StageOne Ventures Quarterly Newsletter — Making The Most Of Summer 2020

Published in

StageOne Ventures

5 min readSep 16, 2020

This newsletter presents a look into what has been done in the last three months, as always please feel free to reach out to us with any questions or comments.

We would also like to use this opportunity to wish our investors, founders, friends, and ecosystem a Happy Jewish New Year and a Shanah Tovah. May this year be filled with health and happiness, success, new beginnings, partnerships, and many exits! but most important, may this year bring a cure for COVID-19 around the globe.

Welcome To The Portfolio Family

StageOne has continued to invest in companies despite the current global environment, and we are happy to welcome on board two new companies: Common Ground, that provides real-time software solutions for an unprecedented level of human interaction over digital, by fusing together cutting-edge technologies, and DoControl, which introduces a modern security layer enforcing advanced security features on multiple SaaS, regardless of each app underlying capabilities.

Four Companies Closed Follow-on Rounds

Otonomo completed a $46M Round C, led by both financial and strategic investors. Otonomo is an automotive data services platform that enables a wide spectrum of services that leverage data collected within the car to vendors in the Connected Car ecosystem.

Epsagon raised a financing round led by a new investor DTCP, with participation from StageOne, bringing its total funds raised to $30 million. Epsagon develops software-as-a-service (SaaS) automated end-to-end monitoring technologies for serverless cloud-based systems, specializing in monitoring and tracing for microservices and cloud-based applications.

Silverfort raised a $30M Round B, led by new investor Aspect Ventures, with participation from StageOne. Silverfort is an authentication platform for enterprises capable of enforcing adaptive authentication (AI-based) across the entire corporate network & cloud, without changing endpoints or servers.

Varada raised a $12M A round, led by new investor MizMaa Ventures, welcoming Gefen Capital as new investors, with participation from StageOne and other existing investors. Varada is a Big Data infrastructure company that uses interactive apps to run fast on cloud data lakes regardless of their data’s scale and complexity.

New Partnerships & Outstanding Results

Silverfort & Kovrr have both been listed in the top 100 cybersecurity start-ups for 2020!
Coralogix will invest $30M in India for over 5 years, to provide its customers with local cloud capabilities (AWS-based) to help them comply with the upcoming security law in 2021.
T heator partners with the Academy for Surgical Coaching to provide surgeons with AI-driven surgical intelligence.
N euroblade was named as one of the top 20 Israeli start-ups for 2020 by TheMarker (Article available only in Hebrew).
M odel9 was named as one of the top 20 Israeli start-ups for 2020 by TheMarker (Article available only in Hebrew).
Kovrr collaborates with MAPFRE RE to manage cyber risk accumulations.
O tonomo collaborates with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles to increase car data utilization in the European Union.
A vanan introduces first-of-its-kind cloud-based security for Slack.
vHive demonstrates new data analytics capabilities for the tower industry.

Expanding the Team X2

We are excited to introduce two new members to the StageOne family, Nofar Schnider who joined in May as an Associate, and Nate Meir, who recently joined us as a Principal. Get to know Nofar in her personal blog where she discusses her journey into the world of Venture Capital.

Lessons Learned from our CEO’s and Founders

We are now just over 6 months into the COVID-19 crisis and continue to work closely with our portfolio companies. We are pleased to see how well our teams have been doing adapting to the new environment and planning for the future. It is incredible to see our teams function great despite considerable pressure, with great leadership and inspiration, ensuring their companies survival and employees’ physical, mental, and social well-being. What is their secret? Read the article to learn more.

Female Founders Office Hours — Status Report

Time flies! 8 months have gone by since we started the StageOne Female Founders Office Hours. Yes, it has been a bit hectic lately, but we continue on course to meet incredible female founders. We have already met over 35 founders, spread across many different investment areas, and on different stages. In a blog article, written by Yael Eckstein, our marketing director, we shared some figures on the program, what came out of these office hours, lessons learned and opportunities we see this program provides.

The Google Drive Folder You Need To Know About

Happy end of summer to all of you! While it is still pretty warm out there, and unfortunately COVID-19 is still spreading globally, we look to the future and remain optimistic. Both us at StageOne and our portfolio companies continue to adapt and make the necessary changes and plans for the future through innovative models and frameworks.
This newsletter presents a look into what has been done in the last three months, as always — please feel free to reach out to us with any questions or comments.
We would also like to use this opportunity to wish our investors, founders, friends, and ecosystem a Happy Jewish New Year and a Shanah Tovah. May this year be filled with health and happiness, success, new beginnings, partnerships, and many exits! but most important, may this year bring a cure for COVID-19 around the globe.

To Summarize…

StageOne continues to look for new investments, so the next time you run into passionate Israel related founders in the Deep-Tech, B2B enterprise space looking for a partner to join them in becoming category leaders, we hope you’ll have us in mind.