Enterprise & Deep Tech Weekly

Issue #81: For the week ended May 26, 2020

It’s a beautiful Tuesday morning in London. I find myself thinking a lot about time horizons. Time horizons until Coronavirus vaccines and/or Covid19 treatments arrive. Time horizons until travel for business and for visiting family is possible. Time horizons for reopening airlines, airports, and the corner coffee shops in London, Tel Aviv, Berlin, New York, and San Francisco that accent our lives. Time horizons for the persistence of social distancing and PPE as a part of everyday life. Like everyone else, I don’t have any answers. So most days I wonder about time horizons for a while and then return to the work at hand, to the love of family, to the comfort of friends, and to the faith that the vast majority of us will live to see this period fade into a strange memory as opposed to daily reality. It’s important not to forget who we were before, so that we can find our way back when it’s over.

On Wednesday we are hosting an interactive talk for founders with Jerry Dischler, who leads product for Google Adwords and Youtube Advertising among other things. He’s also Angular Ventures’ in-house “product sherpa” and advising a few of our portfolio companies directly. You can register for the talk with Jerry here. Our previous session, which is viewable here, was with Uri Baruchin, an internationally renowned branding strategist.

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 talks with our community of early-stage enterprise tech founders from across Europe and Israel. These 30-minute 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 talks, just click on the links below.

• May 27: Product Management with Jerry Dischler, Vice President of Product Management for AdWords at Google (and Angular Advisory Partner)

• June 10: Enterprise Product Strategy with Vivek Saraswat, investor at Mayfield Partners and former product leader at Docker, VMware, and AWS.

• June 17: Monetizing an Open Source Project with Fred Simon, Co-founder and Chief Architect of JFrog (and Angular Advisory Partner)

• June 24: Mistakes Slowing Your Growth with Guy Poreh, former Head of Digital BBDO, the Chief Innovation Officer at Silver + Partners, and Founder of Playground (and Angular Advisory Partner)

Stay tuned for upcoming sessions with: Martin Henk of Pipeline, Omri Tamir of Datorama, Yaron Galai of Outbrain, Geatan Gachet of Algolia, and more.

From the blog

Coronavirus Impact Survey: We surveyed over 120 founders on their response to Coronavirus.
Surviving Coronavirus. A guide for founders and some resources on remote work. Also, some straight talk on VC fundraising in 2020.
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

• UK/Coronavirus. The UK’s GBP 500M emergency funding program for startups was basically overwhelmed on its first day of operation.

• France/Customer Experience. Contentsquare raised $189M for its software that lets companies create better experiences and analyses customer behavior via billions of anonymous apps, mobile, and web interactions.

• Germany/Modern Manufacturing. Arculus raised $17 million for its modular production platform. Instead of a single line with a conveyor belt, a factory powered by Arculus’ hardware and software is made up of modules in which individual tasks are performed and the company’s robots.

• Ireland/Privacy API. Evervault raised $16M for its software that lets developers create ‘privacy cages’ that simplify data protection.

• Finland/Social Intranet. Happeo raised $12M for its platform that is a combination of enterprise social network, company news feed, and intranet system.

• France/Open Source CMS. Strapi raised $10M for its headless content management system, which enables content-rich experiences to be created, managed, and exposed to any digital product, channel or device.

• Israel/Sensor Anti-Virus. Regulus Cyber raised $4M for its “anti-virus” software that aims to secure the communication and sensor suite of autonomous cars and trucks, robots, and drones.

• Israel/Foodtech. A new innovation center has launched in the Negev focussed on desert agriculture, marine agriculture, and cannabis.

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

• Consumer AND enterprise. Nikhil Basu Trivedi argues that “some of the fastest-growing public and private companies in the world are both consumer and enterprise technology companies.” “Dropbox*, for instance, began life as a consumer technology company, enabling anyone to start using Dropbox for storing and sharing their files on the internet, instead of using a USB drive. But its product and go-to-market have evolved since to serve businesses. More recently, companies like Slack and Zoom* have begun with enterprise-focused products, but these products have been adapted by consumers for their uses, and have even experienced consumer-like viral adoption. And the blurring of the lines between consumer and enterprise extends beyond software companies in the “technology” vertical, into industries such as financial services, healthcare, and education.”

• Microsoft refreshes office. Microsoft is creating a new kind of Office document. Instead of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, the company has created Lego blocks of Office content that live on the web. The tables, graphs, and lists that you typically find in Office documents are transforming into living, collaborative modules that exist outside of traditional documents….Fluid is designed to make those tables, charts, and lists always feel alive and editable, no matter where you create them and regardless of how you share and copy them into other apps. Instead of getting a static and dull chart you copied from Excel, you’ll get a chart that can be edited anywhere you paste it, and you’ll see everyone making edits as they happen. That might be in the middle of an email chain, in a chat app like Microsoft Teams, or even third-party apps eventually.

• Couchbase raises $105M. The NoSQL database vendor serves over 1/3 of the Fortune 500. “One capability that plays a particularly big role in Couchbase’s go-to-market strategy is its N1QL query language, which…is an implementation of SQL that allows a company’s existing SQL-savvy engineers to use the database without learning a brand new query syntax. That in turn eliminates the need to retrain staff and thus makes it easier for enterprises to adopt the platform. “

• AI vs. Coronavirus. Why hasn’t AI had more of an impact in our collective battle against Coronavirus? Wired investigates.

How to Startup

• Early-stage valuations are “dropping rapidly.” At least according to The Information in their recent look at how Covid-19 is changing seed investing. “There has been a shocking reversal of fortunes for so many Silicon Valley startups, and the ecosystem is starting to discuss what that means in terms of risk sharing….I believe this will affect the mentality of many Silicon Valley workers on how they value illiquid equity compared with cash. It may encourage employees to be more open to the idea of buying into a pool of companies so they can diversify their risk.”

• Coronavirus is especially hard for female founders. Hilla Ovil-Brenner, the founder of Yazamiot, a non-profit organization with over 5,000 members that promotes female entrepreneurship, believes that Coronavirus will have a disproportionately negative impact on female founders. “I feel that entrepreneurship is one of the most difficult fields to enter and thrive in. There are not enough female venture capitalists as it is, and not enough female entrepreneurs. The coronavirus crisis exacerbated this issue,” Ovil-Brenner said. “If no one is raising funds during this time, then women are doing so even less, as typically female entrepreneurs raise less money than their male counterparts,” she explained.

How to Venture

• Prepping for post-Corona. My friend and former colleague, Danny Cohen, Partner at Viola, talks about the day after the pandemic. “There are a few things I think are not going to be the same, among them e-commerce,” Cohen said. “Over the last six weeks e-commerce was the only option, and I think that growth is here to stay,” he said.

• The shape of a deal. Semil Shah suggests that in today’s climate of uncertainty, early-stage VCs are even more likely to focus on the basic geometry of a deal (ownership, terms, etc.) than previously. “It’s so early, and so uncertain, that it is hard to get company selection right, perhaps impossible; as a result, it can be easier to manage entry price given the risk, yet the early-stage markets are flush with cash from angels all the way up to the platform funds; and as a result, smart founders are rightfully cautious about taking on so much dilution early on — this makes getting proper ownership for a fund quite difficult.”

Portfolio News

An interview with Neta Meidav, CEO of Vault Platform on how the company is helping enterprises capture and resolve workplace misconduct, including Coronavirus-related discrimination.

Datos Health’s CEO, Uri Bettesh, says many hospitals and doctors now integrate Internet of Medical Things devices to monitor patients’ vital signs from a distance.

DUST Identity’s CEO, Ophir Gaathon, discussed remote work and security in today’s landscape in a recent CRNtv panel.

Planable released their latest People of Marketing podcast with Mostafa Elbermawy covering long-lasting work, self-development, and why AI will not replace us.

Crux OCM’s CEO, Vicki Knott, elaborated on the definition of Robotic Industrial Process Automation and how they leverage this technology to make control room operations easier, safer and more efficient for control room operators.

Valohai announced a partnership with Weka.io that allows customers to integrate Valohai’s Deep Learning Management Systems (DLMS) with Weka’s explainable AI capabilities. “A real-world ML system is 95% enabling code, with only 5% actual ML code that creates business value, so the question becomes how to ensure that efforts are focused on that 5%. With Valohai, businesses can focus on data science, as it handles everything else. It is as simple as pointing to your code and data and hitting ‘run’. The seamless integration between our DLMS solution and Weka’s powerful snap-to-object capabilities offer a quick, zero-setup infrastructure for DataOps. This further helps businesses to build models 10x faster, regain 35% of lost cloud costs, and free their DataOps teams with automated ML orchestration, data management, and data mobility.”