healthcare represented 16.0% of vertical SaaS acquisitions in the latest SEG quarter, up from 13.6% a year earlier. Financial services accounted for another 12.8%. Real estate, government and retail were each around 7%.

Those percentages become more striking once we remember that vertical software itself now represents 54% of SaaS acquisitions. Healthcare alone therefore works out to roughly 8.6% of the entire SaaS M&A market, while financial services contributes about 6.9%. Two end industries account for roughly one transaction in every six across all SaaS.

The pattern also looks reasonably stable. Financial services was even larger a year earlier, at 15.5% of vertical transactions. Healthcare has since moved ahead rather than appearing from nowhere. We are looking at two consistently acquisition-heavy industries, with healthcare currently pulling away.

Vertical SaaS industry	Share of vertical SaaS deals	Approx. share of all SaaS deals
Healthcare	16.0%	8.6%
Financial services	12.8%	6.9%
Real estate	~7%	~3.8%
Government	~7%	~3.8%
Retail	~7%	~3.8%

Why do buyers keep buying healthcare and financial SaaS?

Healthcare and financial SaaS keep selling because these products often control work that customers cannot casually stop doing: billing, records, claims, compliance, payments, risk and other essential processes.

Roper's acquisition of CentralReach shows the healthcare version clearly. Roper paid roughly $1.65 billion net of an expected tax benefit for software used by more than 200,000 professionals working in applied behavior analysis. CentralReach handles practice management, claims, scheduling, clinical data and care delivery. Roper described the platform as a mission-critical operating system and expected the business to sustain organic revenue and EBITDA growth above 20%.

Roper then kept buying around the same logic. Orchard Software brought laboratory information systems used by hospitals, laboratories, physician groups and public-health organizations. Spectrum AI was added to CentralReach to automate documentation and clinical data capture. HerculesAI's legal-workflow technology went into Aderant rather than remaining an independent product.

Financial software has similar qualities. KPMG counted 840 fintech M&A deals worth $55.4 billion in 2025, compared with 829 deals worth $44.6 billion a year earlier. Deal count barely moved, yet transaction value rose by roughly one-quarter.

Valsoft's acquisition of Alessa fits the smaller vertical-software version of that market. Alessa handles anti-money-laundering compliance and fraud prevention for financial institutions and enterprises. Valsoft also bought Quorum, whose software runs core operations at automotive dealerships. The industries are different, but buyers are chasing the same quality: software attached to work that still needs to happen every day.

Are workflow SaaS companies easier to sell than simple productivity tools?

Yes. SaaS that owns an important workflow currently has a stronger acquisition story than software that merely makes one task slightly easier.

The clearest evidence is the transaction mix. Content and workflow management remains one of the two largest acquisition categories, with 123 deals in the latest quarter. Buyers surveyed by SEG also say competition concentrates around companies with durable revenue, strong retention and products that are hard to displace.

Recent acquisitions show what buyers mean by “hard to displace.” CentralReach sits inside clinical and administrative work. Orchard handles laboratory information. Muni-Link manages municipal utility billing. Quorum supports dealership operations. Alessa handles compliance and financial-crime workflows.

Removing one of these products can involve migrating records, rebuilding integrations, retraining staff and risking disruption to an important process. A customer does not switch simply because another app launches with a cleaner interface.

That difference has become more valuable lately because software features themselves are getting easier to build. Workflow ownership is much harder to reproduce than a feature set.

Is data SaaS getting more valuable because of AI?

Yes. AI is making good data software more strategically important because companies need clean, connected and governed data before AI systems can do useful work.

The acquisition numbers already put analytics and data management at the top of SaaS M&A, with 126 deals in the latest quarter. SEG specifically connects the category's strength with investment in data infrastructure and AI-enabled decision-making.

Salesforce's Informatica deal shows the logic at much larger scale. Salesforce agreed to pay roughly $8 billion for a company built around data integration, governance, quality, catalogs and master-data management. Salesforce tied the acquisition directly to the data layer needed for its AI strategy.

That kind of transaction helps explain why the AI boom has not reduced demand for older-looking infrastructure categories. Quite the opposite: companies discovering that AI agents need reliable permissions, metadata, integrations and company data are creating another reason to own the plumbing underneath them.

So the phrase “AI acquisition” can be misleading. A data-management company bought partly because AI increases the strategic value of its data layer tells us more about today's market than another startup simply adding an AI assistant.

Is cybersecurity the SaaS category getting acquired most?

Cybersecurity does not lead SaaS by overall deal count, but it is one of the biggest acquisition markets by dollars spent.

Momentum Cyber counted a record 400 cybersecurity M&A transactions in 2025, up 22% year over year. Disclosed M&A value reached $96 billion, almost four times the previous year's level. Eight transactions exceeded $1 billion.

Two deals explain a huge part of that number. Google's agreement to acquire Wiz was valued at $32 billion, while Palo Alto Networks' CyberArk transaction was roughly $25 billion. Together they accounted for around $57 billion, close to 60% of all disclosed cybersecurity M&A value that year.

This is why rankings based on dollars can be misleading. Cybersecurity can dominate annual headlines even though analytics, workflows and vertical SaaS generate more transactions across the broader SaaS market.

Still, security clearly enjoys unusual strategic value. In SEG's latest public SaaS data, security companies traded at a median 4.3x revenue, compared with 3.2x for the overall SaaS index. Only a few product groups commanded higher median valuations.

Cybersecurity belongs near the top of any acquisition discussion today if we care about what large strategic buyers are willing to pay. It simply is not the deal-count leader.

Are AI SaaS companies really getting acquired everywhere?

AI now touches most SaaS acquisitions, but the evidence does not show a market where buyers simply want anything labeled “AI.”

SEG found that roughly 72% of SaaS acquisitions in 2025 referenced AI somewhere in the target's product, positioning, integrations or data story. That is an extraordinary share. It is also broad enough to include many businesses that nobody would describe primarily as AI companies.

The gap becomes clearer in SEG's current buyer survey. Sixty-three percent of buyers said the targets they saw in 2025 still had only limited AI use, while 61% expect SaaS businesses to become AI-driven by the end of 2026. At the same time, 85% named AI-driven commoditization as the biggest risk facing SaaS.

Buyers want AI, but they are also worried that AI makes ordinary software easier to copy.

The deals happening around large platforms fit that view. ServiceNow paid $2.85 billion for Moveworks, bringing an enterprise AI assistant, search technology and reasoning capabilities into ServiceNow's much larger workflow platform. Roper bought Spectrum AI and folded it into CentralReach. HerculesAI's technology went into Aderant.

For founders, “AI SaaS” is consequently too broad to be useful. An AI capability attached to proprietary data, distribution, security or a deeply embedded workflow has a much clearer acquisition rationale than a generic AI application that a buyer fears could become commoditized.

Who is actually buying all these SaaS companies?

Private-equity-backed buyers are involved in most SaaS acquisitions now, but many of those deals are add-ons made by existing software companies rather than PE firms creating brand-new platforms.

In the second quarter of 2026, private-equity- and venture-backed buyers participated in 59% of SaaS transactions. Direct PE platform investments accounted for just 6.3%, well below their historical share of roughly 10%.

That difference is easy to overlook. A deal can be “PE-backed” because a software company owned by a fund buys another company. Operationally, the transaction behaves much more like a strategic acquisition: the buyer is adding a product, customer base, technology or vertical to something it already owns.

Roper offers a particularly clean example. CentralReach became the core platform, then Spectrum AI was added to it. Orchard Software was integrated into Clinisys. HerculesAI went into Aderant. Outgo and Convoy were added to DAT. Roper's 2025 filings show a series of acquisitions being slotted directly into existing software businesses.

Valsoft and Volaris work on a similar repeat-acquisition model. Valsoft completed 16 acquisitions in 2025, while Volaris completed 30 new acquisitions of vertical-market software businesses. Instead of needing every target to become a giant standalone company, these buyers can acquire specialized businesses that deepen an existing portfolio or open another narrow vertical.

This helps explain why niche SaaS is selling so often these days. A target can be valuable without being enormous if a buyer already has the distribution, infrastructure and management structure around it.

Does the SaaS category matter much for a small acquisition?

For small SaaS acquisitions, profitability and transferability usually matter more than belonging to healthcare, cybersecurity or another hot sector.

Acquire.com's latest analysis covers the smaller end of SaaS M&A and shows a very different market from billion-dollar strategic deals. Among 950 profitable SaaS businesses published on the marketplace in 2025, the average profit margin was 71%, unchanged from 2024 and above 67% in 2023.

Buyer behavior followed the economics. Acquire found that higher-margin businesses attracted more buyer engagement and more offers. Most completed SaaS acquisitions also happened quickly: average time on market was 81 days, with the majority of smaller and lower-revenue businesses selling during their first 90 days.

Acquire says profit remains the main valuation anchor for most SaaS deals in its market. Buyers commonly think in terms of how many years of cash generation they are paying for rather than applying the revenue multiples used for larger venture-backed software companies.

That changes what “the best SaaS to sell” means. A small and boring B2B tool producing dependable profit can be easier to acquire than a fast-growing AI product that still needs the founder, consumes cash and has uncertain retention.

Small-SaaS trait	What the latest Acquire data shows
Profitability	Central to how most smaller SaaS deals are valued
Average margin of profitable listings	71%
Higher margins	More buyer interest and more offers
Realistic asking price	Broader buyer pool and cleaner deal structures
Average time on market	81 days
Category	Usually less important than the economics of the business

Which SaaS companies are getting harder to sell?

Generic SaaS with weak differentiation is getting harder to sell, especially when AI can reproduce much of the product before a buyer has earned back the purchase price.

The sharpest evidence comes directly from buyers. In SEG's survey of more than 200 private-equity investors, strategic acquirers and SaaS CEOs, 85% identified AI-driven commoditization as a major threat to software value. Buyers are concentrating competition around companies with durable revenue, strong retention, efficient economics, clear positioning and credible AI execution.

This creates a difficult position for lightweight horizontal products. Imagine a SaaS with modest margins, weak customer retention, sales that still depend heavily on the founder and features that can increasingly be rebuilt with common AI models. Even if revenue looks respectable, a buyer has to price several risks at once.

Simple SaaS can still sell. Acquire.com's marketplace demonstrates that every day. The important distinction is whether simple software also has simple, attractive economics. A narrow product with 70% margins, loyal customers and little founder involvement can be very appealing. A more impressive-looking product with fragile revenue may struggle.

The strongest defenses currently showing up across acquisitions are recurring workflow ownership, proprietary data, regulation or compliance, distribution, customer switching costs and technology that improves a larger platform.

So which types of SaaS are getting acquired most?

Vertical SaaS is getting acquired most by overall market share, while data and workflow SaaS lead the product categories; healthcare leads the verticals, and cybersecurity stands out when we look at the biggest acquisition dollars.

The market has moved far enough that we can be specific. Vertical SaaS represents 54% of recent SaaS M&A. Within the product categories, analytics and data management plus content and workflow management accounted for around 36% of the latest quarterly deals. Healthcare represents 16% of vertical acquisitions, followed by financial services at 12.8%.

Cybersecurity tells a different story. Its 400 transactions are smaller in number than the broader SaaS categories, yet $96 billion of disclosed acquisition value shows how aggressively strategic buyers will pay for scarce security assets.

AI is already spread too widely across software for “AI SaaS” to be a useful winner. Around 72% of 2025 SaaS acquisitions referenced AI somehow, while buyers simultaneously ranked AI-driven commoditization as their biggest SaaS risk. The premium is moving toward software that uses AI while retaining something difficult to copy.

At the small end of the market, the answer changes again. Buyers care much more about recurring profit, margins, retention, realistic pricing and whether the company can operate after the founder leaves. A highly profitable niche tool can therefore have a better exit market than a more fashionable company in a hotter category.

Put all of the evidence together and one acquisition profile keeps coming back: specialized SaaS that controls an important workflow, owns useful data, solves a regulated or expensive problem, or gives a larger platform a capability it wants immediately. That currently describes much more of the SaaS being acquired than the old idea that buyers simply chase the fastest-growing software category.