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Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #94: For the week ended October 6, 2020

Author

Angular Ventures
October 06, 2020

Last week, Index Ventures launched an extraordinarily useful, well-researched, and beautifully presented guide to expanding into the US market called Destination USA. The Angular Ventures team was delighted that Index invited us to be a small part of this initiative and to research and write the chapter on the Israeli Playbook on US expansion. Our NYC-based head of Platform, Anne Blum, and I conducted a survey of over 100 Israeli founders, and in-depth interviews with several of them to try to distill the key learnings of two decades of Israeli tech founders breaking into the US market. In conjunction with the release of Index's outstanding work, we've published a more detailed set of findings from our survey of Israeli c-level executives that covers the why, how, when, and where of setting up in the US as an early-stage company.



US Visas in the time of Coronavirus. Also last week, we held an Insights session with Jennifer Schear, founder of Schear Immigration, and an Angular Advisory Partner. Jen works with our portfolio companies (and many more) to help them strategize and execute on US immigration issues to make their transition to US operations as smooth as possible. Coronavirus (and Trump) have presented a series of challenges that Jen breaks down in detail. If you are planning on US relocation, check it out (and then go talk to Jen).

JFrog Memo. Following the JFrog IPO, I published the original Series A memo for JFrog from 2012. Check it out

Congrats to Guy Poreh, our advisory partner, who survived PTSD and just published the book about it.

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

  • Israel/Security. Cisco acquired Portshift for around $100M. The company built a Kubernetes-native security platform. For Cisco, the deal fits strategically in a couple of ways. It has been a longtime partner of Google’s around cloud services and related to that has been building services around containerization for years now. It has also made a number of acquisitions in the area of cybersecurity...But as Liz Centoni, the SVP of the Emerging Technologies and Incubation (ET&I) Group, notes in the blog post, with this latest purchase, Cisco is turning its attention also to how it can help customers better secure applications and workloads, alongside the investments that it has made to help secure people on networks (the primary thrust of deals like Duo’s and Babble Labs’). In the area of containers, security issues can arise around container architecture in a number of areas: it can be due to misconfiguration; or because of how applications are monitored; or how developers use open-source libraries; and how companies implement regulatory compliance. Other security vulnerabilities include the use of insecure container images; problems with how containers interact with each other; the use of containers that have been infected with rogue processes; and having containers not isolated properly from their hosts. Here's Cisco's blog post.

  • France/SME Digital Marketing Toolbox. Sendinblue has raised $160M for their platform to help small and medium organizations run all of their marketing — from email, SMS and chat marketing through to automation services.

  • France/Warehouse Robots. Exotec has raised $90 million to continue building their robots for warehouses. Their system based on tiny robots called Skypods which roam the floor and go up and down racks to pick up standardized bins of products increasing productivity.

  • Israel/HR Payroll. Papaya Global raised $40M for its payroll and HR platform aimed at global workforces.

  • Israel/Private Application Security. Axis Security raised $32M for its software that helps companies enable employees to safely connect to private applications.

  • Netherlands/Log Security. LogPoint raised $30M for its software which provides cybersecurity automation and analytics solutions to help companies make better security, compliance and business decisions.

  • Israel/Log Analysis. Coralogix raised $25M for its software describes as intelligent applications performance monitoring with some security logging analytics.

  • UK/Fulfilment as a service. Huboo raised $25M for its end-to-end fulfilment service for online retailers of all sizes.

  • Russia/Open Source BI. Cube Dev raised $6.2M for the open-source company behind Cube.js that is building a data platform to help developers write analytics applications for both internal and external users

  • Spain/Voting Tech. Looks like Scytl is getting liquidated after raising $129M from some outstanding investors (in Spanish).

  • Israel/Semiconductors. NVidia launched a new processor developed by Mellanox, an Israeli company they bought in 2019 for $7B. "The idea is to increase the workload capacity of servers by freeing up resources within the server by moving data center infrastructure services — which can take up some 30 percent of server resources — onto one chip. The new chip design that is the basis of the new processor enables “breakthrough networking, storage and security performance,” the firm said."

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

  • What comes after Snowflake? Firebolt sets out its vision for the future of cloud-native data warehouses. "The benefit of decoupled storage and compute for data warehouses and cloud data technologies in general is undeniable. This is one of the key reasons users like Snowflake. Decoupled storage and compute has become the architecture of choice for new data technologies. Amazon Redshift recently added both Amazon Spectrum and RA3 nodes for this reason. As we built Firebolt on a decoupled storage and compute architecture, we also came to realize what was needed to change in storage and compute to solve many of the other problems with data warehouses, and there are plenty of them remaining. One of the bigger ones is being able to analyze huge data sets, quickly and easily without breaking the bank. Achieving fast query response times for big data sets is still something that modern warehouses struggle with, and when it’s possible, it typically comes with a price tag that only big enterprises can afford. Looking at public benchmarks comparing Snowflake, Redshift and BigQuery it’s clear that already in the 1TB scale of data, query runtime easily takes 7 seconds or more on average, sometimes even minutes (See Fivetran’s great benchmark post here). As data keeps growing, and as being able to deliver great user experiences over data becomes increasingly important for businesses, ‘performance at scale’ limitations is what the market will be looking for the tech industry to solve."

  • The state of AI. Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital) and Ian Hogath (an angel investor and founder) released a detailed report on the state of AI.

  • Industrial tech in Europe. Robin Dechant at Point Nine with a look at industrial startups in Europe. Robin deserves major kudos for being focused on this challenging space, learning in public, and developing some coherent theses here. "If we look at the categories that received the most funding, the chart shows that Robotics, Analytics & Efficiency, and Wearables stand out and received nearly half of the total funding together (48.8%). I should mention that the high share for “Wearable” is driven by the big total funding of Varjo and ProGlove."

  • A close look at Unity. Alexandre Dewez takes a close look at Unity. Unity is a great illustration of Clayton Christensen's theory on disruptive innovations. Unity did not start by targeting established players in the gaming industry but tried to solve the pain points of independent developers who were looking for a simpler and cheaper game engine. Obviously, in the early days, Unity's game engine did not have the same capabilities as competitive solutions or in-house game engines developed by AAA studios. Progressively, Unity has managed to go upmarket addressing the needs of more sophisticated organizations (small and medium gaming studios and now AAA studios and other industries beyond gaming).

  • Direct listings. Asana direct listed and traded up. Palantir direct listed and traded down. 

How to Startup

How to Venture

  • Warning from on high. When Bill Gurley speaks, I always listen. “There is certainly what I would call a highly speculative nature to the markets today, a willingness to take on risks, a willingness to get excited about projects that may be five or 10 years in the future, that we haven’t seen since the ’99 time frame,”

  • Framework of frameworks. The always brilliant Sarah Tavel of Benchmark assembled all of her frameworks into one amazing meta-post. Each of these is a must read. 

  • VC on open-source. One more super useful framework, this time on open source from Bessemer (including my friend Amit Karp). This is also a must-read. "In the past few years, the world has seen open source software replace some closed-source incumbents, with enterprises ripping and replacing critical infrastructure with newer and better open-source alternatives. We believe this trend is only going to intensify as we see large software giants struggling to compete with a new kind of competitor who instead of spending hundreds of millions on sales and marketing, leverages a broad and vibrant community of users to penetrate the market. And developers are embracing technological shifts more and more rapidly such that even some of these older open-source winners are starting to be replaced by younger, fast-growing open-source projects." The piece is also full of some narrative violations that are worth noting. For example: "One might also think that a team of entrepreneurs setting out to build and launch an open source-based business is the more natural path to success. Perhaps counter-intuitively, we’ve found the opposite to be true. We see the most compelling companies derived from individual developers who started an open source project to solve their existing challenges, and then eventually built a meaningful business down the road. In fact, of the top 50 successful open source companies, more than half the time the project was launched long before a dedicated company was formed."

  • Why are VCs pissed off right now? Roy Bahat, one of the nicest people in the industry, explains. Look, venture capital is a strange business because: What do we do? People think we invest in companies. Kind of. We really sell money to companies because the companies have so much leverage when they’re doing well. And you only want to invest in great companies, so you think the ones you’re investing in are doing well. In a way, we’re all salespeople. And what do we sell? In the language of tech, we are customer success people, meaning helping our customers, founders to succeed. And we sell money and money is a commodity, meaning like literally my product that I sell is legally equivalent — it’s tender for all debts, public, private, whatever it says on the bills. As a result, as with all commodities, the way you distinguish yourself is with your brand, reputation. And so, VCs just have become, in a lot of cases, these flat-out braggarts who just are incredibly annoying. And I’ve tried for myself to figure out how do you highlight the things you’re proud of and the founders you’re also proud of while also having some things very difficult to have in public which is authentic, genuine engagement and it can be maddening.

Portfolio News

Firebolt’s CPO, Boaz Farkash, covers the tech behind Snowflake and what’s to come.
 
Valohai introduces Minihai, an open-source application for running notebooks remotely without leaving your local Jupyter notebook.
 
Planable’s CEO, Xenia Muntean, shares on Digging Deeper how to better manage social media and creative workflows.
 
Datos Health’s CEO, Uri Bettesh, was featured in Radivision’s COVIDpreneurs latest episode to discuss how Datos Health is providing remote monitoring for COVID-19 patients.  
 
Aquant analyzed service records from more than 50 organizations and discovered that, in the field service industry, the bottom-performing quarter of the workforce racks up 80% more in service costs than the top quarter.

Portfolio Jobs

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Aquant.io

Crux OCM

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