The deals ServiceNow signed in 2025 committed $11.8bn, against $1.7bn for everything it bought from 2016 to 2024. The scale has changed, while most targets are still small: of the 20 acquisitions with a price on record, 11 cost under $50M, and the median is $33M.
The company behind the workflow platform that 603 customers each pay more than $5M a year has completed 37 acquisitions of software companies announced since 2015 in our records, which places it among the ten most active product-driven software acquirers in our ranking. It buys technology and engineering teams and folds them into one platform, and its filings say so in close to those words.
ServiceNow is the strongest buyer for a product that makes its platform more useful, and it pays for that fit: most of every price in its filings is goodwill, the value it expects from combining your business with its own. The same model means your product is likely to become a feature of ServiceNow’s, so the terms for you and your team weigh as much as the price.
ServiceNow’s 10-K and 10-Q filings and its releases supply spend and purchase price allocations. The 37 deals behind every count come from Mergermarket and its releases and filings.
ServiceNow’s Acquisition Strategy: One Platform
ServiceNow sells one product family, the ServiceNow AI Platform, with workflows for IT, employees, customers, security and risk built on a shared data model. Revenue reached $13.3bn in 2025, 97 percent of it subscriptions, and the company employed 29,187 people at the end of the year. Its 10-K describes a “one platform architecture”, and the acquisitions serve it: the filings for 2022 and 2024 describe the deals of those years as made “primarily to enhance our products with the acquired technology and engineering workforce.”
The broader statement in the 10-K lists the aims as expanding or improving service offerings, sales reach, operations, access to expertise and delivery to international markets. In practice, the record shows a buyer of capabilities. The acquired company becomes a module, a feature or an engineering team inside the platform.
ServiceNow reaches companies through two routes, and they connect. It buys control, taking all outstanding shares, and it takes minority stakes alongside other investors through ServiceNow Ventures and ServiceNow Ecosystem Ventures. Spending on those strategic investments rose to $1,056M in 2025 from $181M in 2024. Two of the companies ServiceNow bought in 2025 had ServiceNow Ventures among their investors two years earlier.
How Much ServiceNow Buys
Twelve acquisitions came in 2015 to 2019, 11 in 2020 to 2022 and 14 in 2023 to 2025. Since 2016 it has averaged three to four deals a year, and 2025 brought seven, its busiest year.
The money tells a sharper story than the count. From 2016 to 2024 ServiceNow paid $1.7bn for its acquisitions in total, by the consideration in its filings, with a peak of $806M in 2021. The large deals it signed in 2025, two closed in 2025 and two in the first half of 2026, come to $11.8bn: 87 percent of the $13.5bn in consideration its filings itemize since 2016. Bloomberg Law counted at least $12bn of acquisitions and strategic investments in 2025, after what it called years of eschewing big mergers.
Free cash flow of $4.6bn in 2025 carries much of that, and for the largest deal ServiceNow added debt: $4.0bn of senior notes issued in May 2026, alongside $2.1bn of commercial paper outstanding at the end of June. Cash paid for business combinations came to $8.8bn in the first half of 2026 alone, against $113M in all of 2024.
What Size of Company ServiceNow Buys
A price is on record for 20 of the 37 acquisitions. The median is $33M, with an interquartile range of $15M to $474M, and 11 of the 20 cost under $50M. The deals with an unpublished price are smaller again: ServiceNow’s filings put the total consideration for everything it closed in 2022 at $92M, and in 2024 at $112M.
Disclosed prices skew large, and they skew recent. The 14 priced deals announced from 2015 to 2021 had a median of $22M; the six from 2022 to 2025 had a median of $750M, and deals announced in 2025 account for 89 percent of all disclosed value. The second figure measures ServiceNow’s recent platform bets, and the first a typical acquisition.
Revenue figures are rarer than prices. In every year we checked, ServiceNow’s filings describe the results of acquired companies as immaterial to the group, and two targets published a revenue figure at the time of sale, both above $100M of recurring revenue. The typical company ServiceNow buys is a venture-backed software business with a product ServiceNow can build into its platform.
What ServiceNow Buys
The headline count covers software companies, as our ranking does, and every figure on this page covers the 37 software deals. ServiceNow has also bought IT services firms, for skills it wanted in its products in governance and risk, design and enterprise search. By the market each software target served:
| Vertical | Acquisitions |
|---|---|
| IT infrastructure and developer tools | 11 |
| Data, analytics and BI | 5 |
| AI and machine learning platforms | 4 |
| Cybersecurity and identity | 4 |
| Sales, marketing and customer service | 3 |
| Industrial and manufacturing | 3 |
| HR and workforce management | 2 |
| Other software | 5 |
| Total software | 37 |
IT infrastructure, where ServiceNow started, is the largest group: 11 deals from 2016 to 2024, in IT asset management, monitoring, configuration data, database performance, automation and network automation. Data and analytics and AI platforms add nine more, from conversational AI bought in 2018 and 2020 to the AI assistant and data catalog businesses of 2025. Manufacturing is the newest thread: three deals in 2024 and 2025 added connected worker and quality management applications for industrial customers.
Cybersecurity is the largest line by value. Its four deals include the largest and the third largest in ServiceNow’s history, both signed in December 2025: one in cyber exposure management, which ServiceNow says will expand its security workflow offerings across all connected devices, and one in identity security. The 2025 applications deals point the same way: ServiceNow bought a configure, price, quote business to expand its CRM footprint, in its own words, and a data catalog business to strengthen its AI platform.
If your company is a ServiceNow implementation partner, your buyer list looks different. ServiceNow itself buys mainly software, and the 97 acquisitions of ServiceNow partners we track from 2015 to 2025 were made by integrators, consultancies and private equity platforms, as our analysis of who is buying ServiceNow partners shows.
Where ServiceNow Buys
ServiceNow bought in 12 countries. The United States leads with 25, Israel has two, and the other ten countries have one each: Canada, India, Belgium, France, Denmark, Norway, Germany, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Sweden. By region, 26 of the 37 were in North America, 8 in Europe, 2 in the Middle East (Israel) and 1 in Asia-Pacific (India).
Europe came later. All eight European acquisitions date from 2020 onward, one in each of eight countries, and each brought a specific product: configuration management, indoor mapping, code migration, database performance, smart retail, task mining, connected worker software and quality management. The buyer behind them earns 37 percent of its revenue outside North America, $3.4bn of it from Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2025.
What ServiceNow Pays: Acquisition Multiples
ServiceNow publishes prices and purchase price allocations, while its targets keep their revenue private. Two of them published a revenue figure at the time of sale, and two deals are too few for a median: we publish a multiple from five deals up. Both were priced far above the median of 3.7 times revenue across the private software deals in our valuation research.
The filings show where the price goes. Of the $13.3bn of consideration that ServiceNow itemized, 71 percent was recorded as goodwill, which the filings attribute to “synergies resulting from the business combination.” The median deal was also at 71 percent, and the small deals, those under $100M, at 66 percent. Developed technology is the largest identified asset in every itemized deal, and customer relationships became a large asset only in the biggest deals of 2025 and 2026.
For a seller, that split is the pricing logic. ServiceNow pays for what your product will do inside its platform, sold to its customers, and the identified assets of the business account for the remaining 29 percent. A business with modest revenue and technology that fills a gap on ServiceNow’s roadmap can command a price well above what its financials alone support.
The logic also runs the other way. Element AI, the Montreal AI company, sold to ServiceNow in 2021 far below its 2019 private valuation, BetaKit reported, after setbacks with its products. ServiceNow paid for the team and the technology it wanted, and the price reflected what those were worth to ServiceNow.
Have an offer from ServiceNow?
If you have an offer from ServiceNow on your desk, talk to us before you answer it. ServiceNow is a strong buyer: it pays for strategic fit, with 71 percent of the consideration in its filings recorded as goodwill, it funds deals from $4.6bn of annual free cash flow, and it closes small deals within days of announcing them. Its offers also come from a buyer that has completed 37 software acquisitions since 2015, can invest in a company before it buys it, and can pay partly in its own shares. Our job is to find the buyers who will compete with it, to establish what your technology is worth to each of them, and to negotiate the cash, the stock and the terms for your team while there is still room to move them. Even if ServiceNow is the right home, competing bids alone should push its valuation up. Call us before you sign a letter of intent.
How ServiceNow Structures a Deal
ServiceNow buys the whole company. Every deal itemized in its filings was an acquisition of all outstanding shares, and our records show the same for the rest, with the asset and IP purchases of product carve-outs as the only variation.
Through 2024 ServiceNow paid in cash. In 2025 it began to use its own shares: stock made up 86 percent of the consideration for the configure, price, quote business it bought that year and 61 percent for the AI assistant company it bought in December. Stock moves the price between signing and closing. In the larger of those two deals, the consideration recorded at closing was 16 percent below the value announced at signing, nine months earlier, after ServiceNow shares had fallen. Its two largest deals, closed in 2026, were paid in cash.
The filings also show how ServiceNow pays for people. The contingent payments they describe are tied to employees staying, and ServiceNow books them as compensation after closing: up to $5M for one 2017 deal, and $162M of deferred compensation for key employees of the 2026 acquisitions in the first half of that year alone. One deal, in 2023, was paid in two installments seven months apart. For a founder, that means part of the value of a sale sits in your own employment contract and in the packages for your engineers, and those terms deserve the same scrutiny as the price.
Small deals move fast: most of its acquisitions closed within days or weeks of being announced. The large ones take longer, between two and nine months in 2025 and 2026, with the longest stretch for the AI assistant deal. Plan for that time, because a stock-funded offer carries market risk while you wait.
What Happens After Closing
The acquired company joins the platform. ServiceNow sells one product family under one name, so your brand will likely end at closing, and your product becomes part of a ServiceNow module or the engine behind a new one. Fairchild, bought in 2019, became a resilience tool built natively on the platform.
Products can also be retired. ServiceNow bought the observability company Lightstep in 2021, ran its product as ServiceNow Cloud Observability, and in August 2025 announced its end of life, with support through March 2026. After the Element AI deal, BetaKit reported that the vast majority of its corporate staff received termination notices while ServiceNow kept the technology and set up an AI innovation hub in Canada. The teams that build the technology are the asset ServiceNow buys, and both cases show that the business around them can be wound down.
Large deals also move ServiceNow’s own numbers. The company expected the 2026 security acquisition to reduce its full year operating margin by about 75 basis points and its free cash flow margin by about 200 basis points, and its shares fell 17 percent after the first quarter results of 2026.
If the survival of your product or your brand matters to you, raise it before you sign, and ask ServiceNow what happened to comparable products it bought five years ago. If what matters most is the outcome for your team, the retention packages are where that outcome is decided.
ServiceNow’s Competitive Position
In our ranking of software acquirers ServiceNow is tenth among product-driven strategic buyers, a group that includes Microsoft, IBM, Alphabet, Cisco and Salesforce. ServiceNow’s own pace has picked up: 14 acquisitions in 2023 to 2025, against 11 in 2020 to 2022.
The buyers that compete with ServiceNow for a target are the platform companies that sell to the same IT, security and customer service teams. For a seller, that is good news: a capability that fills a gap for ServiceNow can fill a similar gap for one of its rivals, and a competing bid tests ServiceNow’s view of what your technology is worth.
Is This a Good Time to Sell to ServiceNow?
ServiceNow is still buying after its largest year. In the first nine months of 2026 it completed further acquisitions in analytics, AI agents and CRM operations software, on top of the two large security deals that closed in March and April. It also authorized a further $5.0bn of share buybacks in January 2026, alongside its spending on deals.
The wider software market repriced in early 2026, as AI coding agents cast doubt on parts of a sector that we saw as already carrying excessive valuations. In our March 2026 webinar on SaaS valuations we noted that the businesses holding up best were smaller, vertically focused and serving mission-critical workflows, and that more buyers now ask how a business is addressing AI disruption risk. ServiceNow’s own shares fell with the sector, which matters for any offer paid partly in stock.
The case for selling is strongest for a company whose product adds a capability ServiceNow is investing in now: AI agents and enterprise search, security and identity, data, and CRM. ServiceNow pays for that fit. If your product is exposed to AI disruption, our webinar view stands: now is a good time to sell, while valuations for software businesses remain sensible. For an owner whose business is growing and who can carry the risk, keeping the company is a good option too. The latest prices are in our software valuation multiples research.
Why You Need an M&A Advisor When ServiceNow Approaches You
The buyer has completed 37 software acquisitions since 2015, invests in companies years before it buys them, and sees every price it has paid; the owner across the table is selling one company, with a handful of public numbers to compare against.
The minority route adds a second asymmetry. In our view a ServiceNow Ventures investment gives ServiceNow a close look at your company before any sale, and two of its 2025 acquisitions came from its own venture portfolio. If ServiceNow is already an investor, an approach from its corporate development team comes from a buyer that knows your numbers well.
Establish what the business is worth before the first offer arrives, on two bases: what your financials support on their own, and what your technology is worth inside a larger platform. ServiceNow prices on the second, and the gap between the two is what the negotiation is about. Then bring in one or two other buyers who can see the same value: a platform rival with the same gap in its product, or a private equity investor who will back the business as it stands.
Negotiate the full package: the split between cash and stock and the protection on the stock part, the time to closing, the retention packages for you and your engineers, and the plan for your product and customers. A competing bid gives you room on all of it. The figures on this page describe a market; your company will be priced in a negotiation.
That is the work we do for owners of software businesses while they keep running the company, and running it well through the process matters, because how the business performs ends up in the price. For how an approach fits into a wider sale, see how to sell a software company and strategic versus financial buyers.
About Aventis Advisors
Aventis Advisors is an M&A advisor for software and technology companies. We believe the world would be better off with fewer but better quality M&A deals, done at the right moment for the company and its owners. Our goal is to provide honest, insight-driven advice that lays out all the options clearly, including the option to keep the status quo.
Get in touch to discuss what your business could be worth and how the process works.
