• The Angle
  • Posts
  • Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #90: For the week ended August 18, 2020

Author

Angular Ventures
August 17, 2020

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

Issue #90: For the week ended August 18, 2020

The Data: Enterprise & Deep Tech VC in Europe & Israel. Prior to launching Angular Ventures, I would publish data on the European and Israeli venture landscape. The dataset was unique because every company was manually reviewed and categorized. At the time, I was busy raising the fund and wanted this data to make some arguments about why Angular’s thesis made sense. The report was basically a byproduct of the fundraising effort.

Today, with the help of my London-based colleague, Andrew Poesaste, we are releasing an upgraded version of this report. The big difference is that this time we are really zooming in just on Enterprise and Deep Tech, our area of focus. We are still inputting all the data manually and struggling to categorize every company in a meaningful way. We have, for example, the only dataset I’m aware of that accurately distinguishes between ML tooling, data tooling, DevOps, dev tools, and IT infrastructure. It’s certainly the only dataset I trust at this point. Internally, we use this data for a number of things — but we are happy to be once again making some of our work publicly available. We have come a long way since I first started tracking deals in a big excel back in May of 2014. Click here for the full report both online and in PDF.





Managing a VC career. A while back, I was interviewed for the "baby VC" podcast where I spent the bulk of the episode talking directly about how to manage a VC career as a junior person. The talk - which is now available on Spotify - is entirely in English (following a 1-minute intro in French) and the section on career management starts at minute 20. Here's the link to the episode on Spotify. If you know a promising junior VC who could benefit, please share 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

The Data: Enterprise & Deep Tech VC in Europe & Israel
Defining Enterprise/Deep Tech. What do we actually mean by the phrase "enterprise or deep tech?"
Introducing the Angular Ventures Team. Getting to know Anne and Andrew.
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.
Technology for Trust. Why we invested in Vault Platform
A Security Layer for the Physical World: Why we invested in DUST Identity
A System of Intelligence for Field Service: Why we invested in Aquant.io

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

  • Israel/AI for Sales Teams. Gong.io raised $200M for its platform that gives enterprises critical insights into what is happening with their sales teams, deals and market.

  • Israel/eCommerce Marketing. Yotpo raised $75 million for its eCommerce marketing platform that helps companies manage their customer reviews, visual marketing, loyalty, referrals, and SMS marketing.

  • Finland/VR Devices. Varjo raised $54M for their next-generation virtual reality hardware and software that help professionals in the most demanding industries push the limits of what’s ever been possible.

  • Israel/Authentication Platform. Silverfort raised $30M for its platform that enforces secure authentication and access policies for any user, device, and system, both on-premises and in the cloud.

  • Israel/DataOps. K2View raised $28M for its platform that provides the right data to the right person at the right time in just milliseconds and enables enterprises to operationalize all of their data and get holistic access to what matters the most to their business.

  • Germany/Automated Accounting. Candis raised $14M for its automated accounting platform that automates manual bookkeeping, accounting processes and B2B payments for mid-market companies and their tax advisers.

  • Denmark/Virtual Reality Science Lab. Labster raised $9M for its software that helps individuals engage in STEM lab scenarios using virtual reality and simulations.

  • Israel/Smart Procurement Platform. Approve raised $5M for its smart procurement platform that helps enterprise companies manage purchasing workflows and control overall spending. 

  • Israel/Intel. Intel announced that Alder Lake, developed by its Israeli R&D center, would be its next generation hybrid chip, achieving its best-ever performance per watt.

  • UK/Netherlands/GDPR landmine. Looks like Oracle and Salesforce just stepped on a GDPR landmine.

  • France/Building Klaxoon. How Matthieu Beucher bootstrapped Klaxoon into a Eur 10M a year business.

  • Israel/8200 Alumni. With outgoing program head Mor Chen moving to London to join Accel, 8200 EISP announced the appointment of Yarden Abarbanel to lead the prestigious program for 8200 alumni who are setting out on their entrepreneurial path.

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

  • Reconsidering open source. A killer thread from Devon Zuegel at Github on the economics of attention scarcity in open source communities and projects.  "We should manage production and consumption of open source separately. A million people can consume the same code without dimin­ishing it for anyone else But they cannot bombard the project's developers with demands without draining their finite time, energy, and motivation."

  • Amazon launches quantum-as-a-service. Amazon Braket, part of Amazon Web Services, lets existing AWS customers experiment with early-stage quantum computing machines from D-Wave Systems Inc., IonQ Inc. and Rigetti Computing over its cloud....In a recent test, Fidelity’s researchers used quantum computers running over Amazon’s cloud to build securities and generate price options for those securities. On conventional computers, those calculations can take hours. The experiment was completed “orders of magnitude faster” compared with a typical computer.

  • No-code gains momentum. The BBC on how no-code is upending software. In many workplaces, no-code tools are already having a notable impact for both IT teams as well as those with job descriptions that fall well outside tech. In the past, a marketing team might work with a designer to create a prototype for a custom website or web application, which they would then hand off to developers to build. Teams using no-code tools can save time – and development resources – by skipping development entirely. Traditional developers themselves have reacted with both scepticism and alarm – reactions often heard by Tara Reed, a prominent no-code developer and founder of start-up boot camp Apps Without Code.  “If you make a living writing code, there’s something scary about the idea of everybody being able to build without code,” she says.

  • ML Ops is real. Infoworld on the real problems that ML Ops companies are solving.

  • Asana gears up to go public. The collaboration software company is planning a direct listing next month and reported strong numbers recently. As of July, Asana was projecting it would boost revenue to $236 million for the 12 months to January, from $142 million in 2019, according to an investor in the company. Next year, Asana projects revenue will grow 51% to $355 million. The projections underlie a doubling of Asana’s valuation on the secondary market for private tech stocks to $5 billion since January. 

How to Startup

  • Churn is everyone's problem. Kyle Poyar of Openview offers a holistic framework to think about churn as much more than a customer success problem. He argues that it should be all hands on deck thinking about the problem - and working to reduce it ahead of time. 

  • Thin-slicing ARR. Alex Oppenheimer with a clear argument for how ARR should really be reported. In order to better understand how a business is running (i.e. diagnostic metrics) and then help it improve (i.e. operating metrics), you need to thin slice the ARR into its fundamental components. Those fundamental components are: (1) New ARR: additional ARR from newly signed customers (2) Churned ARR: lost ARR from customers who have churned (3) Upsell/Expansion ARR: additional ARR from customers who are paying more than they did before (4) Downsell/Contraction: lost ARR from customers who are paying less than they did before.

  • Choosing a VC in a time of abundance. Ed Sim's "what's hot" newsletter is in my "must read" pilor every time it comes out. This time, however, he leads with some thoughts about why founders should be focused on alignment and not just amounts. (He's responding, I suspect, to the sentiment expressed by Semil Shah in this tweet.) "Lots of Tier 1 full stack venture firms are dropping term sheets at record pace with many interesting founders who will all require lots of company building help. And writing $2m checks for a large fund who manages a few billion $ is not the same as a seed firm who does the same. Which leads me to my next point - with so many rounds moving at such a rapid pace, it’s imperative for founders to choose wisely and remember to optimize for the best partner who will be with you for the long run and through the inevitable ups and downs and pivots in the early days. The Zero to One is so much different than the One to Ten."

How to Venture

  • How to use multiples. A16Z on how they think about valuations and why some crazy valuations aren't. We think about this framework in the context of how long it takes to feel “in-the-money”, meaning the value of the investment is beginning to appreciate. In this case, at the end of 2021, we may feel “in-the-money” because our implied forward (2022) multiple will be “normalized” at 10x. Until that point, the investment is “dead money” (i.e., no appreciation in value). But assuming the company grows at a 40%+ compounded rate thereafter, we can overcome that 15 months of “dead money” and still generate 30%+ annual returns.

  • Keep it simple. Fred Wilson makes the key point that standard legal documents can render equity rounds as simple as SAFEs. At Angular, we prefer equity to converts or SAFEs where possible - and we work to standards docs as frequently as possible for exactly this reason.

  • Rolling rolling rolling. Some very sharp analysis by Alex Danco on the impact of AngelLists rolling funds. I think he's nailed it in recognizing the what rolling funds really do - and what Angellist and scout funds also did - was to accelerate the allocation of insider capital to other insiders. They do not necessarily change the dynamics for true outsiders or truly contrarian bets. For that - come find us.

  • Investments that don't work. Fred Wilson also shared some thoughts about failures. "Investments that don’t work haunt me. It isn’t the losing money part. I have learned to live with that. It comes with the territory in VC. It’s the losing part that haunts me. The what could have been part. The “if only we had done it differently” part."

  • On leaving a board. Erez Shahar of Qumra reflects on leaving the Fiverr board.

Portfolio News

Datos Health received the 2020 Telehealth Award from HealthTechZone. Additionally, Charlton Morris Medical recognized Datos Health as a game-changer in the digital health space.
 
Vault Platform is hosting an event on 5 ways HR can boost workplace inclusion and equality on August 4th .
 
JFrog added partners and features to bolster its DevOps platform, helping developers ship secure code and use issue-free open source code.
 
Sisense named Gartner Peer Insights 2020 Customers’ Choice for analytics and business intelligence platforms.
 
Snyk announced significant enhancements to its prioritization capabilities.

Portfolio Jobs

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

Datos Health

DUST Identity

Firebolt

Planable

Vault Platform

Reply

or to participate.