The tech investment and deals landscape in India has been largely dominated by the startup ecosystem but an equally strong activity is on in the enterprise tech segment. Data collated by TechCircle shows how both strategic buyers and private investment funds sewed multiple transactions in the country this year. 
 
Here we quick peek at some of the significant M&A and private equity deals in the enterprise tech sector during 2023. 

The biggest deal in the enterprise tech field in India happened in July when Belgian government-owned telecom major Proximus Group announced that it would take up a majority stake in Mumbai-based cloud communication platform Route Mobile. 
 
Not in the same league, but there were at least four strategic buys by Indian IT service companies including those sealed by HCL Tech, TCS, Mphasis and Sonata Software. 
 
Infosys too sealed one deal as part of a five-year $454 million digital transformation project with Denmark-based Dansk Bank. 

Further, PE and sovereign funds made significant investments in India-based companies in 2023. The list includes names like Apax Partners, Qatar Investment Authority, Kedaara Capital, Anthelion Capital, Mithril Capital, BeyondNetZero, and KKR. 

Global picture

In the international arena, there were several large deals despite the year seeing a scaling back of such large sized transactions. The lower decibel in dealmaking was partly due to higher cost of capital, as interest rates have climbed to new highs in the context of recent years due to monetary tightening. 
 
That didn’t stop the big ticket VMWare-Broadcom deal seeing a final closure this year, over a year after it was announced. 
 
In terms of new deals in the enterprise tech field networking company Cisco announced the biggest of them all by inking an agreement to buy monitoring and security firm Splunk for $28 billion. The second biggest transaction was Silver Lake’s acquisition of Qualtrics for $12.5 billion. 
 
Other significant deals of the year include: analytics cloud platform Alteryx’s take private deal by Clearlake Capital and Insight Partners; IBM’s deal to buy the StreamSets and webMethods integration-platform-as-a-service enterprise technology platforms from Software AG; Rocket Software buying a part of Micro Focus from OpenText; Blackstone’s deal for Civica and Atlassian’s billion dollar cheque for Loom. 
 
Among other notable deals announced this year include IBM’s agreement to buy cloud cost control specialist Apptio from private equity firm Vista; Databricks’ deal for MosaicML, the creator of two open source models, MPT-7B and MPT-30B; Thomas Bravo’s deal for Coupa Software and Vista’s acquisition of Duck Creek Technologies, a developer of specialist software for the insurance industry. 
 
That said another big deal came unstuck last fortnight when Adobe’s $20 billion bid for Figma failed to see the light of the day after being announced in September 2022. 
 
Perhaps the most notable tech deal of the year was in the gaming or non-enterprise segment as Microsoft announced a $68.7 billion deal for Activision. 

Source: GWFM Research & Study