The software as a service market has been heating up with startups able to easily raise funding from venture capitalists. One active VC in the market is Insight Venture Partners out of New York, which most recently invested in JFrog, the maker of a software platform that enables companies to store, secure, monitor and distribute binaries for all their programs. That makes it easier and quicker for them to release software updates. With its $165 million investment led by the veteran VC firm, JFrog now has a valuation of more than $1 billion.
The SaaS company gets Insight Venture Partners’ Jeff Horing as a board member, with proceeds from the round going towards product innovation, to bankroll rapid expansion into new markets and to speed up growth. “In the rapidly growing software industry there is a real need for continual software updates, which is captured by JFrog’s Liquid Software Vision,” Horing said in a press release when the funding round was announced last week. “JFrog is the next promising software infrastructure company that’s going to revolutionize the way software is updated and we’re looking forward to partnering with the JFrog team to capitalize on its impressive growth and industry momentum.“
Horing and company at Insight Venture Partners aren’t only upbeat about the prospects for JFrog. The VC firm has more than $20 billion in assets under management, has invested in more than 300 companies since its inception in 1995 and completed more than 200 mergers and acquisition deals for its portfolio companies. Unapologetically obsessed with software, it credits that focus with its success over the more than twenty years.
Lately, Insight Venture Partners has been doubling down on the SaaS market via investments and outright acquisitions. Take its move in September to acquire Episerve, the California provider of services for marketers to manage content. It paid $1.1 billion. Insight Venture Partners said at the time that Episerve is at the center of the so-called digital transformation market in which companies help business digitize, optimize and personalize experiences customers have.
Insight Venture Partners was an early player in investing in technology companies and is largely viewed as a late stage investor, making bigger bets on companies that are already up and running. It has proven successful with the venture fund investing in software companies including Pluralsight, Delivery Hero, HelloFresh, Yext and Alteryx among many others. In July it raised $6.3 billion for a new technology fund, a record in terms of capital raising for the firm. While rivals are amassing huge war chests to arm their startups with enough capital to stave off any competition, Insight Venture Partners says it is sticking close to its knitting. When announcing the recent fund, Deven Parekh, managing director told TechCrunch the firm is focused on investing in startups and letting them flourish rather than running them. “Our fund size has gone up and our portfolio size has gone up,” said Parekh. “The competitive dynamics is not the driver here as much as the types of companies we invest in.”
