What is the "IaaS sector"?

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a method of delivering computing, storage, networking and other capabilities over the Internet. IaaS allows businesses to use web-based operating systems, applications and storage without having to purchase, manage and support the underlying cloud infrastructure. The most popular examples of IaaS platforms are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

IaaS emerged as a popular computing model in the early 2010s and has since become the standard abstraction model for many types of workloads.

The difference between the other similar sectors, such as PaaS and SaaS, lies in the degree of control and access between them, with IaaS having much greater control and access than SaaS, for example.

Scope and coverage of the study

This study covers 404 companies worldwide labelled within the "IaaS" category.

All data on companies, acquisitions and financing rounds were extracted on 23 March 2021. Deals, rounds and companies founded after this date have not been included.

Main investment trends

Firstly, mentioning the activity in terms of companies founded in the sector, it is worth noting the very small values, because as we have seen in the Overview, there are few companies dedicated to IaaS specifically, compared to its "sister" sector of SaaS. The highest number of companies created was in 2010, with 34 companies founded, since, as mentioned above, it is said that this is when the sector became popular. In the following years, it remained at a constant level of just over 20 new companies, before dropping to 14 and then to 5 last year.

On the other hand, in terms of funding received from the sector, there is a rather irregular picture. The top in terms of funding raised (in columns) came in 2017 with a total of 582 million dollars, and the year with the highest number of rounds (online) was 2015 with a total of 51. In recent years there has been a large drop in both terms, number of rounds and funding raised, with a forecast to remain constant in these values, in turn, for the next three years. Being a rather small and specific sector, it is normal to have such irregular numbers.

Analysis of the acquisition activity

As for the activity of acquisitions, there are also low values, as is normal in this sector, not even reaching 20 operations in a year. This visual shows the purchases made with the buyer belonging to the sector. It should be noted that there has been a significant increase since 2010, with a drop in recent years, as in the other operations mentioned. It is worth noting that, in the last year, there have already been 6 purchase operations, with Akamai Technologies, a considerable company in the sector thanks to its large size, standing out. Akamai Technologies is a provider of cloud services to help companies provide secure and high-performance user experiences on any device, dedicated to multiple software sectors, such as SaaS, Cloud Computing or Enterprise Software, among others.

On the other hand, in terms of stock market activity in the sector, there have been very few exits. According to Crunchbase there are only six companies that went public. These are: the aforementioned Akamai Technologies, Intercloud Systems, LevelBlox, and Rackspace (US companies), GIGAS (Spanish company) and AUCloud (Australian company).