YSL Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #17: March 6, 2018

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It was a big week for my portfolio, with US Series A rounds announced for both Moltin and Snyk. Details below.

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From the blog

Moltin. Why I invested in Moltin's Seed Round. A new blog post this week reflecting on my original investment thesis in Moltin, a Newcastle company that moved its HQ to Boston and just announced in Series A round, led by Underscore.

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

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• Romania/RPA. UiPath, a company founded in Bucharest in 2005, raised $153M at a valuation well north of $1B. The company has emerged as a leader (probably the leader) in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), with a headquarters in NY, 600 employees, and more than 700 customers. 

• Germany/Warehouse Automation. Magazino raised $25M for automated warehouse systems that can work alongside humans.

• Israel/Fintech. Capitolis came out of stealth, announcing a $29M round which appears to combine an early $9M round with a more recent $20M round. The company's website and the article are both opaque, but the offering appears to be a marketplace for interbank financial services. The company's co-founders include Gil Mandelzis (the founder of Triana, backed by Sequoia and acquired by ICAP for $247M in 2007) and Tom Glocer, the former CEO of Thompson Reuters. 

• UK/eCommerce Tooling. Moltin announced an 8M Series A round led by Underscore. They also announced that former Demandware executive Jamus Driscoll has joined as CEO.

• UK/Israel/Development Security. Snyk announced a $7M Series A round led by BoldStart. They also announced a deeper partnership with JFrog.

• Europe/ML. Garner's Data Science and ML platform report was released and Europe made a powerful showing. KNIME (Switzerland), Rapidminer (Germany), and Dataiku (France) placed nicely in the quadrants. 

• Israel/Precision Irrigation. Saturas raised $4M for a precision irrigation system that uses sensors implanted into trees and vines.

• Israel/Security. Times of Israel reports that Israeli firm Cellebrite can likely get into your iPhone.

Worth reading

• Venture Vanity. Eric Paley of Founder's Collective writes about the realities of capital efficiency and how founders need to think very carefully about what they are optimizing for: "When I pose these thought experiments to entrepreneurs, they often push back and say that they’re willing to take less personal financial gain for the chance to build a well-known brand. They’re willing to forgo a billion-dollar bank account in favor of a mere hundred-million-dollar payday and fame. The reality is that this is rarely the tradeoff offered to founders."

• Must-read. Bowery Capital, a NY-based enterprise VC known for producing quality thought-leading content was on a tear this week with three great pieces: (1) How to manage enterprise POCs, (2) How to forge the ideal customer profile and buyer persona, and (3) their latest thoughts on cybersecurity as an investment theme (they are warming up to it).

• Splunk plunks $350M down for security. Fortune on why Splunk bought security analytics provider Phantom Cyber for $350M: "Haiyan Song, who heads Splunk’s security markets group, tells Fortune that “automation is becoming more and more important because of the shortage in professional capabilities,” referring to a talent deficit that continues to plague the cybersecurity industry. “You need to adapt defense at machine speed,” she says." ...For Splunk, security remains big—and growing—part of its business. The company brought in $950 million in revenue last year, roughly 40% to 50% of which derived from its security offerings, as CEO Douglas Merritt noted on a third quarter earnings call in November.

• Best practices for deep learning. Carlos Perez on Google and Uber’s best practices for deep learning. 

Portfolio News

Moltin announced an 8M Series A round led by Underscore. Their new CEO, former Demandware executive Jamus Driscoll, blogged about why he's so excited to have joined. Michael Skok, who was an early Demandware investor and led the round in Moltin, blogged about it here. I blogged about it too.

Snyk announced a $7M Series A round led by BoldStart. They are hiring aggressively in both London and Tel Aviv. They also announced a deeper partnership with my old love, JFrog.

How to use BitSrc to share code packages from any repository for use in other projects.

SiSense was named a visionary in Gartner's magic quadrant for Analytics and BI, and placed as the visionary with the highest ability to execute in that quadrant.