Salesforce Acquires Tableau, Raytheon to Merge With United Technologies

M&A Thursday has segued into M&A Monday: Salesforce is buying data visualization firm Tableau for $15.7B in an all-stock deal.

This just a few days after Google announced it was buying analytics startup Looker for $2.6B.

Somebody’s going to need a good analytics visualization tool to analyze all of these sudden big analytics M&A deals!

Also in AI news, network analysis and cyberattack AI firm Vectra has raised a $100M Series E round led by TCV, which brings the company’s total raise to $220M, according to a report from SiliconANGLE.

UK-based Privatar, a data privacy software provider for the enterprise, raised a $40M Series B round led by Accel.

Spacemaker, AI for architects, urban planners, and property developers, raised $25M in a Series A co-led by Atomico and Northzone.

And Bloomberg is reporting that Apple is preparing to do an “acquihire” of self-driving startup Drive.ai. That company has raised about $77M and last valued in 2017 at $200M.

Lest you think those are large deals, let’s not forget the giant merger in the aerospace and defense industries announced over the weekend, the combination of United Technologies and Raytheon.

Raytheon and United Technologies’ aerospace businesses produce a whole slew of aircraft and defense technologies, including Pratt & Whitney engineers, Tomahawk missiles, and the F-35 fighter jet.

If approved, the merger would become one of the biggest deals of 2019, and would leave a company with an estimated $74B in expected sales for the year…and a landscape with a much smaller short list of defense contractors (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon are at the top of that list).