B2B deal flow: w/c 24th Feb 2020
Perspectives from an Enterprise Software VC
Hi team -
My weekly perspectives below on the market, hot deals, new funds and interesting reading as an Enterprise Software VC.
Enterprise Software stocks have taken a Coronavirus-related tumble this week, although to a lesser extent than the broader US / global economy.
My suspicion is that any consumer-focused businesses are taking the biggest hit, while any tools that assist remote work (e.g. Slack, Zoom, etc.) are seen as potential winners from the virus spreading further. Large Enterprise Software businesses aren’t a bad place to put your money for a crisis like this: verticals like cybersecurity should be business as usual.
The market
The BVP Emerging Cloud Index is down 6.6% vs. last week, with the S&P 500 down 11.5%.
EV / Annualised Revenue: Mean: 12.1x, Median: 10.3
Hot B2B deals: US
Unqork (New York) raised $131m Series B funding, led by Goldman Sachs, Aquiline and World Innovation Lab: a no-code application platform enabling enterprises to build complex custom software faster. Business users are given a unified toolkit which allows them to configure rather than code - very cool. Customers include Goldman Sachs, Liberty Mutual.
HeadSpin (Palo Alto) raised $60m Series C funding, led by Dell and ICONIQ (joined by Tiger Global): mobile app performance software that helps developers test, monitor and analyse apps in real time. Customers include Verizon, Airbnb, Tinder.
Flock Freight (Solana Beach) raised $50m Series B funding, led by SignalFire and GLP: a freight logistics matching platform (read: marketplace) that pools together partial truckloads.
Ribbon Health (Boston) raised $10m Series A funding led by a16z: a healthcare data platform (API layer) for payers, providers and digital health companies.
MANTL (New York) raised $8m Series A funding, led by Point72: bank account opening platform that is omni-channel (to help convert customers) and streamlines the back office.
Alkymi (New York) raised $5m Seed funding, led by Canaan Partners: enterprise email extraction automation software, using ML and computer vision to extract data from emails and documents.
Hot B2B deals: Europe
Jumo (Cape Town) raised $55m funding, led by Odey AM, Goldman Sachs and LeapFrog: full tech stack platform for building and running fintech products (credit, savings, insurance, points).
Minute Media (London) raised $40m funding, led by Dawn Capital (joined by Battery, Goldman Sachs): fan-generated content platform, with a portfolio of key sports media brands and a powerful tech platform.
Tractable (London) raised $25m Series C funding, led by Georgian Partners (joined by Insight): insurtech software using computer vision to perform visual damage appraisals for accident and disaster recovery.
Elementor (Tel Aviv) raised $15m funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners: a graphical website building platform that plugs into WordPress to design and publish sites.
Lanes & Planes (Munich) raised $10m Series A funding, led by Battery (joined by DN, Connect): business travel and expenses software. Customers are mostly German today, but include the likes of Handelsbank and Personio.
Strattic (Jerusalem) raised $7m Seed funding, led by SignalFire, TenOneTen (joined by Accel): turns WordPress sites into static sites that don’t query a database whenever a user looks at a page (meaning faster and far less hackable websites).
Cioplenu (Germany) raised €4m Seed funding, led by Cherry Ventures: a modular software platform for manufacturing companies, billed as an operating system for the production floor that digitises an array of processes. Customers include Bosch, Stabilo, Hirschvogel.
Gyana (London) raised £3m funding, led by Fuel Ventures: enables non-technical people to run data science analytics on any structured dataset - part of the “citizen data science” trend.
Stonly (Paris) raised $4m funding, led by Accel: enables businesses to easily create interactive step-by-step guides and embed them in websites or customer support workflows. Customers include Dashlane, Calendly.
New B2B funds
Lakestar (Zurich) raised $735m for early and growth stage deals in Europe
QED Investors (Virginia) raised $350m for early stage deals in the US, UK and LatAm
Speedinvest (Vienna) raised €190m for early stage deals in Europe
Anthemis (London) raised $90m for insurtech deals
New / old things I’m reading (no marketing automation)
Org chart design to ensure sustainable growth by Tomasz Tunguz (Redpoint)
Review of 2019 SaaS IPOs by Alex Clayton (Meritech)
When you should hire a start-up CFO by Christoph Janz (Point Nine)