Hello friend,
The M&A market is officially back, and the first few deals of 2025 are already setting the tone:
Wiz acquired by Google for $32B
Ampere acquired by SoftBank for $6.5B
Moveworks acquired by ServiceNow for $2.9B
Weights & Biases acquired by CoreWeave
DataStax acquired by IBM
These are massive transactions—but notably, all of them are U.S.-to-U.S. deals.
If they clear regulatory hurdles, expect a domino effect—especially in the small and mid-market segments.
Here’s what I think we’ll see next:
✅ Public tech companies in the U.S.—previously cautious despite favourable interest rates and strong cash positions—will start executing more acquisitions.
✅ Private equity-backed software companies will shift from defence to offence, making strategic or defensive buys to stay ahead.
✅ European software vendors, particularly those with strong tech assets and less than $50M in revenue, will become increasingly attractive targets.
While many predict a return of IPOs in 2025, I believe this will be the year of strategic M&A.
If you’re a founder considering an exit, now is the time to raise your visibility with the top strategic buyers in your space.
P.S.: Several CTOs and tech leaders have recently contacted me about my former Unicorn CTO live training program, so I’m doing a limited edition session in May. Click here to learn more about the program, or contact me directly if you’re interested.
P.P.S.: I couldn’t resist generating my usual charts in Studio Ghibli’s style, like the rest of the Internet 😅
Now, let's dive into last week's developer-first transactions.
💰 Market Summary - Week of March 24th, 2025
9 companies raised $213,1 million across 6 product categories in 4 countries.
Europe-based companies attracted 30.5% of the total funding vs 69.5% for North America-based companies.
Cloud is the category that attracted the highest funding.
3 companies provide or contribute to an open-source product.
1 company was acquired this week.
🧩 Funding by Product Category
🌎 Funding by Region
🏢 Funding By Company
Nexthop AI from Santa Clara 🇺🇸 raised $110 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Nexthop AI focuses on creating the most efficient AI infrastructure for major cloud operators worldwide. (more)
n8n based in Berlin 🇩🇪 raised $59.5 million in Series B funding led by Highland Europe. n8n offers a unique workflow automation platform that integrates AI with business process automation, allowing connections to any app or API. (more)
DataOps.live in London 🇬🇧 is expanding enterprise capabilities in Snowflake with its DataOps platform, with undisclosed funding from Snowflake Ventures. DataOps.live offers agile DevOps automation to enhance data engineering within Snowflake’s data cloud. (more)
Browser Use from San Francisco 🇺🇸 secured $17 million in Seed funding led by Felicis Ventures. Browser Use is enhancing web agent interaction, making it easier for AI agents to navigate and operate within websites. (more)
WunderGraph, located in Miami 🇺🇸, raised $7.5 million in Series A funding led by eBay Ventures. WunderGraph offers an open-source GraphQL Federation solution that manages full lifecycle API for federated GraphQL. (more)
Plural from New York 🇺🇸 raised $6 million in Seed funding led by Primary Venture Partners. Plural focuses on simplifying Kubernetes fleet management for DevOps and platform engineering teams. (more)
ai|coustics in Berlin 🇩🇪 secured $5.4 million in Seed funding led by Partech. ai|coustics is developing advanced audio algorithms based on AI to enhance speech audio enhancement in digital communication. (more)
ConfigHub, based in Chicago 🇺🇸, raised $4 million in Seed funding led by Crane Venture Partners. ConfigHub aims to solve software configuration management challenges, providing a standardised solution for system designers and architects. (more)
Lumi AI from Toronto 🇨🇦 raised $3.7 million in Seed funding led by AgFunder. Lumi AI provides a platform that enables conversational self-service analytics, allowing non-technical users to access insights without needing SQL or Python expertise. (more)
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions
TensorDock based in Boston 🇺🇸 has been acquired by Voltage Park. TensorDock provides an affordable cloud GPU service, offering the lowest industry prices for deploying models on GPUs such as H100s, A100s, and RTX A6000s. (more)
⭐️ Trending GitHub Repositories
Shubhamsaboo / awesome-llm-apps (✩ 4,308 stars this week) - Collection of awesome LLM apps with AI Agents and RAG using OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and opensource models.
hacksider / Deep-Live-Cam (✩ 3,569 stars this week) - Real time face swap and one-click video deepfake with only a single image.
ocrmypdf / OCRmyPDF (✩ 3,305 stars this week) - OCRmyPDF adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDF files, allowing them to be searched.
👍 Trending Developer-First Products on ProductHunt
Inferless (👍 915) - Deploy any machine learning model in production stress-free with ultra-low cold starts. Scale from single user to billions and only pay when you use.
Pulse for Elasticsearch and OpenSearch (👍 695) - Pulse makes it easy to control the cost and performance of your Elasticsearch & OpenSearch clusters. Get comprehensive cluster health assessments, actionable maintenance insights, automated root cause analysis and more.
Zapier MCP (👍 657) - Zapier MCP gives your AI assistant direct access to over 8,000+ apps and 30,000+ actions without complex API integrations. Now your AI can perform real tasks like sending messages, managing data, scheduling events, and updating records.