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Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

Issue #96: For the week ended October 20, 2020

Author

Angular Ventures
October 20, 2020

Must read. This week's must read piece is by A16Z on modern data architecture. It's good to see a past investment (SiSense) in a prime spot on their map. More importantly, it's good to know that several of the Angular portfolio companies are actively working to disrupt key areas on this chart. If anyone has Martin Casado's number, please let me know. :) 

Lessons on Hypergrowth. Join us this Wednesday (today for most of you!) for an interactive webinar with Gaetan Gachet of Algolia. I've seen him speak before - and his perspective on building a B2B giant in Europe is priceless.

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/Virtual Events. Hopin closes in on fundraising at a $2B valuation. 

  • Israel/Preventative Maintenance. Augury raised $55M for software that can detect whether a machine is working well or not based on external physical changes in sound, vibration, and temperature.

  • Israel/Security. Apiiro emerged from stealth and announced that it raised $35 million for software that allows companies to find security issues in applications by detecting vulnerable code before it’s deployed.

  • Spain/Healthcare IT. Savana Medical raised $15M to apply AI to clinical notes.

  • UK/SaaSOps. Qatalog raised $15M for its “virtual workspace” that brings together disparate SaaS tools to help teams function better.

  • France/Expense Management. Spendesk raised $18M. The company's spend management platform issues virtual and physical cards for employees, facilitates approval workflows, and manages expense reimbursements. It can also centralize invoices and receipts.

  • Israel/MLOps. Dataloop raised $11M to help manage the data life cycle for AI projects with a focus on labelling.

  • Israel/Capital Markets. Israeli companies have raised $2B in convertible bonds on Wall Street since August.

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

  • Modern data architecture. A16Z with an overview of modern data architecture. "Two parallel ecosystems have grown up around these broad use cases. The data warehouse forms the foundation of the analytics ecosystem. Most data warehouses store data in a structured format and are designed to quickly and easily generate insights from core business metrics, usually with SQL (although Python is growing in popularity). The data lake is the backbone of the operational ecosystem. By storing data in raw form, it delivers the flexibility, scale, and performance required for bespoke applications and more advanced data processing needs. Data lakes operate on a wide range of languages including Java/Scala, Python, R, and SQL. Each of these technologies has religious adherents, and building around one or the other turns out to have a significant impact on the rest of the stack (more on this later). But what’s really interesting is that modern data warehouses and data lakes are starting to resemble one another – both offering commodity storage, native horizontal scaling, semi-structured data types, ACID transactions, interactive SQL queries, and so on. The key question going forward: are data warehouses and data lakes are on a path toward convergence? That is, are they becoming interchangeable in the stack? Some experts believe this is taking place and driving simplification of the technology and vendor landscape. Others believe parallel ecosystems will persist due to differences in languages, use cases, or other factors."

  • The state of CI/CD. Priyanka Somrah of Workbench identifies four key challenges facing CI/CD deployments. "#3: Testing microservices is inherently more difficult than testing monoliths. One of the main challenges with testing microservices is that each of the decoupled components in a microservices environment needs to be deployed independently and there might even be different versions of a component which makes integration testing so much more expensive."

How to Startup

How to Venture

  • The fight for ownership. Semil Shah on how he thinks about ownership. "The result of these colliding forces is that getting to that holy grail of 20% ownership and maintaining it is growing increasingly more difficult. It is one of the major reasons Haystack fund sizes have been intentionally and proactively constrained. We are in a position to ask for 5-12% ownership, and we hope to earn the right to maintain that across a few rounds. Our pitch is that, to a founding team of 2-3, that we will never own more than they do in the company (unless something weird happens). Having a lower ownership threshold empowers Haystack to cut a smaller check that’s still meaningful to the fund; it enables the fund to offer advice and guidance to founders where our interests are aligned, not at odds; and we can help form and/or join strong syndicates in rounds without creating drama. (It’s worth pointing out, however, that with the onslaught of rolling funds, new seed funds, syndicates, and more, the odds of picking a winner in the early rounds is also very low — which means fund sizes that aren’t [properly] constrained and funds where deal flow is adversely selected may find it increasingly hard to generate returns."

  • How Sutter Hill Rolls. Crunchbase takes a look at this secretive but successful VC firm that led Snowflake's Series A. “The core of [Speiser’s] model is to find 2-3 co-founders and be the founding investor,” Kwok wrote. “Often he takes on the interim CEO role himself for the first year or two. This has many advantages. The biggest is that it reshapes the ideal founding team profile. He can focus on getting the right top technical co-founders that will have strong views on what to build and the ability to build it—even if they are people who don’t generally view themselves as having a natural inclination to be founders. This is a significant talent arbitrage.”

  • Cost of capital. Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint argues that SPACs and IPOs might be here to stay because "raising capital in the public markets is now less expensive than in the private markets."

Portfolio News

Aspecto’s CTO, Michael Haberman, will be speaking at {API:WORLD} about developing while there are hundreds of microservices around you without breaking your APIs.
 
Planable’s CEO, Xenia Muntean, spoke about building a successful digital marketing agency on the  latest episode of The Entrepreneurial You podcast.
 
Vault Platform is hosting a webinar on HR tools to keep work culture healthy on October 21.
 
Datos Health is being used by the Sheba Medical Center’s Remote Cardiac Rehabilitation Center to monitor patients.
 
JFrog launched a free tier of its multi-cloud DevOps applications.
 
Sisense is adopting a new approach towards work post-Covid-19 shakeup.

Portfolio Jobs

Apply to all Angular Ventures portfolio companies with one short application.
 
Aquant.io

Crux OCM

DUST Identity

Firebolt

Vault Platform

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