YSL Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #20: April 3, 2018

Good morning from London and welcome to issue #20!

In anticipation of upcoming GDPR regulations, I'll be taking steps to clean up the subscriber list. To stay subscribed to this weekly newsletter, please update your subscriber profile by clicking here and indicate that you wish to stay subscribed.

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

(Please remember to add [email protected] to your address books.)

From the blog

Moltin. Why I invested in Moltin's Seed Round.

2018 EU+IL VC Data. $20.3B of VC investment summarized in 74 slides. 

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• France/Stratégie Nationale pour l'Intelligence Artificielle. French President Emmanuel Macron laid out a national strategy to invest $1.85B of public funding into AI tech by 2022. The initiative seems to comprise more funding for startups, opening up national data sets for analysis (especially in healthcare), and taking steps to prevent a brain drain. As he explains in a wonderful interview with Wired, Macron sees the stakes as very high, both economically and socially: "Europe is the place where the DNA of democracy was shaped, and therefore I think Europe has to get to grips with what could become a big challenge for democracies." Bloomberg reported on wider European initiatives to ensure the continent is not left behind technologically.

• Ireland/CRM. Irish CRM SaaS vendor Intercom raised $125M at a valuation reported at over $1.2B. Notably, the round was led by KPCB, one of the most iconic SV VC firms. The company's own blog post is here. 

• Finland/Bulgaria/Databases. MariaDB, a Finnish open-source database vendor founded by the team behind MySQL (and backed by $98M in VC funding) acquired MammothDB, a small database vendor based in Bulgaria, founded by an American CEO with roots at VMWare. 

• Israel/Healthcare data. The Israeli government announced a $275M program to digitize all personal health records in the country, a potential boon to startups in the field. 

• Scotland/Accounting SaaS. RBS acquired Freeagent, an SMB-focussed accounting SaaS vendor, for approximately $75M. The company had previously gone public in November 2016 on the UK's AIM market, in a small IPO that raised $14M at a $50M valuation. The acquisition is notable for a few reasons: First, it shows the challenges of scaling low-ticket SaaS businesses. Second, it shows how - in certain cases - AIM offerings can be useful financing tools. Finally, it's an example of a small - and quite local - acquisition of an SMB SaaS tool for a mostly local customer base.

• UK/Cloud. UK-based cloud data integration platform Matillion raised $20M. 

• Israel/Hybrid AI. Israeli transcription-as-a-service company Verbit raised $11M. The company is notable, in part, becuase of the way it uses AI/ML to figure out when to augment the machine transcription with human labor. 

• Israel/Crypto. Israel's Securities Authority (the ISA) ruled that cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin) "that are designed to be used exclusively as a medium of payment, clearing, or exchange and are not limited to a specific venture; that do not confer additional rights; and are not controlled by a central entity — will not be deemed securities.”

• Berlin/RPA. Berlin-based RPA vendor Productive Mobile raised $4.2M. 

Worth reading

• Ignore China at Your Peril. The Economist covers the state of Chinese tech and the "stages of denial" that Western technologists have gone through when it comes to thinking about Chinese tech - and argues that "for Silicon Valley, it is time to get paranoid. Viewed from China, many of its big firms have become comfy monopolists. In the old days all American tech executives had to do to see the world’s cutting edge was to walk out the door. Now they must fly to China, too."

• The Enterprise Thesis. My friend, co-investor, and NYC enterprise-tech VC extraordinaire Ed Sim of BoldStart on why he's bullish about the Enterprise tech space: "As a first check investor in enterprise startups, the companies that truly get my attention are more of the infrastructure layer companies like Mulesoft and Pivotal. We are at the beginning stages of one of the biggest IT shifts in history as legacy workloads in the enterprise continue to move to a cloud-native architecture." 

• Enterprise Data Pipeline Reading List. Vipin Chamakkala of Workbench provides an awesome reading list on the data pipeline / data infrastructure. 

• Managing AI as a corporate citizen. Accenture's Mike Redding argues that AI is a new citizen within the enterprise corporate structure and that this will require new processes and tools, particularly around explainability and trust: "As AI is rolled out, however, companies will need to understand what goes into systems before it is deployed as a way to ensure trust. With the pending GDPR deadline approaching, companies will have to soon explain what goes into AI, Redding said. While this does not mean unearthing underlying proprietary algorithms, companies will have to understand how an AI system arrived at its decision."

• Skip the containers, cut straight to serverless? Adobe's Matt Asay argues that for many companies, containers are a distraction but serverless is the real revolution. 

• Blockchain's teething troubles on Wall Street. Reuters covers the challenges that blockchain is facing on Wall Street, as many major projects and proofs-of-concept have been quietly shelved. 

• Workday's IT architecture. A detailed look at the evolution of Workday's architecture. 

• Facebook's "Annus Horribilis." Mark Zuckerberg gave a thoughtful interview to Ezra Klein. To my mind, he seems genuinely awed by the scale of the social implications of his company's decisions. Here's a particularly interesting section: "The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can’t afford to pay. And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people....But if you want to build a service which is not just serving rich people, then you need to have something that people can afford. I thought Jeff Bezos had an excellent saying on this in one of his Kindle launches a number of years back. He said, “There are companies that work hard to charge you more, and there are companies that work hard to charge you less.” And at Facebook, we are squarely in the camp of the companies that work hard to charge you less and provide a free service that everyone can use. I don’t think at all that that means that we don’t care about people. To the contrary, I think it’s important that we don’t all get Stockholm Syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you. Because that sounds ridiculous to me."

• The real YC. A French founder shares his impressions on what being in YC is actually like. 

Portfolio News

Snyk announced a partnership with Google to power the vulnerable JavaScript libraries audit in Google Chrome’s Lighthouse, an automated developer tool for improving the quality of web apps.

SiSense VP of People, Nurit Shiber, with Six Tips for Promoting Wellness in the Workplace.