Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #63: For the two weeks ended October 29, 2019

Stay safe. I've returned to London after a week in NYC and another week in LA and SF, where I seem to have left a trail of fire behind me. Stay safe everyone!

A survey on Israeli Founders Operating in the US. In partnership with our friends at Index Ventures,  Angular Ventures is conducting a survey of late-stage Israeli founders of B2B companies with significant sales or operations in the US. We're trying to get a sense of how these companies make the transition to the US, what the nature and timing of that transition is, and what some of the challenges are. We've invited a select group of just over 200 founders, CEO, and C-level executives of later-stage Israeli companies that reached significant scale to take the survey - but if somehow we missed you, please consider taking the survey. It's only ten minutes, and as an incentive, we'll be raffling off one round-trip ticket between TLV and NYC/SFO to qualified participants.

Click here to complete the survey of Israeli founders operating in the US.

On US incorporation. My blog post last week on the benefits of US incorporation generated a flood of responses - mostly positive. To be clear, I didn't say that US incorporate is the answer for all companies - but I do argue strongly that it's the default position from where early-stage enterprise tech founders should start as they think about their company. Haven't read it? Here it is: US Incorporation: Just do it.

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

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 (read about the follow-on round here)
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

• Israel/Security. Fortinet acquired Israeli endpoint security company enSilo for an undisclosed amount. The company, which was founded in 2014 nad raised $57M, "offers technological solutions to the enterprise to protect its endpoints. The privately-held firm attempts to mitigate the risk of network compromise and data breaches through orchestrated automated threat detection, prevention, and incident response."

• Germany/e-Commerce Tooling. CommerceTools raised $145M for API-based e-commerce tooling.

• France/Vision. Prophesee raised $28M for a computer vision platform. Total funding is now at $68M. "The Paris-based company’s technology is designed to mimic functions of the human eye, a dynamic it refers to as “neuromorphic.” The tech was initially targeted at Industry 4.0 applications like predictive maintenance, but Prophesee plans to push beyond that market to begin targeting automotive, VR/AR, internet of things (IoT), and other sectors."

• Germany/Identity.  IDNow raised $40M for ML-powered identity tools.

• UK/Travel. Duffel raised $30M for an API-based travel booking system.

• Israel/Automotive. Upstream Security raised $30M for cloud-based automotive security.

• Israel/Video Creation. Idomoo raised $18M for automated video creation.

• UK/Construction. Disperse raised $15M for construction project monitoring.

• Israel/Security. Firedome raised $10M for IoT security.

• UK/Drug Discovery. Lab Genius raised $10M for AI-based protein drug discovery.

• Czech/Process Mining. Minit raised $8M for process mining.

• UK/Blockchain. Zamna (formerly vChain) raised $5M to use blockchian to secure airport check-in.

• Finland/Engineering talent. Finnish tech companies are finding it difficult to recruit engineering talent.

• Europe/Health. Why Europe may not be a good place to build a healthcare startup: 

• Israel/FDA. The US FDA is considering opening an office in Israel to speed approvals of Israeli medical innovation.

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

• AI monitoring is emerging as a real category. More and more startups are chasing this opportunity.

• RPA is a band-aid not a strategy. Greylock's Sarah Guo tweets her thoughts on the current state of RPA: "There’s no magic here — over the next decade, companies will have to shift to API driven, more flexible architectures, higher scale and speed data and analytics infrastructure, modern business applications that do more work for us..."

• Quantum. With Google's announcement of "quantum supremacy," Techcrunch takes a look at the real state of quantum. "...as founder of Google’s Quantum AI lab Hartmut Neven pointed out, “Sputnik didn’t do much either. It just circled the Earth and beeped.” And yet we always talk about an industry having its “Sputnik moment” — because that was when something went from theory to reality, and began the long march from reality to banality."

• Microsoft for the win! The US DoD awarded a massive $10B contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud to Microsoft, which edged out the favorite, Amazon. 

• (Tom) Seibel for the win! The godfather of CRM "believes that the century ahead will be one of of “corporate mass extinction,” noting that 52 percent of the Fortune 500 have fallen off the list since 2000. He also discusses how new companies like Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, Tesla, and others have scaled, gobbling up market share from traditional players in the process." He is out with a new book and a new company called C3.ai, which. In his words, "[has] spent a decade and roughly half a billion dollars building a software suite that we typically market to large multinational organizations. This suite allows them to design, develop, provision, or operate enterprise and industrial-scale artificial intelligence [AI] and Internet of Things [IoT] applications. These customers include Royal Dutch Shell, Cat, 3M, and the United States Air Force, and they are making massive-scale industrial AI implementations."

• Windows for the win! Lifetime Mac user (and VC) Tomasz Tunguz experiments with Windows for the first time in his life and concludes decisively that it is vastly superior to Windows in every possible way (just kidding).

How to Startup

• Good leaders are great storytellers. First Round on why storytelling is critical both inside and outside a company. "Leadership is less about having a perfectly-engineered vision, and more about telling a compelling story that convinces others to join you. “The reality is that visionaries like Steve Jobs weren’t successful because they thought of something amazing and original out of thin air,” [Tyler Odean] says. “Rather, they were gifted at constantly persuading many people to follow them on their journey to something amazing and original.”

• Avoiding burnout. Christina Richardson of weare3sixty on how founders can avoid burnout. 

How to Venture

• Remembering Don Valentine. The founder of Sequoia Capital passed away this week at 87 in Woodside, California. Competitors and friends offered their thoughts.

• Keeping an open mind. Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures and one of the leading consumer investors in the world, on how to keep an open and nimble mindset as a venture investor. "I believe are the most valuable trait to have today is to be nimble. To have a nimble mindset and to take every opportunity to learn and keep refining your business and thinking ahead about where things are going. Because they’re not going to stay the same.” “What was super relevant when we were investing in 2012 off of our first fund and where we thought there were outside opportunities or inefficiencies in the market was a different situation. Those those inefficiencies don’t exist anymore, and now we’ve got to look for new ones. That’s cycle of life. It’s not just about being nimble at the earliest stages, it’s about being nimble the way through.”

Portfolio News

Snyk on what "shift left" means for security. "Conversations about “shifting left” often talk about moving responsibilities from classic IT functions toward development teams, with the intention of speeding up the feedback loop. But fundamentally changing how we work, without also changing the tools, rarely works. The development of complex software is itself a complex socio-technical system. As we involve developers more deeply in owning security challenges, we need to also appreciate the tools they need will look different from the previous generation of operator-focused tools."

Vault CEO Neta Meidav is published in Worldatwork on accountability in a #MeToo world.

Crate launches on Azure.

Snyk and Deliveroo talk about PCI compliance.