Enterprise & Deep Tech Weekly

Issue #102: For the week ended March 17, 2021

2020 Enterprise & Deep Tech VC Investment Data for Europe & Israel
As we have for the past several years, we’ve just released our 2020 data report on investment trends across Europe & Israel. Special thanks to Andrew Poesaste for tirelessly working to compile the 73-page report. With the launch of Angular, we’ve narrowed the report’s focus down to just enterprise and deep tech, which now comprise about 2/3 of the investment landscape.

The report includes a breakdown of which sectors are rising and falling in investment frequency, a look at trends by country, a listing of the most active US VCs in this geography, and many other good data points.

Must read. If you haven’t yet, Bessemer’s State of the Cloud report is essential reading/listening this week,

And finally… this, by Alexis Gay, is absolutely hilarious.

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

• Ireland/Payments. Stripe raised $600M at a $95B valuation, becoming the most valuable private company in Silicon Valley history. The company has deep Irish roots and announced that the Irish government was one of its new investors. It also announced plans to hire 1,000 new employees in Dublin, among other locations.

• Israel/Adtech. IronSource is in discussions to exit via SPAC at a $10B valuation. Calcalist has more.

• Israel/Developer Security. Snyk raised $300M for their cloud-native application security platform which is a developer-first solution to provide security visibility and remediation for every critical component of modern applications.

• Israel/Testing. SauceLabs acquired Israeli mobile testing platform TestFairy for an undisclosed amount.

• UK/Gig Worker Insurance. Zego raised $150M for their tech-enabled commercial motor insurance products.

• Israel/Cloud Security. Aqua Security raised $135M for their cloud-native security platform.

• Spain/Short Term Job Matcher. Jobandtalent raised $120M for its dual-sided platform that matches temps with employers needing casual labor in sectors like eCommerce, warehousing, logistics and manufacturing.

• Israel/Mass Transportation. Optibus raised $107M for its AI-based platform to help mass transportation work more efficiently in the ‘modern city’.

• Israel/Employee Engagement. Centrical raised $32M for its frontline training and performance HR management platform.

• Israel/Sales Demos. Demostack raised $17.5M for its platform for building software demos.

• Israel/Software Development. LinearB raised $16M for its software delivery intelligence platform that helps dev teams with their software development efforts.

• Israel/Job Board AI. Retrain AI raised $16M for its software that uses AI and machine learning to read job boards at scale and gain insight into where the job market is going.

• UK/Farmer Knowledge. WeFarm raised $11M for its online platform where farmers can share knowledge and advice as well as get access to a marketplace of retailers.

• UK/Modern Law Firm. Legl raised $7M for its platform invites law firms to streamline core business processes like customer onboarding, due diligence and payments.

• Germany/Retail Supply Chain. Magaloop raised $7M for app that digitizes the ordering process of independent stationery retailers and networks them with a network of wholesalers and manufacturers.

• Germany/Financial Crime. Elucidate raised $3M for its financial crime risk scoring platform.

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

• State of the cloud. Recently, Bessemer’s content has easily become among the best of VC-produced content. I consistently find that it increases my sense of comprehension of the technology landscape — and their recent State of the Cloud 2021 report is no exception. The deck and the entire video are worth reviewing. Even topics that might seem “simple” at first glance, are handled with a degree of depth and sophistication that is worth taking some time out for.

• Tal aus Silizium. Apple announced a $1.2B investment in a silicon design center in Munich. “The company said that Munich is already its largest engineering hub in Europe. There are already 1,500 engineers working there. In particular, Apple has been putting together its own team of engineers working on power management chips. Overall, half of Apple’s engineers working on power management are located in Germany. Since then, Apple’s teams in the country have expanded beyond power management to work on other chip designs.”

• No-code/low-code map. Pietro Inverizzi at Stride put out a massive list, analysis, and market map of 145 no-code and low-code applications. Check it out here.

How to Startup

• Bottom-up pricing. Andreesen Horowitz offered up a guide to pricing for bottom-up B2B SaaS companies. They present a four-tier framework which seems to capture the vast majority of cases: casual/free, prosumer, team, enterprise. In all, the piece offers nine simple and useful lessons. For example. “#6 Use pricing for qualification (not just monetization) We often think of pricing purely as monetization. But for a multi-stage user journey, pricing, especially in early stages, can actually be more useful as a qualifier. Minimally, it is a strong indicator of interest. More specifically, it can be used to generate a qualified list of accounts for an inside or direct sales team, establish a formal relationship with the user, and provide insight into what aspects of the product they are willing to pay for. In some cases, it can provide a rate-limiting function.”

• Less is more. Shaul Olmert, CEO of Piggy and founder of Playbuzz, offers some useful thoughts on time management for startup founders. “The Israeli startup culture cultivates an ethos of a commando unit — the few vs. the many, David vs, Goliath, Waze vs. Google — which sometimes makes us run like madmen for no other purpose than, well, to run like madmen. Sometimes trying to do as much as possible, just results in more commitments, more meetings, more people, more expenses, and more time, without any of it necessarily contributing to efficiency and productivity. The challenge is not how to get more done, but rather how to do less.”

• How selling is changing. Tomasz Tunguz shared highlights from a talk by Chorus CEO Jim Benton. “Jim shared some data points from the 15 million calls Chorus analyzed in their public report on the state of conversation intelligence. Here are a few bullets — sellers invite senior decision- makers to sales meetings much more often in the post-COVID era than before. Inviting sales managers to those calls increases conversion rates by 34%. — sales processes require 4.1 meetings over video, compared to 2.8 before, about 50% more time. — storytelling has become more important in closing accounts. The top performing sales people tell 20% more stories. And 68% of the time, those stories include social proof to establish credibility.”

• Coming to America. US VCs push the Biden Administration to reinstate Obama’s International Entrepreneur Rule, which made it easier for foreigners to set up startups in the US. “The National Venture Capital Association, along with the Center for American Entrepreneurship and other groups, in a letter called on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to promote the International Entrepreneur Rule and withdraw a Trump administration memo laying out the intention to terminate it.”

How to Venture

• Revenue-based financing. Alex Danco shares a vision for how revenue-based financing can replace huge swaths of VC for SaaS companies. The FT also covered the trend this week.

Portfolio News

Datos Health partners with Medial EarlySign, augments artificial intelligence with remote care automation to optimize patient care.

Levity shares their thesis on no-code. “….since our application has machine learning built-in, we frequently face skepticism whether our platform can match entirely code-based machine learning systems and this deserves “to be destroyed” in a more thoughtful manner.”

Snyk hits $4.7B valuation with $300M Series E.

Sisense names Adam Towns as Chief Financial Officer.