Inside Emarsys’ $500M sale to SAP – what it felt like and what I learned

In 2019, SAP bought Emarsys for $500M.

By then, ARR had climbed from about $135M in 2017 (when I joined) to $175M. That’s ~14% CAGR. Respectable but not hypergrowth. So, the multiple came out to ~3x revenue which put it squarely in the “mid-market SaaS” bucket.

Just published a new podcast episode recapping the sale:

Public SaaS names at the time were trading at 8–12x if they were growing 30%+. Hyper-scalers like Zoom or Atlassian sat way higher.

This was in the 10–20% growth lane. So the outcome lined up.

SAP didn’t buy Emarsys for our momentum. They bought it because it filled a product gap. Adobe had Experience Cloud. Salesforce had Marketing Cloud. Oracle had Eloqua. SAP needed a B2C marketing automation layer to complete their CX suite.

Emarsys gave them that.

It offered a strong retail and e-commerce footprint, a good id-market fit. And it had a global presence outside the US.

From SAP’s side, $500M was a rounding error — about 0.3% of their $150B market cap at the time. For Emarsys, it was the founders’ life work coming to fruition.

The chatter inside was constant. What would this mean? How would our jobs change? What would shift?

Almost nothing changed.

The brand stayed. The site stayed. SAP rolled us into the suite quietly.

I got to publish a few pieces on SAP’s media hub and say I worked for there. That was it.

Behind the scenes, the real action wasn’t about us as employees. It was about the investors.

Summit Partners had been in since 2011. Vector Capital since 2015. By 2019, that was 8 years and 4 years in — longish by growth equity standards. Funds want liquidity in 5–7 years. They want to recycle capital into the next bet.A $500M acquisition gave them that.

For me personally, this was a moment of realization.

I’d joined to run content (editorial, blog posts, thought leadership stuff). At the time, that was all I cared or thought about.

Watching the acquisition unfold, I saw the real game — M&A/exits/deals where the real winners (investors and founders) make life-changing money in a single transaction.

It hit me: all the marketing/product work is the surface layer. The real decisions and the real wealth get created at the deal table.

That perspective changed me.

I started paying more attention to valuations, multiples, and strategic fit. Less to campaigns and blog calendars.

Because once you see a $500M deal up close, you can’t unsee it.

You realize: this is the game.

And if you want to play at the highest level, you need to understand how deals get done.