Deven Parekh, Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners, joined the firm in 2000. Founded in 1995, New York based Insight Venture Partners is a global growth equity fund which has raised more than $5 billion and invested in more than 150 growth-stage software, eCommerce, internet, and data-services companies.
Current Trend
In the e-commerce sector, the market in the U.S. is more mature. You have a large competitor such as Amazon. Thus, we are looking more at the next generation e-commerce investment in the U.S. It is important for them to have some category differentiation or a new or innovative way to leverage market with new channels in order to compete successfully. Today, we find more interesting investments in e-commerce internationally than the U.S.
In SaaS model, we are seeing a lot of interesting companies. We see these companies boost when horizontal players define themselves, as the participating multiple verticals offer better horizontal functionality, for example, Buddy Media, a company that we recently sold to Salesforce.com. They provide social media management as a SaaS solution to large organizations across multiple verticals. In vertical application, the world is moving toward cloud-based delivery. Five or ten years ago, the large enterprises had a lot of hesitation about enterprise apps that were not sitting behind their own parallel. Now we see that hesitation is significantly lessened and people are more comfortable with cloud-based solutions even for mission critical applications.
In data space, data is moving towards cloud-based delivery with data solutions. There are lots of interesting examples; one of our largest investments till date is in a company called Drillinginfo, which provides data to oil and gas businesses to help make better decisions on where to spend their capital. This is a business that leverages lot of trends in the cloud-based delivery, big data and the ability to provide analytics on top of these data to make decisions.