Hot Summer, Hot Market
Andrew Poesaste

It is the middle of summer, and it’s nice to be able to slow down this year. The vibe in London has been incredible: pedestrianized streets, meeting friends and teams we’ve been fortunate to back over the pandemic. We are rebooting human connection.

A trend I frequently see is some founders are confounding VC inbound for progress. The market is hot; a new mega-round is announced every other day and founders are full of inbound from the best of firms. So they feel they MUST be doing something right to be on the radar. Right?

The trick is not to let it become a distraction which is easy to do. VCs are widening their funnels and contacting many more teams at all stages. They want to peek inside and see how the companies are doing even if that process means slowing them down. It is good from a company’s perspective to remember that the purpose of a true seed stage of a company’s life is trying to build an incredible team, magical product experience and demonstrate the irrefutable product-market fit. No one can skip the product-market fit stage (not even with $20M+, let Justin Kan tell you). One helpful exercise covered in this great Twitter thread is finding a central and qualifying question that relates to the company’s goals. It can help the team stay focused. “Will it make the boat go faster?”. A Github star, WIMTBGF? A competitor’s round is announced, WIMTBGF? Inbound from a great VC firm, WIMTBGF?

My advice to teams is to focus on progress rather than on fundraising. Focus that energy on de-risking the business and answering the questions they set out when they embarked on the seed experiment. Prove to themselves that they are ready to scale, do that and the score will take care of itself.

Cheers,
Andrew

EVENTS

Sept 29 / Fireside Chat with Ben Braverman, Chief Customer Officer at Flexport
Ben Braverman, Chief Customer Officer, Flexport

Oct 13 / Fireside Chat with Leigh Moore, VP of Marketing at Snyk
Leigh Moore, VP of Marketing, Snyk

Oct 20 / Building Developer Products and Communities
Amir Shevat, Head of Product — Developer Platform, Twitter

FROM THE BLOG

The Great Acceleration of Seed Investing:
Can seed funds and accelerators work together?

Angular’s Brand Strategy:
Revisiting our brand as we launch our new website

Why we Invested in Levity.ai:
A no-code ML-powered workflow on every desktop

Why we Invested in Firebolt:
Next-gen cloud-native data warehouses (& Eldad Farkash)

EUROPE & ISRAEL FUNDING NEWS

• UK/Payments. Visa has acquired Currencycloud for $973M, a developer of APIs that power remittance and currency exchange services.

• Israel/Adtech. Taboola has acquired Connexity for $800M, one of the largest e-commerce media platforms out there.

• Israel/Sales Enablement. ZoomInfo has acquired Chorus.ai for $575M which is a conversational sales intelligence tool.

• Austria/Mobility. ChargePoint has acquired has·to·be for $295M, a European charging software company.

• Spain/Revenue Based Financing. Capchase raised $280M for its non-dilutive capital options for recurring revenue businesses.

• Israel/Cyber Insurance. At-Bay raised $185M for its cyber insurance company.

• UK/Business Payments. Soldo raised $180M for its business payments automation platform which issues employees with prepaid company cards that are linked through to an automated expense management system.

• Germany/Content Platform. Contentful raised $175M for its content management platform.

• France/Internal Search. Algolia raised $150M for its search-as-a-service product. It lets you integrate real-time search in your app or website using a developer-friendly API.

• France/Expense Claims. Spendesk raised $135M for its all-in-one expense claim management service.

• Germany/Loyalty Wallet. Klarna has acquired Stocard for $130M which is a mobile loyalty card wallet.

• Denmark/Customer Engagement. Dixa raised $105M for its customer service and engagement platform.

• Israel/Cyber. ActiveFence raised $100M for its online integrity platform.

• Germany/Food Supplier. Choco raised $100M for its food supply chain platform.

• UK/Mortgages. Starling Bank has acquired Fleet Mortgages for $70M which focuses on providing mortgages to professional and semi-professional buy-to-let landlords, only via mortgage adviser distribution channels.

• Netherlands/Fraud Prevention. Friss raised $65M for its fraud detection software for insurers.

• UK/Email Productivity. Sedna raised $34M for its platform that parses large volumes of email and chat messages to automatically action items within them.

• UK/Secure Communication. Element raised $30M for its Ultra-secure collaboration and messaging app trusted by the French, US, and UK governments.

• Germany/ML Tooling. Aleph Alpha raised $27M to continue to research, develops, and “operationalizes” large AI systems towards generalizable AI, offering GPT-3-like text, vision and strategy AI models.

• Spain/Employee Benefits. Cobee raised $16.6M to transform employee benefits.

• Serbia/Blockchain Developer Tools. Tenderly raised $15.3M for its Ethereum developer platform that enables you to build innovative blockchain products.

• Israel/Data Tooling. Treeverse raised $15M for its open-source data engineering tool.

• UK/Employee Health. Peppy raised $10.5M for its B2B digital health platform for life and family transitions.

• Germany/Space Hardware. ISAR Aerospace added $10M to its previous fundraising for its rocket launch systems.

• Germany/SW Development. GraphCMS raised $10M for its graphQL-based headless content management system for digital creators and digital products.

WORTH READING

ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS

Google has spun Intrinsic, which is focused on unlocking the creative and economic potential of industrial robotics for millions more businesses, entrepreneurs, and developers.

HOW TO STARTUP

Unicorns at Speed. Alex Dalyac, Founder & CEO of Tractable AI shares how he built an AI unicorn in just 6 years — from two college grads coding in a London basement to having their AI be used by millions. “Many large companies will hesitate to adopt a disruptive solution offered by a newcomer, even if your product is best performing. But if you can succeed with one of them and agree to a public announcement, that will be the seismic shift: now all of their competitors will risk falling behind. Now many will be thinking about adopting your solution as a fast follower.”

Hiring at Seed. Shahed Khan, Co-Founder of Loom, shares great insights on this Twitter thread on how they hired top talent as a pre-seed company. “Typically companies would hire their 1st People Ops/HR person at 20 people. We intentionally hired early (9th employee). It allowed us to build processes around sourcing, vetting, interviewing, offers, onboarding, etc. much earlier.”

Frameworks. Jeff Bezos exits with Amazon frameworks in his wake. Bezos has instilled several frameworks in his approach to business and life — from making decisions based off instincts, not scheduling mentally challenging meetings early or late in the workday, sleeping 8 hours a night, focusing on key decisions and the future.

Hypergrowth. Dipti Salopek, VP People at Snyk, shares her terrific playbook for scaling a startup’s talent engine. “The talent market is hot, and bottom line, the main differentiator separating successful startups from the rest of the pack is the ability to attract top talent, swiftly.”

HOW TO VENTURE

Bigger Checks, Days To Close. How 2021’s red-hot venture funding landscape is shaking up early-stage investing. “Earlier-stage rounds are beginning to look like later-stage rounds from 10 or 15 years ago. Deals are getting done a lot faster and rounds are priced higher and higher.”

The Cycle of VC Innovation. “Outsiders innovate, they win, become incumbents and the new establishment. Then they become insiders, get fat and lazy. New hungry outsiders come in and wreck them.” In the venture capital industry, many of the top funds are being pushed out by the new incumbents — the solo capitalists and new emerging fund managers — and the hedge funds, like Tiger, who have radically transformed the typical investment process.

The Beauty of Vertical SaaS. Great blog post by James Green where he breaks down the trends of the new wave of vertical SaaS companies — what they’re doing and why this is leading to outsized outcomes as truly enduring companies, instead of PE or strategic exits.

PORTFOLIO NEWS

Firebolt has entered into a technology partnership with Panintelligence.

Levity’s CEO, Gero Keil, will be giving a talk at the NO-CODE Digital Summit on August 6th. Sign up here!

Planable launches TikTok feature.

Vault Platform’s CEO, Neta Meidav, shares why financial services firms are racing against the clock to raise ethical standards.

Crux OCM’s CEO, Vicki Knott, discusses the challenges surrounding recycling wind turbine blades.

Planable data shows that brands are moving away from traditional social media platforms, as video content increases by 17%.

JFrog names Sagi Dudai EVP of Product and Engineering.