Enterprise & Deep Tech Weekly

Issue #89: For the week ended July 27, 2020

Corporate venture malfeasance. This week’s must-read is probably the WSJ’s expose of founder-unfriendly practices at Amazon, which is accused by some founders of competing directly with startups after making investments in them or engaging in discussions with them as part of a potential investment or M&A process. I suspect (I know…) that this practice is not limited to Amazon, and it’s unfair to single Amazon out as a particularly egregious repeat offender here. The people I know at Amazon, AWS, and other corporate VCs are good people who would never knowingly harm a startup. But founders need to be careful. Generally speaking, founders should maintain a high degree of skepticism and caution when it comes to engaging with corporate VCs or corp dev departments. These business units exist to serve the interests and objectives of the corporate parent, and conflicts of interest can easily arise. Startups need to engage with big tech and big corporates, but they must keep their eyes open. It seems that no amount of well-intentioned warnings from traditional, commercial (non-corporate) VCs are ever going to be enough to completely convince founders to be sufficiently careful. We’ll keep trying.

A talk with Bucky Moore. Please join us on Wednesday at 5:15pm UK / 6:15pm CET / 7:15pm Israel time for a chat with Bucky Moore, a Partner at Kleiner Perkins. He’ll be talking about four key trends driving enterprise software. As an investor and board member at some of the more iconic companies of the new stack (Netlify, Labelbox, Open Raven, Trace Data, Prisma), he’s well-placed to have a great perspective on this — and, as always, he’ll be answering your questions live. Please click here to register to join us.

As always, 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.

• July 29: The Four Trends Driving Enterprise Software Forward with Bucky Moore, Partner at Kleiner Perkins

• September 9: Building your AI Stack In-House with Micha Breakstone, Co-Founder of Chorus.ai

• September 16: Successfully Selling SaaS to Micro SMBs with Martin Henk, Co-Founder of Pipedrive

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

From the blog

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.
Technology for Trust. Why we invested in Vault Platform.
A Security Layer for the Physical World: Why we invested in DUST Identity.
A System of Intelligence for Field Service: Why we invested in Aquant.io.

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• Europe/Apple Taxes. The second-highest court in the EU ruled in favor of Apple in a tax $15B dispute with the government of Ireland.

• Europe/Privacy. The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) announced that there will be no grace period following the end of the “Privacy Shield” that allowed customer data to be moved from the EU to the US under certain circumstances.

• Israel/Adtech. The US DoJ approved the $250M purchase of Outbrain by Taboola.

• Portugal/Cloud Contact Center. Talkdesk raised $143M at a $3B valuation.

• Israel/Checkpoint. The firewall giant dramatically exceeded wall street expectations for Q2 earnings, driven in part by a massive reduction in travel expenses due to Coronavirus.

• Israel/Downturn. Calcalist looks at how the economic impact from Coronavirus may end tech’s era of excess.

• France/Ecommerce Experience Analytics. AB Tasty has raised $40M for its E-commerce user experience optimization software.

• Israel/Network Security. CyCognito raised $30 million for its network security analysis platform.

• Israel/Digital Farming. Taranis has raised $30M for its software that helps farmers analyze ultra-high-resolution images of crops to detect early signs of diseases, insect infestations, nutrient deficiencies, water damage, and other risk factors.

• Germany/Customer Insights. Quantilope raised $25M for its consumer insights platform helps companies build-out their questionnaire design, panel management, live reporting, in-depth analysis, and data visualizations.

• UK/No Trace Plastic. Polymateria raised $19M for a new plastic that the company has designed that automatically biodegrades and leave no trace.

• France/Collaboration Platform. iObeya raised $17M for its real-time collaboration platform for enterprise teams that use Lean or Agile development frameworks, providing virtual meeting rooms, digital whiteboards, and other workflow tools.

• Israel/Cloud and Microservice Monitoring. Epsagon raised $10M for its automated end-to-end monitoring technologies for serverless cloud-based systems, specializing in monitoring and tracing for microservices and cloud-based applications.

• Spain/AI-powered Radiology Diagnostics Platform. QUIBIM raised $9.25M for its AI platform that detects diseases, including COVID-19.

• Ireland/Passion Economy Chat App. Quorum raised $2M for its software that lets creators and service providers communicate directly to their clients via chat, with enhanced features to moderate, manage users and monetize the interactions.

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

• Hacker News thread on enterprise software. I came across this pretty cool thread on Hacker News which consists of people just talking about their favorite pieces of enterprise software — mostly unsung heroes.

• The future of Low-code/No-Code. A podcast interview (and some transcript) with Howie Liu, CEO of Airtable. “What we’re really doing is creating this new layer of data-based workflows. And we’re creating this application platform for teams within any company to build their own useful business process using an end user interface that feels like a spreadsheet, but is actually powered by a relational database and all of these other powerful pieces that we give you to build a useful, tailor-made application.”

• Microsoft goes low-code. Microsoft announced the release of Dataflex, a low-code data platform for Microsoft Teams. “Microsoft Dataflex delivers a built-in, low-code data platform for Teams, and provides relational data storage, rich data types, enterprise grade governance, and one-click solution deployment. Microsoft Dataflex enables everyone to easily build and deploy apps and intelligent chatbots in Teams with Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft Power Virtual Agents.”

• Nvidia is rumored to be looking to buy ARM. Forbes, Bloomberg, and other sources reported on discussions of a potential merger between the two semiconductor giants. If the potential for an acquisition of Arm by NVIDIA is more than just rumors and rumblings, it could reshape the semiconductor landscape in a big way and vault NVIDIA to another level as a semiconductor solutions and technology company. An NVIDIA-Arm deal could send shockwaves far and wide in the chip industry, giving its rivals numerous new reasons to lose sleep.

• Cloudflare outage. The Cloudflare outage last week — which resulted in a 50% reduction in global internet traffic for 27 minutes — was apparently caused by a technician unplugging a switchboard.

• Tough questions for tech. Scott Galloway, in his inimitable fashion, prepares some tough questions for tech execs.

• Bad code drives the world. The Economist on why companies continuously struggle with bad software code.

How to Startup

• Beware Amazon. The WSJ investigates claims that Amazon’s investment arm is being used to gather intelligence on startups to help Amazing compete with them directly. The article, which features an interview with the Portuguese CEO of DefinedCrowd, paints a very disturbing picture of how the tech giant can endanger the startups with which it works. “In some cases, Amazon’s decision to launch a competing product devastated the business in which it invested. In other cases, it met with startups about potential takeovers, sought to understand how their technology works, then declined to invest and later introduced similar Amazon-branded products, according to some of the entrepreneurs and investors. “They are using market forces in a really Machiavellian way,” said Jeremy Levine, a partner at venture-capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners. “It’s like they are not in any way, shape or form the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing. They are a wolf in wolf’s clothing.””

• Selling during Covid-19. Steli Efti suggests that a dry pipeline can be an opportunity to experiment and change your mindset. A dry sales pipeline allows you to enter exploration mode because fewer prospects and deals mean more time to experiment and learn.

• How to engage with Google. Advice from Eze Vidra of Remagine Ventures, on how startups can engage with Google.

How to Venture

• Fear and loathing in venture capital. The brilliant Max Niederofer of Heartcore reflects on the emotional toll VC can take on its practitioners. I came across it recently. It’s two years old, but it’s awesome. “Ours is a game of power laws, if you miss the Facebook/Google/Spotify/Netflix that you could have looked at, you’ve not just screwed up your quarter or your year. You’ve screwed up your entire career. And for what? So you could hang out with your kids or take that cardiologist appointment? Exactly. :) “

• Founder-Investor Fit. Nikhil Basu Trivedi continues his tour-de-force series of blog posts on the VC industry by addressing the question of “founder-investor fit.” How do founders choose their investors? Some care about the best deal terms: the largest round size at the highest valuation with the lowest dilution. Others care most about speed of the investment decision. Some care most about the brand of the firm. Some gravitate more towards agglomerator firms, and others more towards specialists. Others care more about the brand of the individual partner leading the investment. Still others care less about the brand, but more about how exactly the firm or the individual will help their business be successful. Some founders are looking for specific expertise — help in hiring, for example, or a former founder, or someone with deep experience in their business model or sector, as their lead investor. Other founders want a stage-focused investor to match their stage of business.

Portfolio News

Datos Health received the 2020 Telehealth Award from HealthTechZone. Additionally, Charlton Morris Medical recognized Datos Health as a game-changer in the digital health space.

Vault Platform is hosting an event on 5 ways HR can boost workplace inclusion and equality on August 4th.

JFrog added partners and features to bolster its DevOps platform, helping developers ship secure code and use issue-free open source code.

Sisense named Gartner Peer Insights 2020 Customers’ Choice for analytics and business intelligence platforms.

Snyk announced significant enhancements to its prioritization capabilities.