Angular’s first investment — Aquant.io
Why Angular invested in Aquant
Angular Ventures was formed and began investing in June of 2018, only four months ago. While the work of setting up the fund (fundraising, working out the legals, regulatory matters in multiple geographies, and setting up the administrative mechanics) was all-consuming, the flow of potentially interesting investments never really stopped. What that meant was that as soon as the fund was operational, there was a backlog of investments ready to get done. The fund has already made four investments, with two more in the near-term pipeline.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce the first of these investments — a company called Aquant which is building a system of intelligence for service optimization. Aquant’s enterprise AI platform uses machine learning to master an enterprise’s unique language and utilize it to maximize equipment uptime. Through AI and machine learning, Aquant enables companies to make smarter, faster, data-driven decisions by providing predictive actionable service recommendations. By encapsulating all enterprise data silos like CRM, Asset Management, Parts Inventory, Service Agents, IoT Data and more, Aquant transforms a company’s structured and unstructured data into knowledge in record time. Aquant’s approach creates an immediate and significant increase in machine uptime, reduces operational costs and provides a fast ROI, helping service organizations to save millions of dollars every year.
Aquant is using machine learning to rewrite the entire field service playbook. It’s a perfect example of a Systems of Intelligence company, as I’ve tried to outline in the past. They are building a complex software system that integrates with complex human processes, generates proprietary data, and drives massive efficiencies.
I met the founding team of Aquant well over a year ago — the introduction was made by the CEO of company I had previously backed. Aquant was both the last investment I made through my AngelList syndicate — and I’m very pleased to say, it’s also the first investment made by Angular Ventures.
Why did Angular invest in Aquant?
- Service-oriented everything. By helping enterprises provide dramatically more efficient field services, Aquant is tapping into a huge market — one that has already seen a number of very large exits in recent years (ServiceMax). More important, Aquant is riding a mega-trend that is reshaping the economy. We are steadily moving away from a world where we “own a thing” to a world where we “purchase the service of having a thing.” Equipment companies large and small are re-orienting their entire business around the provision of services. For example, industrial printing companies are installing printers at customer sites and charging by the page. In such a world, the need for efficient field service operations is going to become ever more critical. There are hundreds of enterprises each spending hundreds of millions a year on service operations. It’s known that 10–20% of that spend is wastage that could be eliminated through more efficient processes and more accurate tasking of labor and parts. Aquant’s opportunity is massive.
- Deployable today, ready for a connected future. One of the more interesting observations the Aquant team made to me before the investment was to point out just how few “IoT” installations there actually were in the real world. While everyone is talking about how machines are going to be connected to the cloud and will be sending back all kinds of useful data — the reality is that such deployments are few and far between. Aquant’s solution is ready to deploy and able to provide very meaningful value even in situations where machines are not connected at all — making their market size vastly larger than their “connected-only” competitors. Connected machines and the data that will come with them will only make Aquant’s offering more valuable, but it’s not a prerequisite for customers to deploy Aquant today.
- Outstanding team with deep earned domain expertise. Shahar and Assaf are experienced entrepreneurs with a long history of working together in precisely the same industry that Aquant works in now. Over a decade of investment in enterprise software, I’ve found that a founder’s domain expertise (however it is earned) is highly correlated with success — and I’m thrilled to back such an experienced team.
- Sales-native. Not only does the team have domain expertise — they have sales expertise in that domain. Shahar, the CEO, was a quota-carrying (and outperforming…) sales leader in the same industry. Assaf, who ran sales engineering teams in that industry, was customer facing as well. They know how their customers think. They know their pain points. They know their language. And, most importantly, they understand the role of sales and sales efficiency in creating a software business that can truly scale. Aquant focus on sales efficiency is best exemplified by the “seven day challenge” they ask their customers to undertake. That sort of turn-around is unheard of in their industry.
- Deep learning as a driver of sales velocity. One of the most intriguing aspects of Aquant is the way the company uses deep learning and natural language processing to accelerate its sales cycle and time to value. Data integration and labeling is a challenge for any enterprise sales cycle, especially a data-intensive one. But by focusing on unstructured (text) data as one of their key entry points, Aquant has cracked the integration challenge and is able to deploy super fast. The critical description of problems with machines as reported by customers or technicians is literally just fields of free text that is sitting unused in enterprise databases. Aquant’s NLP engine can turn that data into useful structured information very quickly — with minimal integration or transformation.
- “That is impossible.” As I did early diligence on Aquant, a number of experts in the field looked at what they were proposing to do and promptly declared it impossible. Of course, this is not actually a reason to invest — but it was certainly a reason to dig even deeper to see if I could figure out if Shahar and Assaf were crazy or brilliant.
- Early traction. While some industry experts were saying what they were doing was impossible — Shahar and Assaf were actually beginning to succeed in the field with actual customer data. First in Israel with a few pilot customers, and then — sure enough — in the US with household name accounts. Within short order, customers started paying, the pipeline expanded, and it was clear that the experts were wrong.
I’m absolutely thrilled that Angular is an early backer of Aquant, and very excited to be part of their journey going forward. Good luck, guys, and godspeed.
Angular Ventures is a specialist early-stage VC fund backing enterprise technology founders from Europe and Israel. If are you building technology for the enterprise, please let us know.
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