Welcome to 5Q 2020.

I wish I had a better excuse for why this “weekly” email hasn’t hit your inboxes in several weeks. 4Q20 and 1Q21 (which I think should officially be renamed 5Q20 until they let us get on planes again) have been some of the busiest periods I can remember. Angular made three new investments in 4Q20 and sourced over 950 qualified investment opportunities. This quarter so far looks slightly less hectic on the deal flow side, but I don’t think that will last for too long…

Looking back on the past few weeks, it’s clear we are in a new world today compared to the one we lived in just before the new year. First, the Biden inauguration will usher in an entirely new era in how non-US companies relate to and think about the US as a target market. The Trump administration made relocation to the US a real challenge for many founders and executives — and I fully expect Biden to fully reverse that and probably accelerate the trend of founders moving to the US to scale enterprise tech businesses. It also will start to undo four years of negative branding that threatened the image of the US as a land of promise and opportunity for entrepreneurs everywhere. America is back — and for enterprise tech founders that is great news.

Second, despite the constant flow of worrying news items, I think the overall trend on the Coronavirus pandemic is starting to become clear. Vaccinations are running fast in Israel (40% vaccinated) and the UK (11% vaccinated). The US is slightly behind but I suspect it will catch up fast. The European (EU) vaccination programs appear to be off to a shaky start, but I think those kinks will get worked out relatively soon. While new variants can pose a risk to reopening plans and travel restrictions may remain in place for a while — early data suggests that vaccine-induced immunity will provide some protection against most or all of the variants that are circulating, including the UK variant and the South African variant. The result of all of this is that by the end of the first quarter, I think some of the sense of gloom and lockdown fatigue that so many of us are experiencing may start to lift. Business travel may even be on the agenda again for the latter part of this year — and 2022 may end up being much more “normal” that we dare to hope at this point. There might even be a rush of flights to customers and investors to cement interpersonal relationships that were forged during the pandemic. Let’s hope that by the time January 2022 arrives, we’ll have moved from Zoom times to boom times.

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.

• February 24: Lemonade — Building an Engineering Organization from Startup to IPO with Erez Dickman, Vice President of R&D at Lemonade

• We’ll be announcing more sessions soon…..stay tuned!

Check out: www.angularventures.com/events for additional upcoming events, recordings of past events, and to subscribe to our event series.

From the blog

Why we invested in Firebolt: Next-gen cloud-native data warehouses (& Eldad Farkash)
Why we invested in Candu: Democratizing Front-End Development
US Immigration: Updates in US Immigration Impacting Founders
Going to America: Lessons on moving to the US from Israeli startups
JFrog Investment memo: What JFrog looked like in April 2012
Milestones, gratitude, and the challenges ahead: Reflections on an IPO and the ones that got away
League Tables: The most active US VCs in European & Israeli Enterprise Tech
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.

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• Israel/Adtech. Taboola announced plans for a SPAC exit at a $2.6B valuation.

• UK/Payments. Checkout raised $450M for its one-stop-shop for merchants for all things related to payments, such as accepting transactions, processing them and detecting fraud.

• Israel/FaaS. Rapyd has raised $300M for its Fintech-as-a-Service platform that makes it simple to integrate local payment and fintech capabilities into any application so you can scale globally.

• UK/Payments. PPPO raised $180M for a platform to make it easier for marketplaces, payment providers and other e-commerce players to enable localised payments.

• Germany/Freight. Sennder has raised $160 million for its digital freight forwarder platform that hat connects different parts of the logistics process, from shippers to carriers.

• Israel/Corporate Travel. TripActions raised $150M for its software whose tools help businesses book and manage corporate travel,

• Germany/SME HR. Personio has raised $125 million for its SME all-in-one HR platform covering recruiting and onboarding, payroll, absence tracking and other major HR functions.

• Israel/Payments. Melio has raised $110M to help give small businesses a way to digitally manage their business-to-business payments and receivables.

• Germany/Finance Forecasting. Jedox has raised $100 million for its enterprise performance management software streamlines planning, budgeting and forecasting across finance, sales, human resources, procurement, and other departments.

• France/SME Accounting. Georges has raised $42.2 million for its an accounting automation application for freelancers and small companies.

• France/Logistics Intelligence. Shippeo has raised $32M for its SaaS platform that provides supply chain visibility.

• Israel/SRE Help. StackPulse raised $28M for help developers manage these crisis situations more efficiently.

• Germany/SME ERP. Xentral has raised $20M to help online-facing SMBs run back offices better.

• Germany/Healthcare. Kenbi has raised $8.5M for its software to help nurses and fill gaps in the healthcare system.

• Spain/No Code Chatbot. Landbot has raised $8 million for its Intuitive Conversational Chatbot Builder.

• Israel/Auto Cad. Swapp has raised $7 million for its AI-powered construction planning company.

• Israel/Understanding Code. Swimm has raised $5.7M for its DevOps platform that makes it easier for developers to understand someone else’s code.

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

• Calendly finally raises capital. The remarkable and improbable story of how Calendly went from seed to a $350M round at a $3M valuation, having raised just $550K of seed. On the surface, there is a simplicity to the company’s product: it’s basically about finding a time for two parties to meet. Awotona notes that behind the scenes the scheduling help Calendly provides is the key to what it might develop next. For example, there are now tools to help people prepare for meetings — specifically features like being able to, say, pay for something that’s been scheduled on Calendly in order to register. A future focus could well be more tools for following up on those meetings, and more ways to help people plan recurring individual or group events. One area where it seems Calendly does not want to dabble are those meetings themselves — that is, hosting meetings and videoconferencing itself. “What you don’t want is to start a world war three with Zoom,” Awotona joked. (In addition to becoming the very verb-ified definition of video conferencing, Zoom is also a customer of Calendly’s.) “We really see ourselves as a leading orchestration platform. What that means is that we really want to remain extensible and flexible. We want our users to bring their own best in class products,” he said. “We think about this in an agnostic way.””

• Strong dollar hurting Israeli tech? A number of leading Israeli tech execs have started a campaign to get the government to take action to halt the strengthening of the Shekel, which they say threatens the Israeli tech ecosystem. “My greatest fear is that there is some economist at an international company like Intel, Apple or Microsoft and he is saying to himself that Israel is too expensive and they will leave and we’ll see R&D centers closing. Israel has benefitted from a very positive sentiment to date, but if that sentiment changes and Israel gets branded as an expensive country it will take a long time to change, a lot longer than it will to reduce prices. That is my greatest fear.”

• AMD beat forecasts. I looks like the semi world may have a new king. At the start of trading on Tuesday, shares of AMD were up 85% over the past year. That’s partially because of investor enthusiasm for semiconductors, but it’s also because in the past year AMD has gained a technological edge on its primary competitor, Intel. Intel was flat in extended trading. AMD outsources its manufacturing to partners including Taiwan’s TSMC, whereas Intel is still committed to manufacturing its best chips. That’s allowed AMD to access more advanced chip manufacturing on a so-called 5-nanometer process, which makes denser and more efficient chips.

• Data Warehouse vs. Data Lakehouse. Jamin Ball runs through the two paradigms for data lake architecture.

• Plaid lives on. Despite the fact that it’s $5.3B acquisition by Visa was blocked by regulators, Plaid is apparently receiving offers for investment at $15B.

How to Startup

• What is positioning? April Dunford explains the basics of positioning. It’s absolutely fantastic. “We start with Competitive Alternatives, or what would customers do if our solution didn’t exist. Once we have that, we can ask ourselves, “What do we have that the alternatives do not?” That gives us a list of Differentiated features or Key Unique Attributes. We can then go down that list and ask ourselves, “So what for customers?” Put another way, what is the Value those capabilities enable for our buyers? Once we understand what our differentiated value is, then we can move to customer segmentation, or who are the Customers that Care a lot about our value. There is likely a wide range of buyers that care about that value, but certain customers care a lot more than others. What are the characteristics of a customer that makes them care a lot about your differentiated value? That gives us an idea of who our best-fit customers are. Lastly, we move to Market Category. Our best market category is the context we position our product in such that our value is obvious to our target customers. Put another way, it is the definition of the Market we Intend to Win.”

• The WeWork saga continues. This detailed report in Wired provides an update on the company’s financial status and strategies to survive. “The company’s accounts for 2019, which were published at the beginning of January 2021, show just how much trouble it was in. Despite rampant expansion making global revenues almost double from $1.8bn to $3.5bn, the business saw losses balloon in 2019. By widening from $1.7bn to $3.9bn — an increase of 129 per cent — the company’s losses were growing at a faster rate than its income.”

How to Venture

• Not too much VC content this week. They must all be too busy signing term sheets and hosting clubhouse chats. :)

Portfolio News

Firebolt, Israeli cloud data warehouse startup, forklifts forward.

Trellis’ CEO, Ilay Englard, shared that their technology has optimized over 10,000 data blocks in the global food supply chain and analyzed over 50,000 harvests of various crops.

Crux OCM’s CEO, Vicki Knott, shares her 2021 predictions for the oil and gas sector.

Valohai’s Head of Growth, Henrik Skogström, covers how MLOps brings best practices to developing machine learning.

Aspecto’s SDK is being recommended by AWS for tracing support to any AWS SDK calls such as Amazon DynamoDB, S3, etc.

Datos Health was one of the first startups to join ARC and work with Sheba Medical Center to develop its first product as an application to monitor cardiac patients remotely.

Vault Platform’s CEO, Neta Meidav, addresses the legal and cultural challenges of workplace bullying.

Planable’s CEO, Xenia Muntean, shares her journey in the entrepreneurial world and how to build a successful startup against all odds.

JFrog will present at the 23rd Annual Needham Virtual Growth Conference.