Enterprise & Deep Tech Weekly
Issue #115: For the week ended October 6, 2021
Angular Insights
Anne Augusta Blum
Last spring, in the wake of eerie shut downs and talks of “the new normal”, Gil and I put our heads together. How could we, during this unprecedented time and in our own way, give back to our ecosystem which has given us so much? We decided we wanted to bring together a founder community and provide them with direct (albeit remote) access to tech’s top thought leaders.
And thus, the Angular Insights experiment was born — with the hope to bring founders together, build a community, and share unique learnings from the most sought after founders, experts and investors. Most importantly, we wanted to make these virtual sessions interactive — allowing the founders who joined live to have the ability to discuss directly with our speakers.
To be honest, we weren’t sure if this would work. Would good guests want to participate? Would founders actually join our sessions? Would it be possible to do an interactive webinar — allowing founders from all around the world to talk directly to our speakers?
It’s been a year and a half since we launched Angular Insights. How has our experiment panned out? Well, we have now run 29 sessions which have been led by some truly impressive founders (Fred Simon of JFrog, Martin Henk of Pipedrive, Dror Davidoff of Aqua Security, Alon Girmonsky of BlazeMeter, Roy Raanani and Micha Breakstone of Chorus), CEOs (Amir Orad of Sisense), Investors (Bucky Moore of Kleiner Perkins, Jeff Horing of Insight, Ed Sim of boldstart, Dana Oshiro of Heavybit, Lenny Pruss of Amplify, Ash Fontana of Zetta), and luminary experts (Jerry Dischler of Google, Asaph Schulman of Firebolt, Erez Dickman of Lemonade, Francesca Danzi of Tory Burch, Geatan Gachet of Algolia, Kirsten Behncke Colyer of Visible Alpha, Omri Tamir of Datorama, Beck Bamberger of BAM, Udi Nachmany of Snyk). Additionally, over 3,400 founders have tuned into the sessions live and many have watched the episodes on demand. We could never have imagined the series taking off like this — but we couldn’t be happier that it’s been so well received.
What’s next for Angular Insights? Last week we kicked off our Fall 2021 season with a session on crafting the right approach to scaling sales with Ben Braverman. In this session, we piloted a brand new format — the founder clinic — where three startup CEOs had the opportunity to obtain strategic guidance from Ben on the sales challenges and opportunities they’re currently grappling with. We’ll be running additional sessions in this format on various topics, so if you’re an early stage founder who would like to participate in a future founder clinic session, please reach out.
We also have several awesome speakers planned for the rest of the year, including talks led by Amir Shevat, Head of Product, Developer Platform at Twitter, Emil Eifrem, Founder & CEO of Neo4j, Leigh Moore, VP of Marketing at Snyk, and more to be announced shortly. If you would like to be kept abreast of all of our live virtual shows, please sign up to our events newsletter.
Lastly, I’m pleased to share that we have launched our Insights podcast! This has been a year plus in the making and we are delighted that, as people start venturing out into the world again, they will be able to listen to these episodes on the go — anytime and anywhere. The “Insights by Angular Ventures” podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, Google and Amazon. Please like, share and subscribe. New episodes will be released every week. Thanks for coming along this journey with us — your thoughts and feedback are always super appreciated.
EVENTS
Oct 20 / Building Developer Products and Communities
Amir Shevat, Head of Product — Developer Platform, Twitter
Oct 27 / Open Source and Category Creation
Emil Eifrem, Founder & CEO of Neo4j
Dec 8 / Fireside Chat with Leigh Moore, VP of Marketing at Snyk
Leigh Moore, VP of Marketing, Snyk
FROM THE BLOG
Why we Invested in CruxOCM:
Robotic Industrial Process Automation
The Great Acceleration of Seed Investing:
Can seed funds and accelerators work together?
Angular’s Brand Strategy:
Revisiting our brand as we launch our new website
Why we Invested in Levity.ai:
A no-code ML-powered workflow on every desktop
EUROPE & ISRAEL FUNDING NEWS
Sweden/Communications. Pathwire has been acquired for $1.9B by Sinch for its API based communications platform.
UK/RPA. Blue Prism has been acquired for $1.5B by Tibco for its robotic process automation (RPA) business.
Israel/Cloud Security. Guardicore has been acquired for $600M by Akamai for its software that helps to limit user access to only those applications that are authorized to communicate with each other.
Israel/Customer Success. Totango raised $100M for its customer success SaaS platform.
Israel/Data Chips. Optimove raised $75M for its customer relationship management marketing platform.
Israel/Service Intelligence. Aquant (an Angular portfolio company) raised $70M for its platform that allows companies to mine and analyze their own data and maps service problems to the correct solutions.
Israel/Marketing. Speedata raised $70M to continue building a processor (fabless) to cover the specific area of big data analytics.
UK/Bioinformatics Cloud. Lifebit raised $60M for its genomics operating system for precision medicine.
Israel/Employee Secondaries. Equitybee raised $55M for its marketplace for employees to connect with capital from a network of some 12,000 investors to finance the process.
Germany/Construction Materials. Schüttflix raised $50M for its construction site bulk materials marketplace.
Switzerland/Design. Frontify raised $50M for its cloud-based platform for businesses to centralize and distribute all of their brand assets to those who work in and with their companies.
UK/B2B gifting. Reachdesk raised $43M for its B2B gifting company platform.
UK/Security. Senseon raised $20M for its cloud-based, AI-powered “triangulation” cybersecurity platform covering endpoints, networks and microservices.
France/BaaS. Swan raised $18.5M for its Banking-as-a-Service fintech.
Israel/Back end. Appwrite raised $10M for Open-Source End-to-End Backend Server.
WORTH READING
ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS
The 2021 Machine Learning, AI and Data (MAD) Landscape. Matt Turck of FirstMark’s annual market mapping wrap up.
Global Unicorns. The next unicorn could come from anywhere. It’s no secret that we are very bullish on the European and Israeli ecosystems, but just look at Europe’s recent success. From Dealroom’s data and presented by StartupGenome. “The world has minted more than two unicorns per day in 2021.”
HOW TO STARTUP
Flush Funding Markets. John Danner shares why too much capital won’t help companies find product market fit and the importance of having the right investors around the table who are patient and understand the seed phase. Here’s why too much capital is damaging so many startups.
Pricing to Perfection. Eric Paley of Founder Collective continues this theme of early stage capital and valuations and explains why short term optimization of your valuation can lead to problems down stream when you have big shoes to fill. “Applying capital to early stage startups doesn’t work because finding PMF is an exercise for the founders.”
Investor Updates. Leo Polovets of Susa Ventures explains why investor updates are not only good hygiene but how they have many benefits beyond the obvious one way communication. I would also add the benefit that it helps galvanize your cap table. Many investors such as operator angels can and genuinely want to help but they have low bandwidth, so you need to give them very specific actionable asks. I would recommend a great addendum to this tweet Brianne Kimmel’s 3 ways to activate your army of investors. “Investor updates = customer success for existing investors + sales collateral for prospective investors. Very high ROI when done well.”
Narrative Distillation. Kevin Kwok’s latest on narrative and fundraising highlights that founders who can own, distill and distribute the narrative of their companies are helping drive the flywheel of success. Kevin does a great job showing the mechanics of this in practice, if you’re a founder it is worth internalizing. “What’s the difference between future investors and potential hires thinking a company is distracted and unfocused versus inevitable and defining? It’s in the coherence of the company’s logic for each sequencing of steps and how legible that narrative is made to them.”
HOW TO VENTURE
Investor Help Stakes are Rising. Gokul Rajaram of Square and Facebook fame is reflecting on the reality that the needs of founders have changed. They need tangible help on hiring and customer introductions, actions that will move the needle. Combined with the fact that the funding environment has become much more competitive. So the end result is investors need to do more and that starts from day zero. “Investors: it’s increasingly important to find ways to proactively add value before investing, to earn goodwill with potential portfolio companies. Many strategies here: landscape / market decks, customer intros, exec intros. Find your sweet spot based on your strengths.”
So What Can I Do? Following on from Gokul’s thought, Patrick O’Shaughnessy started a thread asking: “If you have started a company and had investors, what is the most useful thing that an investor has ever done for you or your company?”
The Long Tail of the VC Career. Ian Sigalow from Greycroft talked about the accumulating advantage to a VC’s career over time: “The benefits accrue to those who are patient and willing to play the long game.”
PORTFOLIO NEWS
Aquant, a platform leveraging AI to support customer service workers, announced that it closed a $70M Series C funding round.
CruxOCM’s CEO, Vicki Knott, spoke about the benefits Robotic Process Automation can bring to human workers.
Snyks secured $75M in additional funding, pushing its valuation to $8.6B.
JFrog’s VP Product, Sarit Tager, shared the importance of prioritizing product security.
