Enterprise & Deep Tech Weekly
Issue #68: For the two weeks ended December 20, 2019
Good morning from sunny Tel Aviv and welcome to the last Angular enterprise tech newsletter of 2019.
Year-end. Anecdotally, most VCs I speak with are saying that December 2019 has been the busiest December they can remember in terms of the volume of opportunities and the number of investments that seem to be taking place. This certainly seems true from our vantage point. Whether you are working to close the quarter or to close the round, we hope you hit your numbers, we hope you have some time to enjoy friends, family, and peace and quiet over the holiday season, and we hope you come back ready to kick-off 2020 with renewed energy. We’ll take a break from putting the newsletter together until January. See you then!
Angular is kicking off 2020 in Paris, Munich, and Berlin. We are taking the full Angular team on the road in early 2020 to meet startups in Paris, Munich, and Berlin. Most of our time will be spent in 1:1 meetings with early-stage enterprise/deep tech founders in those cities. To let us know you’d like to meet with us, either email us or just fill out this handy web form.
In addition, we have two events coming up for enterprise tech founders in Paris and Berlin:
- Enterprise Sales Panel, Paris, January 6 — I’ll be on a panel on enterprise sales with Gaetan Gachet, SVP Sales at Algolia at The Family. More detailed and sign-up for the event here.
- Enterprise Sales Breakfast, Berlin, January 10 — Along with our friends at Point Nine, we’ll be having breakfast with a small group of early-stage enterprise tech founders. Half support group, half help session, all enterprise. To apply for a seat at this table, please fill in this form.
Semiconductors meet AI. The big news out of Israel this week is the $2B acquisition of Habana Labs by Intel. Habana makes semiconductors that accelerate machine learning, an opportunity that Intel estimates at $25B. At that market size, the $2B price point seems justified when the leading chip vendors buys what it apparently believes to be the leading technology in the space. It will be interesting to see the impact of this on the other competitors in the market. We should start to see further M&A and consolidation here in 2020. The acquisition is yet another feather in Bessemer Israel’s hat, solidifying its position as one of the strongest VC teams in Israel. Links in the news below.
If you are building an enterprise or deep tech startup in Europe or Israel,
please let me know… Now let’s get to the news.
Yours,
Gil
From the blog
- Defining Enterprise/Deep Tech. What do we actually mean by the phrase “enterprise or deep tech?”
- Introducing the Angular Ventures Team. Getting to know Anne and Andrew.
- Launching Angular Ventures I. What we do, why we exist, and how we got here.
- US incorporation? Just do it. Why nearly all enterprise tech companies should incorporate in Delaware.
- Technology for Trust. Why we invested in Vault Platform
- A Security Layer for the Physical World: Why we invested in DUST Identity
- A System of Intelligence for Field Service: Why we invested in Aquant.io
Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech
- Israel/AI Semiconductors. Intel bought Habana Labs for $2B. “The startup offers computer chips to help artificial intelligence production processes. Habana Labs has raised about $120 million in its life as a private company from investors including Intel.” Here is more from Globes: “Habana will remain an independent business unit and will continue to be led by its current management team. Habana will report to Intel’s Data Platforms Group, home to Intel’s broad portfolio of data center class AI technologies. This combination gives Habana access to Intel AI capabilities, including significant resources built over the last three years with deep expertise in AI software, algorithms and research that will help Habana scale and accelerate.”
- UK/Imaging. Apple bought Spectral Edge for an undisclosed amount. “Spectral Edge, which was spun out of a University of East Anglia research lab in 2014, specializes in software that fuses together multiple versions of the same image to improve photo quality, including versions taken on the invisible infrared spectrum.”
- Belgium/Open Source. Odoo raised $90M for its open-source all-in-one business software
- Israel/Customer Success. Walkme raises $90 million to continue to grow its platform that enables businesses to simplify the online experience and eliminate user confusion.
- Israel/Talent. Gloat has raised $25 million for their AI-powered a career development platform that matches users with personalized opportunities while allowing them to remain anonymous
- UK/Fintech. FintechOS raised $13.8M to grow automated, plug-and-play digital services for financial organizations.
- Ireland/Security RPA. Tines announced an $11M extension from Accel and Index just six weeks after its last round for a cybersecurity automation platform.
- Netherlands/New Pork. Meatable has raised $10 million to develop its pork prototype from the lab.
- Israel/Cloud security. Rezilion which has created an autonomous cloud workload protection platform has raised $8 million.
- Germany/Blockchain API. Upvest has raised $7.8 million for its fintech-ready APIs, making it easy for any company to store financial assets on the blockchain.
- Israel/Security. Satori Cyber raises $5.25M to help businesses protect their data flows.
Worth reading
Enterprise/Tech News
- An enterprise margin crisis? This week’s must-read link is a tweetstorm from Martin Casado at A16Z. He argues that we are in the midst of a “margin crisis” in enterprise software. He cites the cost of AI/ML, unoptimized clouds, dropping ACVs, the complexities of multiple GTM motions, and other factors as driving this. Check it out, as well as some of the responses.
- A thread on AI/ML. John Lehr from Workbench offers some thoughts on AI/ML in the enterprise from a recent ML roundtable. “Folks in the room griped about data science teams lacking the best practices that DevOps has brought to application development Who owns a model in production? Who gets the 2am page when it breaks? “You build it, you own it” was one POV.”
- Why did Benchmark invest in Sketch? Only Benchmark really knows, but this analysis by Sar Haribhakti is awesome.
How to Startup
- Leadership is about character. Jerry Colonna runs into a Navy vet on a plane and reflects on leadership. “That was one of the most important things they drilled into me in the Navy. That leadership isn’t about having the answers. It’s about character.”
- Scaling as a founder. Hampus Jakobsson on scaling as a founder. “It is very, very rare that people grow as fast as the company does. This means one of two scenarios: (a) you let the original people be the bottleneck of the companies growth, or (b) people will be “denoted” and get a boss.”
How to Venture
- The Blitzscaling of Venture. Institutional Investor writes that VC funds are getting bigger than ever.
- A big VC outcome down under. Blackbird sells its 40% of its portfolio (which includes Canva) for $100M. Not bad for a $29M fund.
Portfolio News
- Chorus and Zoom release a video on how the two companies are working together.
- Valohai was featured in Finland’s Artificial Intelligence Accelerator’s AI Landscape, an overview of the top AI companies in Finland.
- Trellis was a finalist in the second annual Foodbytes global pitch competition.
- Planable’s Co-Founder, Vlad Calus, shared public speaking tips and the skills necessary to become a great account executive.
- DUST Identity’s office in Framingham was featured on VentureFizz.
