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Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly
The Angle Issue #65: For the week ended November 19, 2019
Angular Ventures
November 18, 2019
Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly
The Angle Issue #65: For the week ended November 19, 2019
Launching Angular Ventures I
Today, I’m thrilled to announce the final close of Angular Ventures I at $41M to back the most ambitious, most technically-driven, and most unique enterprise tech companies coming out of Europe and Israel.
The fund’s final close was 64% oversubscribed above its $25M target, with 100% of our capital commitments coming from purely financial investors (the majority from the US). We are humbled by the faith put into us by our partner-backers, thrilled that our vision for the next-generation of non-US early-stage VC is resonating with some of the most sophisticated institutional LPs in the world, and excited by the journey ahead.
Angular Ventures is a specialist, early-stage, enterprise/deep tech fund. We will invest between $250K and $1.5M, and seek to partner with companies anywhere from their “first check” to their Series A. We’ll invest anywhere in Europe and Israel — and we’ve already made twelve investments, several of which are still in stealth mode. We’re thrilled that several of our early investments have been marked up, several have raised capital from leading US VC firms, and most have either opened a US presence or plan to do so very soon. More importantly, many of them have revenues and are already starting to scale — with the highest concentration of revenue being generated in the US.
What makes Angular Ventures unique?
Track record. Over my career — as a VC, a tiny angel, an angel syndicate lead, and now at Angular, I have backed over 40 companies — all of them at seed stage, all of them enterprise, and nearly all of them born in Europe or Israel. Within that portfolio, two of the companies have achieved valuations of over $1B, several more well over $100M, and the majority have relocated to the US and raised capital from US investors. We are one of the few funds operating in Europe and Israel with 100% of our track record in enterprise / deep tech.
Tight focus on enterprise / deep tech. Angular Ventures is a specialist fund focused solely on enterprise tech and deep tech. We invest in what we know — and in areas where we can be helpful in a meaningful way.
US-oriented. Angular is focused on helping founders build global businesses — and, in the enterprise space, we believe the best place to do that is the US. We try to back founders tackling truly global markets and this usually means an emphasis on US sales and operations relatively early in the lifecycle of the company.
Geographically agnostic. Angular’s investor base includes no governments and no tax-incentivized investors. As such, we have no geographic targets for our portfolio which means that — unlike many other funds — we invest agnostically across the European and Israeli geography — in the best founders and companies we can find regardless of where they are from.
Value-added. To support our portfolio, Angular’s team includes a Head of Platform, Anne Blum, who is based in New York to provide hands-on support to our portfolio as they break into the US market. In addition, we provide access to a team of highly experienced mentors — matched specifically to each portfolio company. This group includes Fred Simon (founder of JFrog), Eldad Farkash (founder of SiSense), Jerry Dischler (product lead at Google Search), and Guy Poreh (formerly head of digital for BBDO).
High-conviction concentrated early-stage portfolio. We believe that early-stage Venture Capital should be a high-conviction activity. We do not spray and pray. Unlike many seed investors that will invest in upwards of 20 (or even 50) companies per year, Angular Ventures invests in 4–6 companies per year. When we choose to partner with a founding team, it’s because we have done the diligence and the work necessary to build high-conviction — and we are deeply committed to the success of all of our portfolio companies. From our network of industry-specific advisory partners to the platform we are building to help our companies land in the US successfully, we are planning to punch way above our weight with low-volume, high-impact value-added work for a carefully curated and concentrated portfolio. Much more on this in the coming months.
For the full story and background on the launch of the fund including why we exist, how we got here, photos of North Carolina BBQ, and - most importantly - thank yous to the all the people without whom this would not have happened, please check out our launch blog post.
Angular's launch was covered by Tech.eu, Techcrunch, Crunchbase, Venturebeat, Calcalist, The Jerusalem Post, No Camels, and The Marker (Hebrew) (which managed quoting me comparing myself to a chef....), among others.
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.
From the blog
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.
Stop counting unicorns. How fund economics are inflating the private tech market and wrecking companies.
2015-2018 Europe & Israel Venture Data: $25.1B of 2018 VC investment summarized in 83 slides.
Technology for Trust. Why we invested in Vault Platform
A Security Layer for the Physical World: Why we invested in DUST Identity
Angular's first investment: Why we invested in Aquant.io
Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech
UK/Payments. Sage Group sold Sage Pay to US-based Elavon for $300M.
UK/Document processing. Eigen raised $37M for document processing.
AT/Video infra. Bitmovin raised $20M to provide streaming infrastructure for video publishers
UK/IT workflow. Cutover raised $17M for IT change management workflow tooling.
Ireland/investigative analytics. Siren raised $10M to help investigators conduct research.
Germany/Coaching. Coachhub raised $11M for an enterprise-oriented coaching platform.
Israel/Security. Pcysys raised $10M for cybersecurity risk assessment.
GB/Fintech. Funding Xchange raised £8M to enable partners to offer their customers instant quotes for business funding
Israel/ML. Cnvrg raised $8M for an AI/ML platform.
Germany/RPA. Bryter raised $6M for an automation platform.
UK/Data Pipeline. Snowplow Analytics raised $5M for an event-driven data pipeline.
Worth reading
Enterprise/Tech News
Docker has left the building. Docker sold its enterprise business to Mirantis, a container orchestration company, and raised fresh capital under a new CEO to refocus on developer workflows. I'd love your take on what this means for the industry - please send it to me and maybe we'll include in next week's newsletter. CIO Dive said this: "For Docker fans, it's the end of an era. Container services was founded by developers six years ago as an open source project that took off, according to Tony Iams, research VP at Gartner, in an interview with CIO Dive. Industry is now retooling, standardizing on container technology and orchestration on Kubernetes. The service became so popular it ran away from the original creators, he said. Docker was "quickly overshadowed by the market they helped create." The Docker Enterprise acquisition is a lifeline for Mirantis. The company was a leading player in the OpenStack space, but the industry's attention has shifted to Kubernetes. "These are two companies that are trying to join forces to stay relevant in the market," Iams said."
Analytics. Tableau and AWS get cozy with a joint cloud migration program and Looker branches out from analytics into decision-making tools.
1Password raises $200M Series A. The Canadian-born password manager raised a massive round after a 14-year stretch of bootstrapping to take password management tools to the enterprise.
Google moves into Healthcare. Shortly after acquiring Fitbit, Google announced plans to move into the healthcare market.
Walmart deploys blockchain. The retail giant is rolling out a blockchain trial for third-party logistics carriers in Canada starting in February.
How to Startup
The most frequent mis-hire for startups? Marketing. At least according to Tomasz Tunguz who breaks down why in a great blog post. "Which should you hire first? Many founders seek a demand generation marketer. After achieving product market fit, it’s a natural time to scale lead generation. But over the past decade or so, I’ve found hiring a product marketer first leads to more consistent success. Why is this? Though the startup may have achieved product market fit, the company may not understand the fit. Who is using the product and why? How does the buyer journey evolve with time? How do buyers describe the product amongst each other? Few early stage companies can answer those questions accurately."
Roadmap template. Lenny Rachitsky offered this product roadmap template, fully functioning in Google Docs.
Full-stack AI. Nathan Benaich of Air Street Capital argues in Sifted that "full-stack" AI companies are likely to be the most valuable. We wholeheartedly agree. "The internet has now matured to the point where the low-hanging opportunities that can rise to products packaged as consumer, SaaS or marketplaces are few and far between. New opportunities for value creation are emerging in what some refer to as the traditional economy (e.g. industry, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture). Here, ML companies have a big opportunity to create category-defining businesses if they abide by the full-stack mantra."
Building marketplaces. NFX chats with Marco Zappacosta, Co-Founder & CEO of Thumbtack on how to build a billion-dollar marketplace.
Find love first. Founders considering relocating to San Francisco may want to make sure they find love first, if this article from the Information is even partially accurate.
How to Venture
Enterprise vs. Consumer Exits. Hillary Cook of Sapphire Ventures does a deep dive into the data of enterprise exits versus consumer exits. Her conclusions is that there is a consumer comeback coming. I totally agree - the consumer world has suffered from statis for too long. "Since 1995, the number of enterprise exits has consistently outpaced consumer exits (blue line versus green line above), but 2019 is the closest to seeing those lines converge in over two decades (223 enterprise vs 208 consumer exits in the first three quarters of 2019). Notably, in five of the past nine years, the value generated by consumer exits has exceeded enterprise exits."
Branding a VC. Christoph Janz, VC branding master, on why this actually matters. "...If you think of positioning as “defining who you (and only you) authentically are and who you want to become”, it is extremely important for companies, which is why we like to go through a positioning exercise with our portfolio companies. And brand is, I believe, one of the most undervalued moats in B2B SaaS."
Angular Ventures in the press. Angular's launch was covered by Tech.eu, Techcrunch, Crunchbase, Venturebeat, Calcalist, The Jerusalem Post, No Camels, and The Marker (Hebrew), among others.
Portfolio News
DUST Identity was named to 2019 Upstart 100 List, CNBC's 100 most promising startups to watch, and announced a partnership with Algorand to offer a physical binding to blockchain and to ensure authenticity.
Planable has partnered with Socialinsider to find what types of posts bring the best engagement in social media.
Vault Platform was recently featured on diginomica's fall HR tech round-up, and their CEO, Neta Meidav, appeared on BBC World News, to discuss Alphabet's investigations into misconduct, and how Vault Platform is solving this major problem for companies who care about their culture.
Portfolio Jobs
Apply to all Angular Ventures portfolio companies with one short application.
Aquant.io
Crux OCM
DUST Identity
Valohai
Vault Platform
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