Array Ventures: Exciting Reads, Industry Updates, & Job Opportunities

Hope you and your families are safe and healthy. We have been good and busy on many fronts. Please read on for some information on how venture capital and startups industry is doing, job opportunities, and covid trends especially in the enterprise.

Exit and Notable Rounds

• PassageAI sold to ServiceNow this year.
• EraDB, database company, launched from stealth and announced a $7m round led by Foundation Capital
• Almanac, collaboration tools, launched publically and announced a $9m round led by Floodgate Capital. Check out some of their playbooks on anti-racism, sales, community, and many more.
• Xwing raised $10m towards autonomous aviation

Welcome new investments to the Array Family

• Uniform — JAMstack company for enterprises
• Blumira — Automated threat detection and response. Fully remote investment in 2020.

Array in the News

• Axios, Business Journal, covered the launch of $1m allocation and office hours for underrepresented founders. Please apply here.
• Article in the Venture Capital Journal and report for emerging fund managers

Portfolio Updates

• Placer has been quite ahead of the retail trends during covid informing us how people have been moving around. See their mentions on Forbes, Nasdaq, and Cheddar.
• Catch&Release founder gave tips on how to communicate and collaborate more effectively from a distance, quoted by Fastcompany and Toolbox. They have powered great covid commercials with their platform, including these on — Kleenex & Facebook.
• Productiv was named a May 2020 Cool Vendor in the Digital Workplace report by Gartner.
• Blendid is launching a new cloud service, in response to the rising demand for robotic automation in the food service.
• Modal saw a surge on their platform of ecommerce volume since the pandemic started.
• Zecops has uncovered large scale bugs on iphones, tackling remotely triggerable security issues, and is getting apple to share instant fixes, mentioned in WSJ.
• Goodtime has scheduled over 1.2 million interviews and will be releasing data monthly on which industries are actively hiring.
• Openprise launched an Agile Customer Data Platform (CDP) solution, to automate hundreds of business processes with no-code.

Jobs

• Solugen (Texas) and CasaOne (SF Bay Area) are looking to hire a Chief of Staff.
• Productiv is looking for B2B Customer Success leader.
• EmpInfo is looking to fill various marketing roles.
• Zecops is looking to fill an SDR role.
• Go to Array Ventures investment for other roles not listed here.

Covid Trends

Q2 was certainly the most unique time in all of our lives. While there have been many challenges from getting groceries, unable to see our loved ones, subdued celebrations of major milestones, and eating our own cooking…every single meal, many people I have talked to have tried to make the best of it. There has been a rise in charitable giving over the last few months.

We have all heard the impact of covid on certain businesses. Zoom, food delivery, rise in remote work, online education, TikTok videos, and animal crossing (nintendo stock up during covid) are the most talked about.

Below are some other noteworthy covid trends to track.

1. Enterprise companies such as DataDog, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, and others have held their own and seen good growth in multiples. Enterprise spend will increase in these 3 categories as per a survey with 100s of CIOs on Pulse.qa.

• Collaboration Tools — To collaborate internally and with customers
• Security — Protecting employees and company data from hack
• Cloud — Increased adoption from remote work

2. E-commerce saw 10 years of growth in 3 months. E-commerce jumped $52 billion and an 18% increase in online shopping sales is projected for 2020.

3. Fintech: Banks are sitting on a lot of cash — $2T surge in January, and increased by $865B in April alone.

4. Travel especially local travel surges. If public, Airbnb would have been a pretty volatile stock maybe behind Tesla. Similarly, there is a surge in RV popularity along with Hertz bankruptcy fiasco.

I try to send this newsletter once a quarter. For updates between newsletters follow me on Twitter and Medium . Share this newsletter with your friends or reply with their email to add them to the distribution. Let me know if you find this valuable and any other things you would like to see!