Enterprise & Deep Tech Weekly

For the week ended June 22, 2021

We are super excited to be hosting Erez Dickman, VP of R&D at Lemonade, which recently went public on Nasdaq, on our weekly webinar/podcast series. He’ll be talking about how to scale an engineering organization from zero to IPO — and you don’t want to miss it. Catch us wherever you get your podcasts or — far more fun — join in on the conversation by registering for the session and asking Erez a question. See you there!

We haven’t sent out this newsletter over the past few weeks — and that’s entirely my fault. I was in the US with my family on a vaccine run, enjoying the sun across Texas and New Mexico, working out of two AirBnBs and four hotels across two beautiful states and covering nearly 4,000 miles with an extremely cooperative four-year old. It’s good to be back on this side of the Atlantic, but after nearly 18-months locked in one place — the sense of freedom was amazing.

One of the benefits of this time in the US was the chance to reflect — and in this era of massive fundraising by both companies and VCs (new and old) I found myself reflecting on where Angular is relative to others. Angular is a relatively small fund. Even if the fund were to double or triple in size, it would still be among the smaller funds announced on what seems like a nearly daily basis. There are VCs funds doing early stage investing that are literally 100x the size of Angular. So I asked myself a simple question on one of those thousands of miles of driving through the Southwestern Desert: suppose Angular could be any size at all, suppose fundraising infinite capital was possible, what would I actually want to be doing with my life? Phrased that way, the answer was clear — the part of this industry that I find the most exciting is still pretty much unchanged: that first check into a company that no one else wants to back and — more importantly — the partnership that gets forged with an early stage team attempting to do the impossible. That is why I got into VC, it’s why Angular exists, and — even in a climate where dollars appear to be falling from the sky — there are still plenty of opportunities to lean into a situation where most others would not.

EVENTS

June 23 / Building an Engineering Organization from Startup to IPO
Erez Dickman, Vice President of R&D, Lemonade

June 30 / Building Developer Products and Communities
Amir Shevat, Co-Founder & CPO, Reshuffle

July 21 / Fireside Chat with Lenny Pruss, General Partner at Amplify Partners
Lenny Pruss, General Partner, Amplify Partners

September 29 / Fireside Chat with Ben Braverman, Chief Customer Officer at Flexport
Ben Braverman, Chief Customer Officer, Flexport

FROM THE BLOG

The Great Acceleration of Seed Investing:
Can seed funds and accelerators work together?

Angular’s Brand Strategy:
Revisiting our brand as we launch our new website

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)

EUROPE & ISRAEL FUNDING NEWS

Israel/IPOs. The value of publicly-traded Israeli tech companies exceeds $300B on US exchanges according to a new study.
UK/Unicorns. The UK hit 100 tech unicorns, more than the rest of Europe combined.
Sweden/Databases. Neo4j, maker of the world’s most popular graph database, raised $325M in the largest round ever for a database company. Go Emil!
Israel/Fraud Prevention. Forter (an Angular Ventures portfolio company) raised $300M for its fraud prevention and protection with a real-time automated decisions platform for all transactions.
Israel/Sales Enablement. Gong raised $250M for its revenue intelligence platform giving insights into what’s happening with your (remote) sales teams and deals.
Germany/Logistics. Forto raised $240M for its online platform for freight forwarding.
Israel/Security. Exabeam raised $200M to help power cloud-delivered security products that solve Threat Detection, Investigation and Response.
Israel/Computing. Secretive HPC vendor NextSilicon emerged from stealth (sort of) and announced $200M in financing.
Belgium/IT Asset Management. Lansweeper raised $158M to provide IT asset management software solutions for tracking IT assets.
UK/Talent. Beamery raised $138M for its talent acquisition, engagement, and retention platform.
France/SME Cash Flow. Agicap raised $114M to help builds a SaaS platform for SMBs to manage and forecast their cash flows.
UK/Beauty ERP. Fresha raised $100M for its beauty and wellness booking platform and marketplace.
Israel/Logistics. Bringg raised $100M for its delivery logistics platform for the enterprise market.
France/Employment. Malt raised $97M for their employment marketplace where developers, data scientists, designers, project managers connect with fixed-term job opportunities in their fields.
Germany/Logistics SaaS. Sennder raised $80M for its digital freight forwarder platform.
UK/ Email Security. Tessian raised $65M for its email security company platform which applies machine learning to flagging problematic patterns such as phishing or data exfiltration.
UK/Visual AI. Tractable raised $60M for its artificial intelligence for accident and disaster recovery.
Israel/Web Development. Duda raised $50M for its website development platform specifically catering to web devs the build for small business customers.
Ireland/Quality Platform. Qualio raised $50M for its quality management software platform for the life sciences sector.
Israel/Visual Intelligence. AnyClip raised $47M for its expanded platform introducing “a new era in video analytics” with next-generation AI tools.
Israel/Sales Commission. Spiff raised $46M for its provider of sales commission software.
Germany/Conversational AI. Cognigy raised $44M for its leading Enterprise Conversational AI Platform for customer & employee support process automation.
Israel/Developer Debugger. Lightrun raised $23M for its observability platform which gives developers deep insights into running applications.
Israel/IoT Security. SAM Seamless raised $20M for its cybersecurity platform specialising in network and IoT device security.
Belgium/Customs Platform. C4T raised $20M for its SaaS solution that automates customs and trade compliance.
France/SME Finance. Pennylane raised $18.3M for its full-stack financial management platform used to deal with financial data.
Israel/Space Computers. Ramon raised $17.5M to build supercomputer systems that are specifically designed to operate in the extreme conditions space presents.
Germany/Construction. Cosuno raised $15M for its construction project efficiency platform.
UK/Health Insurance. Qumata raised $9.9M to focus on transforming the life and health insurance underwriting journey through digital data.
UK/HR. Vault Platform (an Angular Ventures portfolio company) raised $8.2M from Google’s AI-focused fund, Gradient Ventures, for their misconduct reporting SaaS.

WORTH READING

ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS

Tech saves the world. Marc Andreesen reflects on the role of technology during the pandemic. “The most positively shocking development was that virtually all knowledge work in the economy simply kept going. Of course, companies were forced to shut down physical production facilities such as car factories, and frontline workers bore the brunt of in person exposure to COVID throughout the pandemic. But consider this: Not a single significant company engaged in service provision — whether banking, insurance, communications, media, healthcare, you name it — had any downtime at all. Every knowledge worker went home, fired up their laptops, jumped on Slack and Zoom and Gmail and Github, and kept on going. I must have talked to a hundred CEOs through that initial period, and they were uniformly shocked at how well remote work worked, right from the start.”

No/low-code explosion. Gartner argues that 80% of tech will be built by non-developers by 2024, introducing the term “business technologist” to capture non-technical developers. “But instead of tech professionals driving what’s next, Gartner predicts a democratization of technology development that includes citizen developers, data scientists, and “business technologists,” a term that encompasses a wide range of employees who modify, customize, or configure their own analytics, process automation, or solutions as part of their day-to-day work. Aside from non-IT humans, AI systems that generate software will also play a significant role, according to Gartner.”

The fintech endgame. Battery Ventures argues in Extracrunch that “supercompanies” will combine the best of fintech and software, offering a useful framework for analysis which they call the Battery Fintech Framework (BFF). “At the top of the BFF chart, we see our vaunted hybrid SaaS + financial companies. These companies enjoy the best of both worlds: They collect subscription fees for ongoing use of their service (often with strong customer retention over time) and earn fees for offering financial services to their customers that scale with their customers’ volume. In the middle, we see the fintech spectrum. This group ranges from payments companies that collect fees from their customers’ payment volume — essentially the SaaS + financial category, less the subscription fees — to short-duration lenders like the buy-now-pay-laters, or BNPLs, whose short credit exposures are slightly more “fee-like” and require less balance sheet capacity relative to long-duration lenders. At the bottom of the BFF, we see the lenders. These companies rely on interest income from loans, are heavily balance-sheet dependent, and typically don’t have a recurring purchase pattern.”

HOW TO STARTUP

Struggle & success. Some absolutely priceless perspective from Morgan Housel at Collaborative Fund. “When you are keenly aware of your own struggles but blind to others’, it’s easy to assume you’re missing some skill or secret that others have. The more we describe successful people as having guru-like powers, the more everyone else looks at them and says, “I could never do that.” Which is unfortunate, because more people would be willing to try if they knew that those they admire are probably normal people who played the odds right.”

A perspective on fundraising. Freshpaint CEO Steven Fitzsimmons reflects on his fundraising process during the pandemic. He’s absolutely right on the update thing. “The second thing was we started sending weekly updates to our investors at the end of April. Though a bit aggressive, we committed to weekly updates to keep Freshpaint top of everyone’s minds for the next couple months. Our first update went out on April 18, and then weekly thereafter. Our investors mobilized, and started intro-ing us to more investors in their networks that fit our more targeted criteria.”

Lessons on going public. Wise CEO Kristo Kaarman offers some learnings on going public in this twitter thread.

HOW TO VENTURE

One thing. If you read one thing this week on venture investing, read this Twitter thread by Semil Shah. It’s great, but this snippet on leading really resonated. Angular leads the overwhelming majority of the investments we make — and we take that very seriously as the essence of what VCs are supposed to do — but, as Semil says, it’s far from trivial. “Leading Investments — Haystack very occasionally leads. Not often. This is b/c “leading” is more than writing a check — it’s setting terms, corralling syndicate, being accountable to CEO, saying uncomfortable things, QB-zing next raise & more. Very few VCs lead.”

No swim lanes. Gokul Rajaram is seeing what a lot of us see: everyone is in everyone else’s lane.

PORTFOLIO NEWS

Forter raised a $300M Series F funding round at a $3B valuation, led by Tiger Global.

JFrog CRO Tali Notman was named a woman of influence by Silicon Valley Business Insider.

Vault Platform raised a $8.2 million Series A led by Google’s AI focused fund, Gradient Ventures.

Planable welcomes Miruna Dragomir as Chief Marketing Officer.

Crux OCM’s CEO, Vicki Knott, discusses Crux OCM and their technology, and how digitalization is changing pipelines today.