YSL Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #13: February 5, 2018

Back in sunny London - and welcome to issue #13. Running a bit late this week due to a heavy schedule. Please feel free to email me with comments - and if you like this - please forward to friends and subscribe!

From the blog

Recent: The Evolution of the AI/ML Application Space.

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

Portfolio News

Crate got even faster, and made it onto this list of 21 brilliant Berlin startups.

SwiftShift CEO Assaf Shalvi writes about his vision for the future of healthcare labor: use technology to empower the millenial workforce. The company launched their labor marketplace last week in Philadelphia,  complementing their pre-existing SaaS offering.

Innovid announced a partnership with three mobile ad networks (Fyber, InMobi and MoPub) to launch and utilize VAST tags that are compatible with the IAB’s and others’ efforts.

Shoppimon is hiring a director of product management. Apply here. 

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• France/UX Analytics. French UX analytics platform Content Square raised $42M led by Canaan and Highland. 

• Germany/Marketing Tech. Berlin's Uberall raised $25M from HPE Growth Capital with participation from Project A and United Internet.

• France/Payments. Paris-based Spendesk raised EUR 8M from Index. The company has built a SaaS-based solution for enterprises to allow employees to manage their corporate spend better. 

• Israel/Beer-tech. Inbev, the Belgium-headquartered global beer maker, acquired Israel's WeisBeerger which builds a connected-tap (IoT) system that helps improve beer distribution through real-time integration with demand-side data. The acquisition has been reported at $80M, a reasonable return for Weissbeerger's investors who invested only $10M into the company. From Globes: "WeissBeerger has developed Internet-of-Things analytics tools that include sensors in the beer taps, refrigerators and other important points in the supply chain to provide bar and restaurant owners as well as brewers and beverage manufacturers with a full picture about the quality of their products, the inventory situation, consumer habits and more. According to WeissBeerger's website, bars that have used the company's tools have increased revenue from each beer tap by 32% and reduced beer wastage by 50%, among other things by promoting more efficient sales."

• Europe/GDPR. The new EU privacy regs look like a losing proposition for companies. 

• Israel/Machine Learning. How Israel's Liveperson is using machine learning to improve customer support. 

• Israel/Security. The Israeli tech scene is massively overweight on security startups - and, now there's data arguing that the global security market is massively overweight on Israel. Israel has 0.1% of the world's population but 16% of the security-related venture investment. I have no problem with Israel leading cyber (arguably it should) - but I do think it's a problem when cyber leads Israel.

• Israel/Data. NY-based Israeli tech company BigID raised $14M from Comcast, SAP, ClearSky, and BOLDstart. The company helps enterprises identify and manage private customer data, a problem space boosted significantly by GDPR. 

• UK/Adtech. Data out this week shows that total ad spend on mobile was higher than total ad spend on TV for the first time. 

• UK/Startup slow down. New data suggests a 10% year-on-year decline in startup formation in the UK. I've always believed that the innovation game is about quality, not quantity. Given the boom and hype we've seen, I'd think a moderate slow-down is generally a good thing. I'd be willing to be dollars-to-donuts, however, that this data is beginning to capture a slowdown in companies moving from the rest of the EU into the UK due to Brexit. Anecdotally, those were disproptionately some of the highest quality UK startups. In other Brexit news, it might be too early to assume that Brexit won't be reversed, as a new poll suggests Briton's favor another referendum by a 16-point margin. 

• Humus in Space. Israel might be joining the European Space Agency. 

Worth reading

• AI/ML Explainability. Vijay Pande of A16Z tackles the question of AI/ML's explainability and concludes that lack of explainability should not be a concern or obstacle to adoption.

• SAP shells out $2.4B for Callidus. The German software giant acquired the US-based sales software maker to accelerate its move onto the cloud. 

• Redhat onboards the containers with $250M CoreOs acquisition. Good coverage in Venturebeat. From Techcrunch: "Perhaps by working so closely on Kubernetes, CoreOS and Red Hat formed a bond, and it eventually made sense for them to come together and share customers and brain power. The companies also had competing Linux distros with CoreOS and Red Hat Atomic concentrating on containers, and perhaps the two can find some common developer ground by combining the two. If the next generation of software is going to be in a hybrid cloud world where part lives on prem in the data center and part in the public cloud, having a cloud-native fabric to deliver applications in a single way is going to be critical."

• The Amazon of AI is Amazon. Wired published this long read on how Amazon woke up to the promise of AI, drove change throughout the company, and is now one of the powerhouses in the space. 

• Dell explores alternatives. The WSJ reports that Dell is exploring strategic alternatives including potentially going public again and/or buying the rest of VMware. Dell was taken private in 2013 and merged with EMC in 2016 in the largets tech merger ever. 

• Tech turns to healthcare. The Economist on how tech startups and giants are finally turning their attention to healthcare.  

• Quantum is hard. How quantum computing companies such as D-Wave ($200M invested) and Rigetti ($70M invested) are spending their warchests. 

• (Neural) Network Pruning. MIT Technology Review covers new approaches to machine learning which could upend current algorithms and hardware: "It would also mean vastly more efficient machine learning. While neural networks that can be trained using small data sets are not a reality yet, research is already being done on making algorithms smaller without losing accuracy, Bill Dally, chief scientist at Nvidia, said... Nvidia researchers use a process called network pruning to to make a neural network smaller and more efficient to run by removing the neurons that do no contribute directly to output. “There are ways of training that can reduce the complexity of training by huge amounts,” Dally said."

• A deep dive on deep learning. Jesse Moore argues that "Data is greater than model design, and model design is greater than parameter optimisation."

• Don't fire your radiologists just yet. A fascinating and detailed look at how AI and human radiologists will need to co-exist - and why AI isn't going to be able to replace them completely. This is an important perspective - and supports the view (that I hold) that hybrid systems of intelligence are path forward in many enterprise use cases. (Here's another perspective on the same theme from Datanami: Why AI Shouldn’t Be Deemed the ‘Workplace Enemy’)

• Too much of a green thing. My friend Amit Karp of Bessemer on why financing rounds should be limited in size: "I believe that having some cash constraint forces management to be more disciplined and focused, and often leads to building a better and more sustainable culture."

• Quantum vs. Crypto. Natalie Fratto of SVB argues in Fortune that the coming world of quantum computing will crack crypto-currencies wide open. It's a compelling argument. Overall, I suspect it's far too early to conclude that advances in computer science will lead us to a decentralized, trustless world. On the contrary - they might make human trust, law, institutions, and societals norms more critical than ever. 

• Roubini vs. Crypto. Nouriel Roubini - a noted economist whose resume includes the Clinton Administration, NYU, the US Fed, the IMF, and the world bank - takes crypto-currencies to the woodshed in this blistering article. The money quote: "As for the underlying blockchain technology, there are still massive obstaclesstanding in its way, even if it has more potential than cryptocurrencies. Chief among them is that it lacks the kind of basic common and universal protocols that made the Internet universally accessible (TCP-IP, HTML, and so forth). More fundamentally, its promise of decentralized transactions with no intermediary authority amounts to an untested, Utopian pipedream. No wonder blockchain is ranked close to the peak of the hype cycle of technologies with inflated expectations. So, forget about blockchain, Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, and start investing in fintech firms with actual business models, which are slogging away to revolutionize the financial-services industry. You won’t get rich overnight; but you’ll have made the smarter investment."

• FB where art thou? Vanity Fair reports on Facebook's gradual demise? "As a society, we feel like we’re at war with a computer algorithm, and the only winning move is not to play."

• Students of Enterprise Tech. Alana Anderson of Rough Draft Ventures explains why it can be very challenging for teams of young founders to successfully identify and address enterprise pain points. I've long believed that early-career exposure to enterprise-grade technology challenges in the IDF was the #1 reason for Israel's unique status as the startup nation.