Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #44: November 26, 2018

Good morning from London!

Last week, the news of Angular’s investment in DUST Identity became public. I’ve shared the story of our investment and the investment thesis in a blog post. We’re thrilled to be backing the company together with Kleiner Perkins, New Science Ventures, and Castle Island Ventures.

The core technology. DUST Identity’s core technology consists of a proprietary synthetic diamond resin which can be applied to any surface. This resin contains microscopic crystals of synthetic diamond which have a specific orientation. While invisible to the naked eye, these crystals (their location and their orientation) can be detected by a specialized sensor. Because the application of the resin results in a unique and random distribution of the crystals, every object treated with the resin has a unique identity which is defined by the specific distribution of crystals on that object. The company is combining quantum processing, nanoengineering, and atomic sensing to provide a unique identity layer for physical objects. This can be thought of as a physical fingerprint (or serial number) that can be applied to any object.

For more, read the full blog post on the investment.

If you are building an enterprise tech startup in Europe or Israel, please let me know…

From the blog

• A Security Layer for the Physical World: Why we invested in DUST Identity

• Accelerators or Conform-erators?

• Angular’s first investment: Why we invested in Aquant.io

• 1Q18 & 2Q18 EU+IL VC Data.
  $12.7B of VC investment summarized in 70 slides.

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• UK/Networking. Cisco acquired Ensoft, a maker of networking software. Terms were undisclosed.

• Greece/Recruiting SaaS. Workable raised $50M for its recruiting automation platform for SMBs.

• Germany/Employment. Zenjobs raised $17M to match temporary workers to jobs.

• Israel/Quantum. Quantum Machines raised $5.5M

• Denmark/Data center. Google announced a new $690M data center project in Denmark, powered by the country’s abundant green energy sources.

• Europe/Anti-Robot Protests. Amazon Warehouse workers across the continent are protesting “inhuman” conditions.

• Israel/Computer Vision. The Financial Times with a story on the role of the military in powering Israel’s computer vision startups.

• France/Adtech. In what could have broad implications across Europe, a French regulator rules against a small adtech company for not “validly” collecting user permission to target advertising. Ad industry watchers note that the decision “suggests that bundling consent to partner processing in a contract is not, in and of itself, valid consent under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) framework….the CNIL’s ruling [further] suggests a data controller has to be able to demonstrate the validity of the consent — so cannot simply tuck consent inside a contractual “carpet-bag” that gets passed around to everyone else in their chain as soon as the user clicks “I agree.””

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

• Construction tech. Autodesk acquired Plangrid for $875M. Founded by Tracy Young in 2011, Plangrid digitizes blueprints. “Young sees joining Autodesk as a way to continue building on that early vision. “PlanGrid has excelled at building beautiful, simple field collaboration software, while Autodesk has focused on connecting design to construction. Together, we can drive greater productivity and predictability on the jobsite,” she said in a statement. PlanGrid currently has 400 employees, 12,000 customers and 120,000 paid users, and has been used on over a million construction projects worldwide.” Semil Shah had a great breakdown in his blog: “PlanGrid…realized the complexity of construction workflows…was perfectly suited for the iPad in a rugged work environment. Perhaps while everyone saw a consumer device, the PlanGrid team saw a new canvas for building plans to drawn, edited, and built — a vision which leads to this month’s incredible outcome.​”

• Is a recession coming? The Atlantic attempts to find the answer.

• Crypto is down but not out. After Bitcoin’s bloody week, Gigi Levy of NFX is bullish: “Looking at the state of dApps, there are at least 6 major reasons why we think blockchain is just getting started: (1) Better use cases & UX; (2) Increasing resources and talent; (3) Rise of private blockchains; (4) Normalized funding; (5) Maturing blockchain ecosystem; (6) Friendlier regulation”

• Facing the future of airport security. Facial recognition is coming to an airport near you. Creepy, yes, but faster lines and better security.

• Working with Gen Z. New research from Dell across 17 countries shows that Gen Z (born after 1996) workers are (unsurprisingly) tech savvy but also worried about their futures and readiness for employment: “Nearly all of the graduates 94%, had some concerns about future employment: just over half, 57%, rated their education as good or excellent in preparing them for their careers, while half of them — 52% — said they are confident they have the tech skills required by employers, but not necessarily the non-tech skills needed.”

• Turbineless. An electric plane with no moving parts has made its first flight.

• Geopolitics and AI. The WSJ (paywall) reports on NVidia’s effort to grow its China business without getting caught in the brewing trade war. “With a new Cold War brewing between the U.S. and China, Nvidia’s bid to play both sides is beginning to look like a high-wire act. Other U.S. chip makers, including Intel Corp. and Qualcomm Inc., do big business in China, with both its tech leaders and artificial-intelligence startups. But Nvidia’s dominance of the market for the highest-end artificial-intelligence chips make it the most striking example of how Silicon Valley is contributing to China’s technological rise…The company also is concerned that deteriorating relations between the world’s two biggest economies are causing Beijing to double down on efforts to reduce reliance on U.S. suppliers of key hardware such as chips by nurturing homegrown competitors, eating into Nvidia’s long-term business.” The MIT Technology Review also covered the topic this week, with an interview with R. David Edelman, the director of the Project on Technology, the Economy, and National Security at MIT: “Edelman worries that if the restrictions are mishandled, they could cause serious “collateral damage” for US businesses. Companies like Apple and Google, for example, which rely on China for a large share of their profits, might scale back their AI development to avoid the famously lengthy export control process. Smaller companies that can’t handle the high compliance costs might write off international expansion. “This is intended to help US companies be more competitive,” Edelman says. “The irony is it would almost certainly give Chinese companies that don’t face those same restrictions a sizable advantage in the playing field.””

How to Startup

• Move Slow and Make Things. Forbes on how Airtable’s Howie Liu built a $1B software giant emphasizing substance over speed: “Liu is convinced Airtable can win by being software’s version of Lego, providing blocks to let any business build do-it-yourself custom software cheaply and quickly. “America’s most valuable data is still stored in people’s heads and on Excel sheets,” says Sam Lessin of Slow Ventures, which joined in Airtable’s fundraising in March. “If you can become the place where all the data that operates most businesses goes, the opportunity to build an ecosystem and be the next great platform becomes obvious.””

• Stop vs. Pivot. Hunter Walk picks up on Fred Wilson’s theme from last week, adding some stories and perspective from personal experience. “Sometimes founders think their VCs want the hard pivot — that the goal is to keep the company alive no matter what — or that if they don’t show ‘grit’ they’ll never get funded again. My opinion? Startups are really hard. If you don’t have a mission or problem you’re passionate about, where investors are aligned on the business, and it’s still early stage, you’re better off returning the cents on the dollar. We’re prepared to take the risk and redeploy.”

How to Venture

• Unpacking Alpha. Ahmad Butt, a London-based public markets investor, turns his attention to the VC industry in a series of blog posts. They are worth a read.

• AI companies are not that special. Scott Maxwell of Openview reminds us that “AI startups shouldn’t be treated differently than standard software startups [because] everyone is using AI to an extent. Over the next few years, everyone is going to be integrating machine learning to a degree.”

Portfolio News & Jobs

• SiSense named as a 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customer Choice.

• Front launched a charitable foundation. They are setting aside 1% of their equity and 1% of their time for charitable causes.

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. 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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