Enterprise & Deep Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #92: For the week ended September 8, 2020

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Angular Ventures
September 08, 2020

Enterprise & Deep Tech Weekly

Issue #92: For the week ended September 8, 2020

Last week, we hosted David Peterson who leads partnerships at Airtable, for a conversation on product-led-growth and no-code technology. It was super useful and touched on a lot of key themes for companies in both of those categories. Check it out here (video).

This week, on Wednesday, we are hosting Micha Breakstone — co-founder of Chorus.ai among others — for a talk on Building an AI Stack in-House. Click here to register.

This week’s must-read. There are a lot of fundraising guides out there for early-stage founders. Most of them are undifferentiated and uninspired content marketing by VCs with little new to say (I may even be guilty of this…). But this one, by Mark McCabe is concise and very useful. If you are raising capital in the next 12 months, take a look.

Five lessons from the recent spate of SaaS IPO filings. The Information gathers five key lessons from the S-1 filings of Snowflake, Asana, Palantir, JFrog and Sumo Logic. “Asana led the pack with a gross margin of 87% for the most recent quarter it disclosed in its filing, up from 85% during the same period last year. Next was JFrog with a gross margin of 82%, up slightly from a year earlier. Both Palantir and Snowflake showed the biggest gross margin improvement year over year thanks in part to smarter cloud purchases. Palantir said its gross margin in its most recently reported quarter was 80%, up from 70% a year earlier, while Snowflake’s figure rose to 62% from 53% in the year-earlier period. Sumo Logic was the only company among the five that saw its gross margin decline — which it blamed on higher cloud fees — falling to 69% from 73% a year earlier.”

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.

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

From the blog

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

  • UK/Design. Figma opens an HQ in London. “The London headquarters will be Figma’s first international base and will allow them to be closer to European clients. A move to London is a sign that Figma is stepping up its challenge to rivals like Adobe on a more global scale — the company said that 81% of their weekly active users are now based outside of the US.”

  • Israel/AI Visual Intelligence. Anyvision has raised $43M for its visual intelligence software that specializes in face, object and human recognition in mass crowd events. The company has found an uptake in its technology during Covid times which enables the management of safer spaces with touchless access and control remote authentication.

  • UK/Federated Big Data. Infosum raised $15 million for its privacy-first, federated approach to big data analytics which helps companies connect customer data, without actually sharing it.

  • Poland/Foot Traffic Prediction. Cosmose AI has raised $14.7M for its help stores predict foot traffic and help them understand offline shopping habits and drive footfall.

  • Germany/Business Process Automation. Hypatos raised $11.8M for its software that will allow companies to apply deep learning tech to power a wider range of back-office automation. With a focus on industries with heavy financial document processing needs, such as the financial and insurance sectors.

  • Germany/Sales Demo Platform. Demodesk raised $8M for its platform that helps deliver online sales demos remotely with a dash of intelligence to help busy salespeople set up the meetings in a more automated fashion.

  • France/VC. The state of VC in Paris.

  • Israel/CRM. Gong bought Vayo, an early-stage startup, for an undisclosed amount. “While Gong searches unstructured data like emails and phone call transcripts and finds nuggets of data, Vayo looks at structured data, which is essentially the output of the Gong search process. What’s more, it handles large amounts of data at scale.”

  • Israel/Job Market. Some bad hiring practices seem to be proliferating in Israel’s startup eco-system.

  • Germany/Payments. The Wirecard backstory.

  • Israel/Flying cars. Literally.

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

  • StackWars. Stackbit founder Ohad Eder-Pressman argues that JAMstack is here to stay and is pretty much ready for prime-time. “In terms of architecture, the Jamstack isn’t more fragile than older stacks, which depended on a multitude of pieces — LAMP, Java, and almost any other old-school framework depended on tons of frameworks, libraries, and tools for everything from building to caching and serving….A more modern approach championed by the Jamstack is to create a new breed of products and services on top of a modern architecture that introduces more elegant, stable, and developer-friendly ways to create a multitude of different websites — anything from blogs to e-commerce, PWAs to corporate websites and more. Additionally, Jamstack websites are infinitely more resilient and self-sufficient than your average website because they are hosted on a CDN. A dependency on a commercial service can, at worst, break the ability to update a website or disable a specific functionality (e.g. a payment gateway API). This rarely, if ever, will take down a complete Jamstack site, unlike a vulnerable plugin in a monolithic architecture that can take an entire website down. With server-side processes abstracted into microservice APIs, surface areas for attacks are reduced, and you leverage the domain expertise of specialist third-party services.”

  • End-to-end Data Science. Eugene Yan of Amazon Web Services argues that Data Science should be approached increasingly as a single monolithic discipline, i.e. that data scientists should increasingly work “end-to-end” across the stack. “Recently, I came across a Reddit thread on the different roles in data science and machine learning: data scientist, decision scientist, product data scientist, data engineer, machine learning engineer, machine learning tooling engineer, AI architect, etc. I found this worrying. It’s difficult to be effective when the data science process (problem framing, data engineering, ML, deployment/maintenance) is split across different people. It leads to coordination overhead, diffusion of responsibility, and lack of a big picture view. IMHO, I believe data scientists can be more effective by being end-to-end.”

  • Optimizely gets acquired. The A/B testing company was acquired by Episerver for less than $600M, according to Bloomberg.

  • BMI. Brain-machine-interface tech got a boost this week as Elon Musk demonstrated Neuralink’s implanted brain monitors on pigs.

How to Startup

  • Fundraising guide. This week’s must-read is this comprehensive early-stage fundraising guide by Mark McCabe. It’s all great but here’s an excerpt: “An important component in building this content is a part of the process I like to call “Hardening the Pitch”. Typically I recommend founders prepare their materials to about 70% completeness and then test them before going into battle. Put together a coherent story with great supporting data (not necessarily heavily designed). Find 4–6 people in your network, who have either fundraised at Series A for their own startup (ideally in the same or similar space), are friendly investors who know the space (perhaps from your seed investors), or even growth stage investors. Practice your pitch with them. Testing your materials and thesis before you hit the full pitch gauntlet will build your confidence and reps on the pitch. It will also provide you with helpful feedback and, potentially, warm introductions to relevant funds. I’ve seen this be immensely helpful in securing strong investment leads.”

  • Hype and exclusivity as a launch strategy. Gaby Goldberg (Chapter One) and Jordan Odinsky (Ground Up) on strategies for generating and managing pre-launch hype.

  • Sales-Marketing alignment. Tomasz Tunguz offers a simple and useful framework. “If the marketing slope is up, and the sales slope is flat to down, then there’s a disconnect between marketing and sales. This is the most common scenario in startups. There’s a problem with the handoff between marketing and sales.”

  • Post-seed Product Management. Advice from Point Nine’s Louis Coppey on hiring a product manager early. “Founders often have strong insights into the problem that they’re trying to solve so they are logically the first Product Manager. The challenge comes when the number of customers grows and the size of the tech team increases. In this context, there are many more feature requests to prioritize and more development resources that need to be allocated optimally. This often happens when the product starts changing shape from the initial vision of the founders to one which fits what the market actually wants.”

How to Venture

  • Finding the track. Semil Shah gets philosophical and drops some wisdom on how to navigate these weird times.”We’ve all been thrown off our track, to varying degrees. Some, more cruelly than others. It’s easy to assume we can just find the track again on the other side of this, if there is another side. But in listening to Boyd over and over in August, I have a slightly different view. I think most of us will need to work really hard to rediscover the track. It may take years, in fact. It will require a significant amount of scenario planning, letting go of beliefs once strongly-held and/or accepted as immutable truths, a survivalists’ adaptability, and the willingness to be nimble and accept new environmental signals that may force us to make decisions we couldn’t have dreamed of just a few months ago.”

Portfolio News

See how JFrog is managing AI and ML (webinar).

Vault Platform was featured in the Central London Lawyer publication on the importance of employee voice and why it needs to be heard to expose ethical dangers.

Firebolt’s CEO, Eldad Farkash, explains where Snowflake ends and Firebolt starts on the latest episode of Data Engineering Daily’s podcast.

JFrog’s upcoming IPO will show how Wall Street values a fast-growing, managed software company — that also doesn’t lose money.

Sisense was one of the data science platforms which raised the most money this year.

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