360 views on tech #52: Enterprise software is dead. Long live enterprise software.
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🍕 Food for thought
Enterprise Software Is Dead. Long Live Enterprise Software.
by Rex Woodbury — Digital Native
Productivity and collaboration software has been one of the leading startup trends throughout the 2010s. Enterprise SaaS tools were becoming more user friendly, and more tailored to specific groups’ needs within an organization.
The number of softwares an average company uses has gone up to a staggering 254 distinct SaaS apps, only 45% of which were used on a regular basis. Thus, the need for all-in-one tools like Rippling, aggregating different teams’ functions, had become a major pain point for all types of organizations.
However, despite the “future of work” hype cooling down in the past few years, there are still segments where early-stage companies are fostering disruptive innovation worth exploring.
Knowledge Management
The proportion of remote, hybrid and distributed teams will keep growing in the next few years, and with it the emphasis on knowledge management inside organizations. The need for strong knowledge backbones will keep growing, and some late-stage companies have already made major progress in this matter : Notion has become essential in many businesses, Slack’s channels have offered an immediate way to get answers.
Younger startups are also tackling this subject from different perspectives : Scribe aims to be the go-to tool for tutorials and how-to guides, Fireflies.ai automates your meeting notes, and Rewind.ai lets you quickly search through all your digital activity, aggregating your Zoom meetings, Slack history, notes and messages.
Employee Management
Software and data have revamped the employee lifecycle, from attracting talents to day-to-day workforce management, going through onboarding and training. Use cases include employees’ leaves, payroll and benefits handling, etc.
🔴🟠🟡 Our recent investment, HeyTeam, enables HR Teams and Managers to create automated workflows to provide their employees with a best-in-class experience at every key moment of their journey in the company, at scale.
Identity
Managing identity is a massive pain point for most organizations, and making sure the right people have access to the right information is a major step made easy for them with Lumos, an internal App Store allowing companies to manage accesses and restrictions.
On the other side, Stytch’s ambition is to “kill the password”, and offer easier, one-click authentication experiences, all while being easy to integrate with any product.
Observability and Monitoring
The ability to access your data and be able to analyse it has become essential for most companies, and there is still plenty of innovation happening in that field :
Incident.io, for example, allows teams to better handle incident management and come up with better insights on what happened and how to make the product more resilient. Avenue, founded by ex-Uber and ex-Amazon founders, focuses on Operations teams to track warehouse stocks, order volumes variation, and setbacks in the supply chain. Finally, Trackstar offers 24/7 monitoring for D2C brands for their e-commerce stack.
AI Superpowers
AI-powered tools are springing up across all verticals, resulting in a somewhat resurgence of productivity tools like Gong giving B2B sales teams better intelligence, Descript making video and audio editing effortless, and Runway offering a faster way to content creating.
The best productivity tools are the ones that will augment human skill, allowing workers to save time and companies to cut costs on secondary tasks. Hebbia, for example, allows knowledge workers to go through all company data only by asking the question. Alpaca is a photoshop plugin combining human skill and AI generative power, and Synthesia is an AI video avatar platform which creates videos from plain text in a matter of minutes.
Microsoft and OpenAI: coming full circle
Microsoft integrating OpenAI in its Office suite is a way for the productivity software Goliath to come full circle, after being disrupted by Google’s real-time collaboration and product-led growth startups after that. And while Google’s response to protect both Search and Workspace will be very interesting to see, early-stage companies will keep innovating amidst the continued digitization of work and consumerization of the enterprise.
In the end, here is what ChatGPT has to say about it :
🧑💻 Top readings
- How to get your first 1,000 users
- Why we’re not sleeping on InsurTech this year
- The European DeepTech report 2023
- Uber made surge pricing so mainstream, even the Fed is talking about it
💸 Money matters
- Pasqal, quantum computer developer, raised €100M from Temasek, European Innovation Council Fund, Wa’ed Ventures, Bpifrance Investissement, Quantonation Ventures, Daphni and Eni Next.
- Welcome To The Jungle, career portal with a startup focus, raised €46M from Revaia, XAnge, Bpifrance, blisce, Cipio Partners, Groupe ADP and Kostogri.
- Egerie, software house specialized in cybersecurity analysis, simulation and management, raised €30M from Tikehau Ace Capital, Open CNP, Banque des Territoires and Tiin Capital.
- Hemea, marketplace connecting homeowners wishing to renovate their home with contractors/architects, raised €8M from LBO France, Daphni and business angels.
😂 Meme of the week
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