YSL Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #22: April 23, 2018

I'll be in New York tomorrow...but I'm in London today, so greetings from London and welcome to Issue #22!

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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

• UK/Regtech. Clausematch raised $5M for its enterprise collaboration platform for regulatory professionals. Notably, the round was led by Index's Jan Hammer, who between Adyen, Novus, Robinhood, and Transferwise is arguably the leading financial technology investor in Europe.

• Israel/GDPR. NYC-based BigID was just named "most innovative startup" at RSA and is riding a GDPR-powered wave of interest in helping enterprises manage privacy data they have. 

• Israel/Quantum. My friend Amir Mizroch of Startup Nation Central interviews Dr. Michal Vakrat Wolkin (former head of R&D at 3M) on the future of Quantum Computing.

• Europe/Crypto. An American visits Europe, surveys the crypto landscape, and comes away impressed. Some of his more interesting observations relate to geography: (1) the growing importance of Switzerland as a regulatory haven, (2) the opportunity Berlin has to eclipse London as a hub for crypto activity, and (3) the importance of Eastern Europe as a "cultural hub for crypto." 

• Israel/Testing. Applitools raised $31M for its visual software testing platform. 

• Spain/Corporate Travel. TravelPerk raised $21M to help enterprises optimize their corporate travel spend. 

• Israel/Legal. Lawgeex raised $21M for its contract review automation software. 

Worth reading

• Zuora: Another IPO in SaaS-land. Zuora, maker of subscription billing SaaS solutions, priced its IPO, raising $154M at a $2B valuation.  The company had $167M in revenue in fiscal 2018, and counts 950 customers including 15 of the Fortune 100.  According to the New York Times, this is part of a coming wave of IPOs that has tech VCs giddy. Ron Miller of Techcrunch, in his piece of Zuora, called it the Golden Age of Enterprise SaaS. 

• GE's struggles with Digital. The New York Times reports on GE's decision to cut its Digital division by 25%, a remarkable pivot (or retreat?) for the industrial giant. An essential read for anyone in the industrial/IoT space. " “G.E. reached too far outside its expertise and too fast,” said Steven Winoker, an analyst at UBS. “And it became a financial black hole....The priority at GE Digital is now on selling products for specific industrial applications, sold as offerings in the “Predix portfolio,” and tailored for G.E.’s roster of existing industrial customers. Less emphasis is being put on all-purpose software for the wider industrial world."

• Palantir's black box. Bloomberg has this detailed long read on Palantir's history and future options. "It all ended when the bank’s senior executives learned that they, too, were being watched, and what began as a promising marriage of masters of big data and global finance descended into a spying scandal. The misadventure, which has never been reported, also marked an ominous turn for Palantir, one of the most richly valued startups in Silicon Valley. An intelligence platform designed for the global War on Terror was weaponized against ordinary Americans at home."

• The state of AI. Professor Michael Jordan at UC Berkeley outlines the state of the art in AI, IA, and II in this fascinating piece that argues that the real revolutions haven't happened yet. Here's an excerpt: The current focus on doing AI research via the gathering of data, the deployment of “deep learning” infrastructure, and the demonstration of systems that mimic certain narrowly-defined human skills — with little in the way of emerging explanatory principles — tends to deflect attention from major open problems in classical AI. These problems include the need to bring meaning and reasoning into systems that perform natural language processing, the need to infer and represent causality, the need to develop computationally-tractable representations of uncertainty and the need to develop systems that formulate and pursue long-term goals. These are classical goals in human-imitative AI, but in the current hubbub over the “AI revolution,” it is easy to forget that they are not yet solved." Matt Turck, a VC at Firstmark in NYC, also covered some of these topics these week in his related post. "Frontier AI: How far are we from artificial “general” intelligence, really?" Meanwhile, the Economist has a great piece on how non-tech businesses are starting to deploy AI at scale.

• Out of touch? GC VC MG Siegler worries that the valley is increasingly out of touch. "The nerds have taken over the world. Now they’re showing signs of being drunk on such power. And speaking accordingly — offering up cringe-worthy statements that only showcase a complete and utter lack of self-awareness."

• Blockchain as a Service. AWS launched a cloud-based blockchain infrastructure service.

• Crypto needs to grow up.  Arjun Balaji writes that crypto projects need to "stop playing pretend and start building" in an article suggesting that a wave of increased centralization is necessary for the success of the overall crypto (decentralization) project. 

• Old dogs, new tricks. New data suggests older founders outperform their younger peers. 

• VC Conviction. Max Niederhofer of Sunstone on what he means by conviction investing.

• Security Predictions. 10 Predictions on Security from Shasta's Nitin Chopra, including a shoutout to Snyk. 

Portfolio News

Snyk was listed among the top 50 "must-have" security tools by Threat Stack.

Moltin's Jamus Driscoll on how experience has replaced omnichannel as the key buzzword in online retail.

ServiceFriend is hiring a full stack developer.

Siemplify won the 2018 InfoSec Award for cutting edge provider of incident response solutions

Innovid, JFrog, and SiSense all made Calcalist's list of 50 most promising Israeli startups.