Building Angular Ventures II
Gil Dibner

Last week, we announced the launch of Angular Ventures II at $80M, double the size of Fund I. Our plan for Fund II is to double down on the strategy that got us here: Angular II is a first-check fund to back deep tech founders across Europe and Israel. The larger fund size allows us to write first checks of up to $3M. We are also very willing and eager to write smaller first checks of as low as $100K when we have the chance to work closely with founders at the earliest stages. For us, it’s always been more about when we engage (crazy early!) and how we engage (intensely and deeply!) than how much capital we are deploying. That hasn’t changed at all.

We also announced that David Peterson is joining us as a second full partner in the fund. David will lead investments and work with me, Anne, and Andrew to continue building Angular into the leading early-stage deep tech fund on this side of the Atlantic. David joins us from Airtable where he was employee #16 and led the company’s growth and partnerships efforts as it scaled from zero to 200,000 customers, achieved unicorn status ($5.7B!), and emerged as one of the iconic companies of our era. Airtable is a leader in no-code, product-led, customer-built growth — and David brings a wealth of operational experience into the Angular family. An American living in London, David combines a Silicon Valley perspective, a cosmopolitan worldview, and a deep intellectual curiosity into what drives growth and success for the most impactful new companies. He’s already had a massive impact on every portfolio founder who has engaged with him. I look forward to working with him to find and help build great companies, and I can’t wait to see what his first few investments will look like.

As we reflect on the past three years, one thing we are especially proud of is that we’ve built the best early-stage advisory platform on this side of the Atlantic. Angular has pioneered a new model of bringing real tangible value to portfolio companies by connecting them to the right advisors at the right time. It has been a secret weapon, but perhaps we should talk about it more. Since inception, we have deployed a large part of our fund’s carry to build a small but very committed network of outstanding advisory partners. By focusing on people we know well and by truly bringing them into our partnership, we are able to drive deep trusted relationships between founders in our portfolio and our network of advisors. As with everything we do at Angular, our focus is on high-quality, high-value relationships — and our advisors are key to that approach. Angular’s network of Advisory Partners and Venture Partners include Asaph Schulman (CMO at Firebolt), Assaf Melochna (co-founder at Aquant), Eldad Farkash (co-founder of SiSense and Firebolt), Fred Simon (chief architect and co-founder of JFrog), Guy Poreh (founder of Playground), Jerry Dischler (GM of Ads at Google), Jennifer Schear (Founder of Schear Immigration), Keren Myr (previously COO at Oribi and Head of Sales Ops at SiSense), Oren Raboy (CTO at Noogata), Ron Yachini (head of the Allen Institute of AI in Israel), Phil Wickham (founder of Sozo Ventures and former CEO of the Kauffman Fellows Program), and Uri Baruchin (an independent international brand strategist).

For more on this, please check out:

• My blog post on the new fund

• David’s post on why he decided to join Angular

• My post on why I’m so excited by what David brings to Angular

It’s never been a more exciting time to be a tech founder or a venture investor — particularly in Europe and Israel, and particularly in enterprise and deep tech. With the announcements we are making today — a new fund and a new Partner — I am happy to say that it’s never been a more exciting time for Angular as well. Andrew, Anne, David, and I look forward to continuing to back the most innovative enterprise and deep tech companies in Europe and Israel. We think we’ve built the most founder-friendly, value-added, and independent-minded venture launchpad for tech founders in Europe and Israel. If you are working on something interesting (especially if no one else seems to get it), drop us a line…

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Alpha, beta, and an inverted venture risk curve. On another note, I put some thoughts together last week on the state of the VC market and what it might mean for venture returns. I’ve observed that some Series A+ investors are racing to deploy checks into very high-risk seed-stage companies where a lot of seed funds I consider excellent have been unwilling to invest — and the question is why? The conclusion I came to is that the momentum market we are in may be driving venture returns to be high beta and low alpha as they all index to a rapidly rising market. At Angular, our focus is on Alpha, and that means we’re going to approach this market in a bit of a different way…..more on that soon.

EVENTS

Oct 20 / Building Developer Products and Communities
Amir Shevat, Head of Product — Developer Platform, Twitter

Oct 27 / Open Source and Category Creation
Emil Eifrem, Founder & CEO of Neo4j

Dec 8 / Fireside Chat with Leigh Moore, VP of Marketing at Snyk
Leigh Moore, VP of Marketing, Snyk

FROM THE BLOG

Building Angular Ventures:
Announcing an $80M first-check Fund II for deep tech founders across Europe & Israel.

Introducing David Peterson:
Why we are adding a second partner.

Why I’m Joining Angular Ventures:
After almost four years at Airtable, David is thrilled to announce that he’s joining Angular Ventures.

Alpha, Beta, and an Inverted Venture Risk Curve:
Making sense of a momentum market.

EUROPE & ISRAEL FUNDING NEWS

Sweden/Automotive Systems. Veoneer has been acquired for $800M by Qualcomm for its advanced driver assistance system stack that includes sensors and software.
Israel/Ad Tech. Tapjoy has been acquired for $400M by IronSource for its platform for monetizing and scaling mobile apps, said the deal would help the firm expand its presence in the non-games app market.
Israel/Travel. TripActions raised $275M for its corporate travel platform.
UK/HR SaaS. Hibob raised $150M for its all-in-one platform that handles various human resources functions.
Sweden/E-commerce. Juni raised $73M for its banking app and platform for e-commerce and online marketing entrepreneurs.
Sweden/Marketing SaaS. Funnel raised $66M for its software that helps marketers automate the collection of data and reporting.
Poland/Frontend Commerce. Vue Storefront raised $17.4M for its front end for headless commerce.
Poland/IT Infrastructure. Spacelift raised $15M for its platform that developer operations (DevOps) teams use to manage cloud infrastructure.
Germany/B2B BNPL. Mondu raised $14M for its “Buy now, pay later” for business customers.
Switzerland/Cloud Analytics. Optimyze has been acquired for an undisclosed amount by Elastic for its Prodfiler platform continually monitors cloud performance to identify inefficiencies.

WORTH READING

ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS

2021 Euroscape. Accel’s Philippe Botteri shared the firm’s 2021 Euroscape, their in-depth report which indicates that Europe and Israel are well on their way to global cloud dominance. Up from just 4 public companies worth less than $9B in 2016, “today, Europe and Israel have generated 23 public companies worth $231B”. That’s not all, “Europe generated the largest cloud IPO of 2021, with UiPath closing its first day of trading with a $36B market cap” and “Europe and Israel minted the two fastest cloud companies to hit unicorn status, with Wiz (14 months) and Hopin (17 months)”. While this data is impressive, we at Angular have been betting on this ecosystem since our inception and, core to our thesis, this region’s eventual “global dominance” was incredibly likely. We also would like to congratulate our portfolio company, Firebolt, for being selected as a Euroscape top 100 cloud company, Accel’s list of the hottest cloud companies across Europe and Israel.

State of AI. Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth compiled into a 188 page deck the most important work in AI research, industry, talent, and politics to inform conversation about the state of AI. One of our favorite key themes they highlight is “AI is stepping up in more concrete ways, including being applied to mission critical infrastructure like national electric grids and automated supermarket warehousing optimization during pandemics.” In line with this trend, check out our portfolio company, CruxOCM. They’re applying AI to automate control rooms, starting with oil and gas pipelines.

HOW TO STARTUP

GitHub Reflections. In the wake of GitLab’s IPO, Jason Warner shares his incredibly honest reflections of his time at GitHub and its acquisition by Microsoft, a sale he helped architect. “For 18 months I was essentially the shadow CEO of the most important software company of a generation. I wish I had another year, but I also knew it wouldn’t have been possible. Selling was the right decision, no matter how much I wanted to see how far we could take it.”

HOW TO VENTURE

Slow Crawl Back to In-Person. An interesting phenomena which has emerged during the pandemic is how in-person meetings and return to office norms have diverged from city to city. When we zoom with founders in Israel, it’s common to see them in an office (together — and less than 6ft apart!). Meanwhile in NYC and SF, a majority are still not back in the office and in-person meetings are a rare occasion. According to Bloomberg, “less than 25% of workers in the San Francisco metro area have returned to in-person work”, but SF-based VCs are finally starting to meet founders in person again.

PORTFOLIO NEWS

Firebolt was featured in Accel 2021 Euroscape as a top 100 cloud company, the firm’s list of the hottest cloud companies across Europe and Israel.

Vault Platform unveiled their TRUST GAP report, the most comprehensive independent research in the market revealing how workplace misconduct is impacting employers, employees and the wider economy.