Our 100th weekly newsletter.

This is the 100th time we’ve pulled this newsletter together. Thank you for subscribing, reading, sharing with your friends, and sending the occasional note back with your comments, suggestions, and words of encouragement. It means a lot!

This was another insanely busy week, so we’ll get straight to the news, where you’ll find UiPath’s latest mega-round, DataBrick’s mega-round, Peakon’s $700M acquisition, and two Israeli IPO filings.

If you click on one thing this week, click on this: Semil Shah brilliantly summarized the two streams of thought shaping the tech world today: “Fundamentalists” vs. “End Marketers.” I’m pretty sure I’m a fundamentalist…and I’m pretty sure the end marketers are winning. :)

If you are building an enterprise or deep tech startup in Europe or Israel, please let me know… Now let’s get to the news.

Angular Insights: Talks for Enterprise Founders

Angular is hosting a series of online interactive events with our community of early-stage enterprise tech founders from across Europe and Israel. These talks are designed to deliver practical startup advice in an easy-to-consumer format — with plenty of opportunities to engage with our speakers. Typically, these take place on Wednesday at 3pm UK, 4pm CET, 5pm Israel. To register for any of the sessions, just click on the links below.

• June 23: Lemonade — Building an Engineering Organization from Startup to IPO with Erez Dickman, Vice President of R&D at Lemonade

• We’ll be announcing more sessions soon…..stay tuned!

Check out: www.angularventures.com/events for additional upcoming events, recordings of past events, and to subscribe to our event series.

From the blog

Why we invested in Levity.ai: A no-code ML-powered workflow on every desktop
Why we invested in Firebolt: Next-gen cloud-native data warehouses (& Eldad Farkash)
Why we invested in Candu: Democratizing Front-End Development
US Immigration: Updates in US Immigration Impacting Founders
Going to America: Lessons on moving to the US from Israeli startups
JFrog Investment memo: What JFrog looked like in April 2012
Milestones, gratitude, and the challenges ahead: Reflections on an IPO and the ones that got away
League Tables: The most active US VCs in European & Israeli Enterprise Tech
The Data: Enterprise & Deep Tech VC in Europe & Israel
Defining Enterprise/Deep Tech. What do we actually mean by the phrase “enterprise or deep tech?”
Introducing the Angular Ventures Team. Getting to know Anne and Andrew.
Launching Angular Ventures I. What we do, why we exist, and how we got here.
US incorporation? Just do it. Why nearly all enterprise tech companies should incorporate in Delaware.

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• Denmark/HR. Workday acquired Danish HRtech company Peakon for $700M. Bernard Liautaud of Balderton blogged on why they backed the company in 2018. “The Peakon team had realized that businesses needed a better way of understanding what really mattered to their employees. To solve this issue they had created best-in-class survey technology, rooted in psychology, which would provide companies with the feedback they needed to make better people decisions. The idea was to collect continuous feedback to get a real-time pulse of how a company was operating, rather than just surveying staff once a year.”

• Israel/Training. WalkMe filed to go public on Nasdaq at a $4B valuation. “In an age in which most communications between a company and its clients is done digitally, companies need large and sophisticated websites that can answer a wide range of needs. WalkMe develops platforms that aid companies in carrying out digital transformations, enabling them to maximize their technological systems both from the user side, with guidelines and training, and on the analytics side, providing management with insights on what works and what doesn’t, to assist in their rapid transitions to digital platforms. What makes its product unique is that it can be integrated into existing websites as an additional layer without requiring the writing of code.”

• Israel/Payments. Payoneer filed to go public on Nasdaq at a $3.3B valuation. “Payoneer, which was founded in 2005 by Yuval Tal, developed a platform that streamlines global commerce for millions of small businesses, marketplaces, and enterprises from 190+ countries and territories. Leveraging its robust technology, compliance, operations, and banking infrastructure, Payoneer delivers a suite of services that includes cross-border payments, working capital, tax solutions, risk management, and payment orchestration for merchants.”

• Poland/VC Scene. An overview of VC activity in Poland.

• Israel/Scaleups. New research by Insight Partners highlighted the increasing number of scaleups in the Israeli eco-system. “According to estimates, investments in scaleups in Israel between 2015–2019 increased by 66% compared to the previous five years. In this time period, Tel Aviv also became the 15th biggest global Scaleup Hub by funding growth, with 290 scaleup funding rounds between 2015–2019.”

• Romania/RPA. UiPath raised $750M for their Robotic Process Automation platform which helps organizations efficiently automate business processes.

• Israel/Telco. Drivenets raised $208M for its network cloud software that turns the physical network into a shared resource supporting multiple services which aims to revolutionize the telecom industry.

• Israel/Data Tooling. LeadSpace raised $46M for their B2B data platform giving them a source of reliable information that powers their sales and marketing efforts.

• Israel/Bio AI. Ukko raised $40M for its AI-powered software platform that precisely engineers food proteins to eliminate allergies.

• Spain/Electric Smart Chargers. Wallbox has raised $40M to help it continue to manufacture smart charging solutions for electric vehicles.

• Israel/Compute Workloads. Granulate raised $30M for helps improve the performance of organizations’ computing infrastructure and reduces computing costs.

• Israel/AI Compute. Run AI has raised $30M for its software layer tailored to the needs of AI workloads running on GPUs and similar chipsets.

• UK/HR. Oyster has raised $20 million for its HR platform for globally distributed companies.

• Spain/SME ERP. Holded raised $18M for its platform that gives small businesses access to ERP-style planning across invoicing, accounting, sales, project management, inventory management and HR, in one dashboard.

• Finland/Media Licensing. Flowhaven raised $16M for its Licensing Relationship Management (LRM) platform enables any brand, large and small, to manage the entire lifecycle of a licensing partnership, and prevent communication gaps.

• Belgium/Data Monitoring. Soda Data has raised $14.5 million for its data monitoring platform. Point Nine blogged on why they invested.

• Israel/Quantum. Classiq has raised $10.5 million for its quantum software development platform.

• Israel/ML Tooling. Pinecone raised $10M for its vector database, ML and data infrastructure engineers can dynamically transform and index billions of high-dimensional vectors.

• Austria/Headless CMS. Storyblok has raised $8.5M for its “headless” CMS for developers and marketers to deliver content.

• Israel/B2B Payments. Balance has raised $5.5M for its software that offers efficient B2B payments that allows merchants to offer a variety of payment methods.

• Germany/No Code AI Workflows. Levity (an Angular Ventures portfolio company) has raised $1.7 million for its ‘no-code’ AI tool to let anyone create workflow automations, letting knowledge workers automate tedious, repetitive and manual parts of their job without the need to learn how to code.

• UK/App Builder. Stacker has raised $1.7M to help non-developers create software from spreadsheets.

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

• A new era for Amazon. In an inspiring letter to employees, Jeff Bezos announced that he will be exiting the CEO role (he will remain Executive Chairman) and will be replaced by Andy Jassey who currently heads AWS. “Keep inventing, and don’t despair when at first the idea looks crazy. Remember to wander. Let curiosity be your compass. It remains Day 1.”

• Databricks. The data analytics company raised $1B at a $28B valuation. “Previous funding rounds have been led by Andreessen Horowitz and New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from investors like Microsoft and Battery Ventures. Previous $250 million and $400 million funding rounds, held in February and October 2019 respectively, focused on the development of the Unified Analytics platform, Delta Lake, and optimization of performance with the open-source MLFlow platform for performing machine learning experiments and launching models into production. In June 2020, Databricks acquired Redash, the dashboard visualization for data scientists, and turned over control of MLflow to the Linux Foundation. Databricks was founded in 2013 by the creators of Apache Spark, an open-source framework for distributed computation across multiple machines many deep learning projects use today. The group of data and machine learning researchers first met at UC Berkeley.”

• API-First. Grace Isford released a comprehensive directory of API-first companies and a thoughtful analysis of API pricing strategies. Here’s a highlight: “Worry less about making your product cheaper, and more about how to make your product easier to use and adopt. API-first companies often open up antiquated industries or provide software encouraging connectivity and scalability. Many of the best API-first companies of the 21st century removed intermediaries like slow-moving banks (Stripe) or unreliable SMS providers (Twilio).”

• Robinhood’s Reckoning. The WSJ cover’s the fintech rocketship’s recent trials.

How to Startup

• Usage-based pricing. Kyle Poyar of Openview on the movement towards usage-based pricing instead of straight subscription pricing. “The usage-based model allows a customer to start at a low cost, minimizing friction to getting started while still preserving the ability to monetize a customer over time because the price is directly tied with the value a customer receives. Not limiting the number of users who can access the software, customers are able to find new use cases — which leads to more long-term success and higher lifetime value.”

• A primer on Sales Ops. Amy Liu of Point Nine / Framer on sales ops. “Until recently, companies waited until too late to hire SOPs. Now Sales Leaders know that having this function earlier means building critical structure proactively, instead of diving into the unknown without expertise or scrambling to clean up operational debts later. Rapid growth without visibility, process, and measurement is a big no-no. Often start-ups will start by sharing SOPs responsibilities among multiple individuals. Even if they have the right skill sets, this will still take away time and focus from sales reps, which is not ideal in the mid-long term basis.”

• Strategic product roadmaps. Emil Kabisch discussed the importance of strategic product roadmaps vs. more tactical feature-level roadmaps. “This article proposes five alternative roadmap structures to focus on more strategic product planning and managing trade-offs. For each approach, it then discusses how the respective format can help you reframe the question of prioritisation within your team.” Well worth the read and a bookmark for later.

• Launch metrics. The team at Levity (yeah, we are biased) shared some cool metrics on their launch.

How to Venture

• Fundamentalists vs. End Marketers. Semil Shah brilliantly summarizes what is happening in VC land as an ideological battle between (A) “fundamentalists” who seek to peg valuations to what they see as realistic underlying value and possible exit outcomes and (B) “end marketers” who are willing to pay nearly any price to access a slot in a possible winner in what they perceive are increasingly enormous markets. (hat tip to @Bandrew)

• Five lessons from Vinod Khosla. A few extraordinarily useful pieces of advice from the legendary VC. “Know who to take advice from and on what topic. Vinod is ruthless about who he takes advice from. He believes it’s easy to get the wrong advice. He would say this is one of the most important lessons for an entrepreneur, and most investors give advice that hurt companies rather than help. There were times I’d ask, “well, why aren’t you taking his/her advice?”, and Vinod would reply, “That’s not his/her strength.” He taught me the importance of understanding each person’s strengths and to prioritize advice based on them. Taking the wrong advice? That can be a missile to what you are building.”

• Brave new world. Carta announced its CartaX liquidity service to facilitate secondary share sales in private companies. A16Z thinks it’s a game-changer…and it very well might be.

Portfolio News

Levity, a ‘no-code’ AI tool to let anyone create workflow automations, emerges out of stealth.

Trellis was selected by Pernod Ricard to dynamically predict yield, quality and timing of grape harvest.

Crux OCM’s CEO, Vicki Knott, shares how Crux OCM was started and why it’s so important for engineers starting their own companies to learn sales.

Planable launched Instagram direct publishing.

JFrog and Docker announce partnership to improve quality and performance in app development.