Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #30: July 11, 2018

Welcome to Issue #30!

It’s a warm sunny day here in NYC, so we’ll get right to the news, below.

Please feel free to email me with comments (or startups) and if you like this — please forward to friends. Thanks!

From the blog

2017 EU+IL VC Data. $20.3B of VC investment summarized in 74 slides.

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• Israel/CPG Analytics. Trax raised $125M for its in-store execution, market intelligence and data science solutions for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies and retailers

• Israel/Security. Thetaray raised $30M for its threat detection software, which is powered by unsupervised machine learning.

• UK/Image Recognition. Tractable raised $25M for its vision-based insurance claims processing software.

• UK/AI. Facebook is acquiring Bloomsbury AI for a rumored $23–30M. The company was working on NLP-related technology.

• UK/Industrial IoT. Oden Technologies raised $10M for its industrial IoT optimization systems.

• Spain/Typeform Breach. Spanish webforms giant Typeform was hit with a painful security breach recently, one which impacted a number of major customers.

• Romania/RPA. As Romanian-born UI Path emerges as one of the fastest-growing software companies ever, here’s a look at what RPA is and why it’s exploding today.

• Scotland/Ireland/Employee Equity. Reports that employees and founders of Scotland’s Fanduel would get no compensation despite the company’s $465M acquisition by Ireland’s PaddyPower generated a lot of conversation. The best response, I think, was from Semil Shah, who wrote a post on the harsh reality of the preference stack. In short — the only defense for founders is to stay as capital efficient as possible and to not raise more than you must.

• A European venture giant. The New York Times had a brilliant profile on Index, which just raised $1.65B for two new funds and — despite a growing presence in the US — is one of the dominant firms in Europe.

• Either Brexit, the UK, or both are in trouble. From where I sit, it’s abundantly clear that an influx of brilliant European founders has given Britain an incredible edge in leading Europe’s startup scene so far. Brexit threatens that — and the failure of Brexit (or a sufficiently weak version of Brexit) would be the best possible thing that could happen for the UK’s startup scene at this point. The Atlantic has a good review of the current status of Brexit.

• Israel/Space. An Israeli company plans to become the first private organization to land a spacecraft on the moon.

Worth reading

• Who is buying AI startups? CB Insights published an analysis of AI M&A.

• Spend an hour with Mark Andreesen and Ben Horowitz. Or at least feel like you did by listening to this thoughtful conversation with them. My favorite section is Mark’s breakdown of the weak, semi-strong, and strong versions of his “software eats the world” thesis. Definitely worth a listen.

• YC. Applications for YC Winter 19 are open. Please consider approaching Angular before you apply.

• Founder motivation. Ohad Samet of Klarna and TrueAccord on why it’s so dangerous to assume things about a founder’s motivation.

• Serverless. Techcrunch had a good overview of the serverless opportunity, including interviews with Sarah Guo of Greylock and Ping Li of Accel.

• Artificial AI. Why most AI companies are not AI companies. “Here’s what we look for before we invest in a company making an AI play: Are they doing more than basic data analysis? Are they creating their own data exhaust — a large trail of proprietary data that they collect from interesting sources? Do they use this data to create systems that constantly get smarter and in turn create their own data exhausts? Do they have iterative technology (machine learning or deep learning) that reduces the need for humans in the loop?”

• Why the tech backlash is a problem for all of us. Aaron Levie of Box (an enterprise software company) is worried that the public backlash against consumer giants like Facebook and Google can negatively impact his business — and, by extension, yours. “The worst-case scenario for us is that Silicon Valley gets so far behind on these issues that we just can’t be trusted as an industry,” he said. “We rely on the Fortune 500 trusting Silicon Valley’s technology, to some extent, for our success. When you see that these tools can be manipulated or they’re being used in more harmful ways, or regulators are stamping them down, then that impacts anybody, whether you’re consumer or enterprise.”

• Caste System. Antonio Garcia Martinez on how Silicon Valley fuels an informal caste system. “This, of course, is a burgeoning dystopic nightmare. But it is the vision of the future that San Francisco offers: highly stratified, with little social mobility. It’s feudalism with better marketing. Today’s “sharing” economy resembles the “sharecropping” of yesteryear, with the serfs responding to a smartphone prompt rather than an overseer’s command.”

• How did relational databases die? Gradually and then all at once, at least according to Vinnie Mirchandani.

• VC’s Diversity Dividend. Paul Gompers and Silpa Kovvali have a piece in HBR arguing that diversity demonstrably drives improvement in venture performance. “Along all dimensions measured, the more similar the investment partners, the lower their investments performance.”

• ICO? What ICO? Bloomberg reports that half of ICOs are from companies that have disappeared within four months. “That’s the finding of a Boston College study that analyzed the intensity of tweets from the startups’ Twitter accounts to infer signs of life. The researchers determined that only 44.2 percent of startups survive after 120 days from the end of their ICOs. The researchers, Hugo Benedetti and Leonard Kostovetsky, examined 2,390 ICOs that were completed before May.”

• The downfall of DaWanda. Ok, not enterprise tech, but an important story nonetheless. After 12 years, Berlin-based Etsy competitor DaWanda is shutting down. Handelsblatt has the story of why.

• The dark side of AI. The New York Times on China’s dystopian AI-powered surveillance state.

• Here’s to the Pickers. Joanne “Gotham Gal” Wilson on the state of the VC industry. “The rise of the big fund means bigger management fees and less returns but for the firms that stay lean and mean, the Catch-22 is that it is hard to get into deals at reasonable prices and get the ownership that their thesis calls for. In the past weeks, I have seen one company do their first round, on a consumer brand product without having a product yet to sell, at a software valuation. I saw another get a price that was so out of whack to the value that has been created. I don’t get it. Let’s get back to the pickers. It is the pickers, who find the gems that nobody is looking at, understand the voids in a market and are able to find a small group of people working on a problem that nobody else sees.”

Portfolio News & Jobs

Datos is hiring a BD lead in the US.

Moltin is hiring for multiple roles in the US and UK.

Aquant partnered with Salesforce to deliver its uptime-as-a-service field service optimization package to Saleforce customers.

Front’s CEO, Mathilde Collin, on why email is making a comeback. “Slack is synchronous. If I send you a message on Slack, then you’d rather reply right away. Otherwise, there is no way for you to put it in a folder or to deal with it later. And my belief is that where work happens is actually in your inbox, and is actually asynchronous. And so I think that for sure at a point there will be a platform, a communication platform and everything will be connected to it. I think that it will be coming from something that’s asynchronous, and not synchronous.”

Angular Ventures

I am the founder of Angular Ventures, a specialist early-stage enterprise tech VC firm based in London and Tel Aviv.

Angular backs companies born in Europe or Israel with the ambition to define a category and achieve global leadership, usually by starting with the US market.

You can follow me on Twitter and Medium or connect with me on LinkedIn. If you are running an early-stage start-up in the enterprise space anywhere in Europe or Israel, I’d love to hear from you to see if Angular can help. You can find a list of past and current portfolio companies here.

Yours,
Gil Dibner

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