Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #28: June 18, 2018

Happy Monday — and welcome to Issue #27! Eagle-eyed inbox-zero types might have noticed there was no newsletter last week. I plead a deadly combination of too much business travel that resulted in a minor cold. But I’m back online — and working out of the incredible Cafe Lulu in Tel Aviv.

Maybe the best part of being an enterprise-oriented investor is that I don’t need to struggle to develop a view on the scooters wars or WeWork’s new valuation. I’ll leave that to others. Let’s get to the enterprise news below…

Please feel free to email me with comments (or startups) and if you like this — please forward to friends. Thanks!

From the blog

2017 EU+IL VC Data. $20.3B of VC investment summarized in 74 slides.

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• Netherlands/Payments. Adyen popped 70% on its first day of trading, valuating the SMB payments company at $14B.

• Estonia/CRM. Pipedrive raised $50M to continue to build out its SMB-oriented CRM SaaS tool.

• Israel/IOT Security. Claroty raised $50M for its industrial security platform.

• UK/R&D Analytics. Patsnap, which was founded in Singapore but is HQed in the UK today, raised $38M from Sequoia and others for its software, which helps companies understand their R&D processes — particularly the patent process.

• UK/Synthetic Biology. Tropic Biosciences raised $10M for CRISPR-modified banana and coffee plants.

• Israel/Medical AR. Beyeonics raises $11.5M for surgical AR device.

• France/Mobile OS. Gael Duval’s efforts to build a Google-free version of Android, with the support of the EU.

• UK/Health AI. Google’s DeepMind division is going through some rather tortuous navel-gazing on how to self-regulate, apparently in an effort to front-run government regulation.

• UK/Computational Biology. An overview of computational biology in the UK market from my friend Julia Hawkins at Local Globe.

• Israel/Digital Health. Israel’s ministry of health partnered with the Israel Innovation Authority to make it easier for startups to access the country’s healthcare databases, part of a five-year $264M plan to spur the digital health industry in the country.

Worth reading

• Do VCs really add value? My friend Carl Fritjofsson of Creandum attempts to answer this question with a detailed survey. A pretty interesting picture emerges — and one of the main takeaways is that VCs are dramatically over-valuing their “value add” compared to what founders actually perceive.

• Software M&A update. The amazing Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint provides some data on Software M&A valuations. Bottom line — valuations are running at about 10x TTM revenues — and growth rate is (not surprisingly) the biggest driver of valuation around that average. While you are at it — read Tomasz’ great breakdown of the strategic justifications of MSFT’s Github acquisition.

• Adobe’s SaaSy reinvention. Fortune has a good piece on Adobe’s quiet reinvention: “One of the best, if less told, tech reinvention stories is Adobe, the maker of Acrobat and Photoshop that dates to the Pleistocene era of tech — 1982. Adobe for years profitably supplied packaged software to creative types. When the cloud became a thing, it dithered. Then it changed course dramatically, painfully converting its product offering to a subscription model and aggressively attacking new areas like analytics, marketing software, and e-commerce tools. The reinvention worked. Adobe’s stock is up nearly six-fold in half a decade, and the company is worth a cool $127 billion. It has become boldly acquisitive and is challenging the buzzier subscription-software newcomer Salesforce.com (CRM, -0.01%) at multiple points of its product line.”

• Workday buys Adaptive Insights. HR SaaS platform Workday acquired Adaptive Insights, a SaaS tool for financial planning, for $1.55B last week. Adaptive had recently raised $75M at a valuation north of $1B and had filed for an IPO. The acquisition appears to be part of Workday’s strategy to broaden its offering into a more horizontal platform — away from a pure HR tool.

• Pricing tips. Lool’s Tony Saigh on some B2B pricing tips.

• “Alexa, be more human.” An inside look at Amazon’s $3.5M competition to build a more conversational UX.

• Don’t blink. Researchers at SUNY Albany discover that failure to blink is a tell-tale sign of fake video.

• Criminal charges. It was becoming increasing obvious that we would end up here — but the Theranos scandal has finally led to criminal charges.

• AI ethics. Accenture has developed a package of tools to help customers understand the ethical implications and biases of AI algorithms.

• What to send a VC. Mark Suster with a helpful post on what material to actually send to a VC.

• Valuation obsession. Fred Wilson valiantly tries to convince people to stop focusing on valuations.

• What do you want from me besides capital? That’s what Homebrew VC Hunter Walk wants to know.

Portfolio News

Aquant partnered with 3D Systems, which will use Aquant’s predictive maintenance optimization platform in the printing business.

Bit and JFrog jointly published a post detailing how to use the tools together: “Once your components are shared with Bit they are made available to discover and consume through Bit’s discoverability portal, for which JFrog’s Artifactory can be configured to act as a caching proxy mechanism. Since Bit’s package registry implements the CommonJS specification for package managers, it can be easily configured as an NPM Remote Repository with JFrog.”

The JFrog team launched their new book, Liquid Software. “In the evolution of DevOps, Continuous Integration led to Continuous Delivery, and the next logical step is Continuous Updates in which software is constantly updated without our involvement. No need to figure out hardware specifications. Nothing to interrupt our digital lives. No waiting for lengthy downloads and reboots. It all just happens in the background. This is the world of Liquid Software in which developers code high quality applications that securely flow to end-users with zero downtime.”

Moltin announced a major deployment with Stance (mobile self-checkout in a physical store using the Moltin API) and released new documentation for their e-commerce API.

Resin released a public product roadmap on Trello, and announced a partnership with and investment from KDDI.

SwiftShift made this list of 40 top SaaS companies in NYC.

Angular Ventures

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 or connect with me on LinkedIn. 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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