Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #45: December 17, 2018

Good morning from London!

First off — Congrats to Angular portfolio company Aquant.io on their Series A round led by Lightspeed and congrats to Chorus (an angel investment) on their $33M round.

Second — Apologies for not getting the weekly out on a more, well, weekly basis. I had a busy period on both the personal and professional sides. After nearly two years of living in a 1-bedroom with a (brilliant and amazingly cute) baby (new VCs are startups, too!), we finally were able to move into a new 2-bedroom apartment. There was a lot of packing and unpacking, but sleep was never sweeter. On the Angular side, we’ve been hard at work processing three new investments and two follow-on rounds — so the weekly took a bit of a break…but we’re back with a vengeance this week!

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If you are building an enterprise tech startup in Europe or Israel, please let me know…

From the blog

A Security Layer for the Physical World: Why we invested in DUST Identity

Angular’s first investment: Why we invested in Aquant.io

1Q18 & 2Q18 EU+IL VC Data.
$12.7B of VC investment summarized in 70 slides.

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• Israel/Infrastructure. Redhat acquired NooBaa for approximately $20M. “Founded in 2013 by former Dell employees, Noobaa develops software for managing data storage services across hybrid and multicloud environments. The company offers a data platform that serves as an abstraction layer over existing storage infrastructure, enabling intercloud data portability and allowing users to manage data stored in multiple locations as a single, coherent data set.”

• Switzerland/Application monitoring. Nexthink raised $85M for next-generation application monitoring.

• Israel/Logistics. Optibus raised $40M to optimize ground transportation networks.

• Germany/Industrial. Navvis raised $33.5M for its indoor spatial mapping system.

• Germany/Headless CMS. Contentful raised $33M for its API-first (“headless”) CMS platform.

• Israel/Sales Analytics. Chorus raised $33M for its machine-learning based sales call analytics platform. More from Techcrunch.

• Israel/Test Automation. Quali raised $22.5M for cloud-based test automation.

• Israel/Field Service Optimization. Angular portfolio company Aquant raised $10M led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

• Ireland/Sports Analytics. Kitman raises $9M to help professional sports organizations avoid player injuries and improve performance.

• UK/Crypto-security. Trustology raised $8M to secure crypto-currency.

• Germany/Munich. VentureBeat on why Germany’s startup eco-system is fragmented — and why Munich matters. “Berlin may be more glamorous and hip, but Munich is the place to get business done.” Indeed. Of the last ten Germany companies I’ve looked at, only two were from Berlin.

• Israel/Semiconductors. Amazon launched a server chip built around ARM cores. “The central processing unit was developed by Annapurna Labs, an Israel-based chipmaker acquired by Amazon in 2015 for a reported $370 million while still in stealth mode.”

• Czech/Israel/Automotive. Skoda unveiled a new car model in Israel and announced partnerships with three Israeli autotech startups. This is a new high watermark in the game of one-upmanship between global automakers vying to access to Israel’s sought-after autotech engine.

• Israel/Genome. Israel is sequencing the genomes of 100K people to drive digital health innovation forward.

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

• Machines will lead “Dataism.” Fred Simon, a co-founder of JFrog and a technical advisory partner at Angular, spoke at Calcalist’s Mind the Data conference in Tel Aviv. “We are going towards a system where we are basically programming machines to manage the flow for us.” Watch the talk here.

• Digital twins move from the factory floor to the back office. The approach — which is already quite common in IoT/industrial implementations, is spreading through the enterprise.

• What’s next for marketplaces? A16Z partner Andy Chen unpacks his thoughts on the space. Andy identifies four distinct phases of the marketplace phenomenon (listings, “unbundled Craigslist,” “Uber for x,” and managed) and proposes what might be next: service marketplaces (including — noteably — marketplaces for regulated services).

• 2019 Predictions. ’Tis the season for annual tech predictions. Here are 31 tech predictions from a range of sources compiled by Inc. Magazine. Here are some AI predictions compiled by Forbes, including from Roy Raanani, CEO of Chorus. Finally, Fred Wilson looks ahead to 2019 and sees both a flurry of IPOs and storm clouds for financial markets. “These markets, public, late stage private, and early-stage private, feed off each other and the participants in one look to the others for supply of deals and liquidity. So while they may appear to be disconnected, and often are, they do ultimately sync up. And so I’m wondering if 2019 is the year they start to sync up again, after quite some time being out of sync. And if that comes to pass, what it means for our portfolio companies and their financing and liquidity options.”

• Airtable. Semil Shah on why Airtable is so important.

• Big deals. Invision raised $115M and Looker raised $103M. Bird (though not enterprise) is also a really big deal.

• The awkwardness of automation. The Atlantic on how the age of automation is increasingly awkward for us humans.

• Codes of conduct. As we enter the age of AI, codes of conduct are all the rage. Here’s a hippocratic oath for connected devices and a code of conduct (from Microsoft) for facial recognition.

How to Startup

• After you’re hot. Ohad Samet, co-founder and CEO of TrueAccord and previously the Chief Risk Officer of Klarna, on what happens after you’re hot.

• Matrix’s B2B Growth Academy. VC firm Matrix Partners in Boston released a comprehensive set of talks, slide decks, and resources for B2B founders focussed on the “9 steps to repeatable, scalable, profitable growth.”

• Getting to $100M in ARR. Christoph Janz of Point Nine on how long it took companies to get to $100M in ARR. He finds that the average time to $100M is ten years. His earlier post on the variable paths to $100M is also definitely worth a read.

• From Xero to 350K. How Xero acquired 350K users in the past 12 months. The article is a useful teardown of Xero’s marketing strategy and activities.

• Enterprise growth hacking. Slack’s head of midmarket sales, Dannie Herzberg, offers her tips: “Pilots are a very tempting place to start, but seller beware: drawing boundaries is a must. First, figure out what value can (or can’t) be evaluated during the pilot and what questions can’t be answered without a pilot. Second, determine who will be running pilot, how they measure success and if they’ll be running simultaneous pilots. After all of this, if you still end up running a pilot, make sure you learn about the buying process that would take place if and when the pilot is a success. Agree upon the price and plan for success in advance so that a successful pilot can immediately parlay into a full-blown contract.”

• Nine ways to go viral. Gabor Cselle on nine ways to build virality into a product. He’s talking to consumer founders, but enterprise founders should all read this.

• On shutting down. YC’s Aaron Harris writes about the tough decisionsfacing founders contemplating a shut down: “The unintuitive thing about figuring out if you should shut down your company is that it isn’t the path of least resistance. The “easiest” thing to do for a struggling company is to fall into zombie mode — neither growing nor truly dead.”

• Do your due diligence. Zak Kukoff of Emergence on how to diligence your VCs (ideally before they invest!). “On-list references can be helpful, but the most useful conversations will likely happen with people that your investor isn’t keen to introduce you to — your off-list references. Every time you talk to an on-list reference, ask that person for introductions to 2–3 others who have raised money from the same investor.”\

• Inside the fall of GE. The WSJ with an amazing story on the unravellingof an American icon. It’s an awesome long-read, and starts like a novel: “They came by the dozens in luxury sedans, black Ubers and sleek helicopters. As they did each August, General Electric’s most important executives descended on a hilltop above the Hudson River for their annual leadership gathering….”

• Remember PowerPoint? Here’s the original (2-page) business plan for the product.

How to Venture

• Reflections after a decade. Rob Go reflects on ten years as a VC, highlighting some of the lessons of his second five years.

• State of Startups Survey. First Round’s annual state of startups survey is out. No big surprises, but worth a quick read.

• Vouch versus Intro. Hunter Walk explains this critical difference.

• LP Anti-Portfolio. Lindel Eakman of Foundry channels Bessemer and discloses some venture firms he wishes he had invested in — and talks about why he didn’t.

Portfolio News & Jobs

Aquant raised $10M led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Chorus raised $33M for its machine-learning based sales call analytics platform.

Front named by Zapier as the second fastest-growing application of 2018.

I am the founder of Angular Ventures, a specialist early-stage enterprise tech VC firm based in London and Tel Aviv. Angular backs companies born in Europe or Israel with the ambition to define a category and achieve global leadership, usually by starting with the US market. You can follow me on Twitter and Medium. If you are running an early-stage start-up in the enterprise space anywhere in Europe or Israel, I’d love to hear from you to see if Angular can help. You can find a list of past and current portfolio companies here.

Yours,
Gil Dibner

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