Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #55: For the week ended May 20, 2019

Congratulations to the Netherlands on their Eurovision win in Tel Aviv on Saturday night. (Norway, you were robbed!) 

If you are building an enterprise tech startup in Europe or Israel,
please let me know...  Now let's get to the news.

From the blog

Technology for Trust. Why we invested in Vault Platform (read about the follow-on round here)

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.

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

• Accel. The storied fund announced a $575M new fund (based in London) for European and Israeli early-stage technology. Romanian enterprise tech giant, UiPath, features heavily in Accel's positioning. Sifted has more on Accel in this interview with Partner Philippe Botteri, in which he emphasizes enterprise tech, consumer tech, fintech, and - interestingly - SMB software as areas of focus.

• Israel/Collaboration. Monday.com is apparently in the process of raising $200M-$300M.

• Israel/Data Analytics. SiSense bought US-based Periscope Data for $100M in an all-shares deal. "Sisense also announced that after the merger, the combined company's annual revenue will be more than $100 million from over 2,000 customers."

• Denmark. Why corporate card issuer Pleo raised $56M before it really needed to. “Fintech is a little bit of an overvalued term and a misleading term. In essence, we don’t see ourselves as a fintech company, we are about helping companies lead and have better workflows and automation. Then it just happens to be that we need to be a financial institution to solve that problem."

• Israel/Storage. WekaIO raised $31.7 for scalable file storage. 

• UK/Medical AI. The UK is starting to integrate Babylon Health's AI system into the NHS.

• Israel/Medical AI. Zerba Medical received FDA approval for an AI-based algorithm for automated analysis of chest X-rays.

• Italy/streaming. Mainstreaming raised $6M to provide infrastructure for game streaming.

• Belgium/Israel. Israeli/US VR manufacturer Magic Leap acquired the Belgian company Mimesys, which has been building "volumetric video call" technology aimed mostly at enterprise customers. 

• Northern Ireland/Silicon Valley. The Independent has a great profile of Sarah Friar outlining her personal journey from growing up in Northern Ireland to CEO of Nextdoor and the board of Walmart.

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

• Enterprise IPO watch. US-based CDN provider Fastly went public, and popped over 50%. Crowdstrike, also US-based, has filed to go public as well, reporting revenues doubling to $250M in its S-1.  Finally, Slack, the US-based communications platform, is set for a direct stock listing after hitting 10M users. 

• Digital transformation in the real world. The WSJ interviewed the CFO of Duke Energy on that company's digital transformation. "WSJ: What kinds of complaints or resistance do you get to automating finance processes? MR. YOUNG: You’ll hear initially, “This is a part of what we do. If you eliminate this, what are we going to do?” There are personal concerns, which are very legitimate. That’s why we thought ahead, and said, “We’ve got plenty of emergent work here that we’ll move you to and we’ll train you for that.”"

• Will the enablers of automation finally automate themselves? The WSJ covers efforts by CIOs to automate the IT department itself. "Mike Berendsen, vice president of IT at Whirlpool Corp. , said one of his department’s most ambitious projects was to create tags, scripts and algorithms to automate the process of monitoring the amount of cloud services delivered throughout the company, rather than reviewing the data piecemeal. That has enabled the team to provide more efficient and accurate monthly cloud billing information for each department, Mr. Berendsen said. The shift to automate IT services is being driven by a need to cut costs. Research firm International Data Corp. said in a report last year that by 2022, 70% of chief information officers are expected to ramp up efforts to apply data and artificial intelligence to IT operations and processes, under pressure to curb IT spending."

• Robofarming. A look at the autonomous farming space. "The first fully autonomous farm equipment is becoming commercially available, which means machines will be able to completely take over a multitude of tasks. Tractors will drive with no farmer in the cab, and specialized equipment will be able to spray, plant, plow and weed cropland. And it’s all happening well before many analysts had predicted thanks to small startups in Canada and Australia....Machinery that uses automation for tasks right now is more beneficial to farmers than autonomous equipment, Purdy said. Artificial intelligence, deep learning and advances in computer vision are going to transform agricultural machinery even further, he said."

• Salesforce outage. The CRM giant suffered a major outage this week, apparently in response to a security issue that allowed unauthorized database. “The Salesforce Technology team is investigating an issue impacting Salesforce customers who use Pardot, or have used Pardot in the past. The deployment of a database script resulted in granting users broader data access than intended. To protect our customers, we have blocked access to all instances that contain affected customers until we can complete the removal of the inadvertent permissions in the affected customer orgs. As a result, customers who were not impacted may experience service disruption."

How to Startup

• So you think you are ready to hire a marketer? Arielle Jackson of First Round Capital on why founders often hire too early for this role, and why they shouldn't. "If you have a sales-driven enterprise startup, then take the time to lay that go-to-market foundation first before hiring anyone."

• Zapier: From $1.3M in VC to $50M in revenue. The Information on Zapier's path to profitability. "Zapier doesn’t have a sales team and sells its products on its website. But while its popularity has stemmed in part from word-of-mouth, Zapier spends a significant amount on marketing its software to small and medium-size companies, an approach that Mr. Wade acknowledges was inspired by software companies like Atlassian. “We think about the world in a similar way,” Mr. Foster said. “Most people don’t answer the phone or respond to cold emails, so even in enterprise you have to be effective at getting people’s attention in other ways.” One approach Zapier takes is to build web pages that highlight specific integrations between third-party products and tweak them to appear prominently in search results, said a Zapier spokesperson. The company also uses its blog to highlight specific products."

• Weak ties. The New York Times on why weak ties create strong benefits.

• Pricing insights from Figma. Openview's PLG podcast has this interview with Amanda Kleha, Figma's CCO. She shares some great insights on startup pricing, including one story about how a mishandled price increase nearly backfired. 

• HPE+Cray. HPE is acquiring the iconic supercomputer maker Cray. "Loss-making Cray traces its roots back to a company founded in 1972 by Seymour Cray, known as the “father of supercomputing.” This month, it signed a deal with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to build a new $600 million system for research on artificial intelligence, weather, subatomic structures, genomics and physics. HP Enterprise’s own high-end computer systems are used by the University of Notre Dame, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and chemical giant BASF SE, according to its website. Last year, it won a $57 million contract to provide supercomputers to the U.S. Department of Defense for helicopter design and weather forecasting."

How to Venture

• On market highs and volatility. Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital tweeted out a snippet of the firm's letter to LPs. along with a graph. It's worth a read. In it, they argue that rising stock prices (a crude but compelling measure of generic optimism) seem to be associated with increasing correlation between companies and individuals - all thinking in increasingly similar way. This correlation sets up the conditions for increasing volatility and disruption. In short, this is a smart and data-driven argument our vigilence levels must rise faster than stock prices - especially in a bull market.

Portfolio News & Jobs

SiSense bought US-based Periscope Data for $100M in an all-shares deal. "Sisense also announced that after the merger, the combined company's annual revenue will be more than $100 million from over 2,000 customers."

- - - Portfolio Jobs - - -

Aquant is hiring. R&D in Israel and Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success in NY.