YSL Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #9: January 4, 2018

Welcome to 2018, welcome to the Yankee Sabra Limey EU/IL Enterprise/Tech Weekly, and welcome to a new format. I've switched over to Mailchimp - hopefully the format will be more user friendly and the list management better. Please feel free to email me with comments - and if you like this - please forward to friends and subscribe!

From the blog

This week, I released my quarterly data deck on European & Israeli venture capital investment trends. In short, the region hit a new record of $20.3B of investment across over 1,940 deals. Fintech was the most frequently funded category; services overtook SaaS, and the UK led with $5.7B of investment. Israel was second, with $3.9B. For the full report, click below:

Portfolio News

The best news I got in the past week is confidential. The rest of the portfolio was pretty quiet over the holidays. 

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• Ireland/Collaboration: A deep dive on how Ireland's Teamwork.com scaled to $18M in revenues with no VCs.

• Netherlands/Payments. Adyen is also considering an IPO. 

• Israel/Process Mining: Anodot raises $23M to scale out its process mining tech.

• Netherlands/Design Tools: Framer raises $7.7M to build a toolset for designer. 

• Ireland/Analytics: Clavis Insight is acquired by the UK's Ascential for $121M. Founded in 2008, the company employs 170 people.

• Sweden/Robots: The New York Times on how Sweden's social structure might mean it's well prepared for the brave new world of AI: The Robots are Coming and Sweden is Fine.

• UK/Automotive: Why the UK sees an opportunity for it to leapfrog the US in driverless car deployment. "For driverless, or autonomous, cars, Britain is betting that research from university-linked start-ups and a relaxed regulation regime will be a winning combination." 

• Israel/Exits: A review of Israeli exit activity in 2017 by PwC.

• Israel/Taxes: The Israeli government is concerned that Trump's reduction of the US corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% might cause some American companies to reconsider their Israeli operations and might cause some Israeli companies to relocate to the US faster. I suspect the effects here will be relatively limited. On the first point: the main reason companies choose to set up development centers in Israel is not tax relief - it's talent. And that's not going anywhere. On the second point, I'm probably the #1 advocate of Israeli and European companies relocating to the US to scale their operations are take over the world. The smart founders are doing that anyway, and tax is really not the main factor in their decision-making.

• Israel/Humus: El Al, Israel's national airline, announced direct flights to San Francisco which will begin in 4Q18. This would be news, but United has been doing this for well over a year. But at least now you can get Kosher humus on your way to DLD.

Worth reading

• Elephant path: Steven Sinofsky of A16Z on how startups can compete with BigCo in the enterprise (hat tip: Jon Lehr!)

• Spotify: It's not enterprise - but it's a big big deal. Sweden's Spotify apparently filed for an IPO. Rumored valuation is around $20B. The same week, however, they were hit with a $1.6B lawsuit over allegedly unpaid royalties.

• Crypto: French/Israeli entrepreneur and investor Ouriel Ohayon hosted a meetup on crypto (in English) in Tel Aviv. You can listen to the full audio here. Here's a great blog post from Ouriel on the state of crypto and what he's worried about for 2018. Eden Shochat of Aleph wrote a fascinating piece on how "self-destructing companies" might be the key to successful crypto-protocol platforms. 

• Devops/Security: Security is the next step in the evolution of devops.

• Evil-doers? Wired on how tech has become the world's new villian. In related news: EU courts rule against Uber (it's a transport company) and France files a complaint against Amazon (for abusing market power). 

• Global AI race: The Economist declares Google the likely winner for now in the global AI race.

• Social 3.0: Bilal Zuberi at Lux Capital on why a new generation of social networks is needed. I think he's right, and I'm looking forward to the next wave of adtech and marketing companies that will emerge as a result. 

• Serverless: Elliot Forbes, a developer at JP Morgan, on "How Serverless Computing will Change the World in 2018."

• This (app) is a hijacking: Google's design ethicist Tristan Harris on how technology products hijack the mind.

• Tech Conferences: Israeli log-management company Logz.io published this list of leading global tech conferences in 2018. Good stuff.