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

Many of you want to know more about investing in companies and funds so I have started a new series on Startup Investing where I document my learnings from my decade of experience in venture capital. Below are 2 posts so far: 

• Introduction to Angel Investing mechanics and best practices
• Sourcing strategies (Finding deals) 

Subscribe here for more on this topic and to find out about how we built our strategy and vision for our upcoming Fund 3. If you are a investor in funds feel free to message me directly to learn more. 

Welcome new investments to the Array Family:

• Mozart Data - Mozart Data connects, centralizes, and orchestrates data from a variety of SaaS tools and databases. Here is fundraising announcement on Techcrunch. They are hiring for backend software engineer. 
• Shipyard - Shipyard is a devops company that creates and manages shareable copies of your environments (app) including live data enabling developers, product, and QA teams. They are hiring for a frontend engineer.
• Invisible Commerce - Invisible Commerce enables anyone to easily monetize an audience with commerce, by delivering a fully scaled retail experience (inventory, storefront, payments, fulfillment, support, returns, accounting, taxes).

**We will still invest in a few new companies in 2020 so please reach out to me if you know good founders starting an enterprise company and raising a pre-seed round. Array Ventures can lead with first checks from $500k-$1M in companies at formation alongside angel investors.**

Notable Rounds in Q3

• Goodtime (Meeting Scheduling Software) - Raised Series B from KTB Ventures, Gingerbread Capital, Atinum, and Smilegate
• PrecisionGX (Automated Claims Intelligence) - Raised a seed round led by Point72 Ventures 
• Solugen (Chemical Manufacturing) - Raised from Founders Fund and Valor Equity Partners and just broke ground on a 15,000-square-foot plant, announced the release of a specialty chemical ScavSol IC 75 used to control oilfield scales & prevent corrosion and was mentioned in Forbes
• Modal (Digital Commerce For Auto Dealers) - Raised Series A 
• RadAI (Radiology Workflow) - raised a seed round from Kickstart Ventures.

Open Jobs at our portfolio companies

• PrecisionGX is looking for a Medical Claims Audit Specialist
• Leapfin is looking for a Business Development Representative
• Dyneti is looking for a Software Engineer
• Almanac is looking for a Full Stack Engineer, Head of Marketing & Head of Design
• EraDB is looking for a Distributed Systems Engineer, Senior Data Scientist & Database Engineer
• Uniform is looking for a Customer Success Engineer
• Xwing is looking for a Aerospace Systems Engineer
• Mapistry is looking for a VP of Product 
• Overview is looking for a Lead Computer Vision Engineer

Array in the News

• Podcast with HBS on Women in Venture Capital
• Profile in San Francisco Business Journal on red flags to look for while vetting founders
• Interview for Chicago Booth on Reverse Engineering a More Equitable Startup Ecosystem
• Podcast with 100xEntrepreneur on taking SaaS companies from Zero to $10M ARR
• Session on “Transparent Angel Investing” for Angel Investor School (paywall)
• Podcast with The Sure Shot Entrepreneur on telling the story of "why" to excite investors 
• Podcast with The Desi VC about Array Ventures and VC thoughts

Q3 2020 Market Overview

• VC-backed startups made Q3 2020 a standout quarter despite the pandemic with 9 venture-backed companies acquired for more than $1Bn. 
• As companies move on from survival mode of the pandemic, they will look to accelerate capabilities across cloud computing, data analytics, intelligent SaaS, artificial intelligence and others given their increased importance in the new-age workplace. According to Gartner, nearly 70% of corporate boards cite the impact of Covid-19 for a ramp up in spending on IT and digital capabilities.
• As VCs adapt to the remote world and close deals remotely rounds have been closing faster thus increasing deal activity. One new factor is reduced travel time and increased access to capital for entrepreneurs. 
• Valuations in 2020 saw a rise across the board and are now higher than pre-COVID levels.

Here are other noteworthy trends to track:

Enterprise

• B2B customer buying behaviour is evolving, companies that follow a growth+sales go-to-market (GTM) strategy will succeed over the traditional top-down sales approach. At Array, we leverage our experience as technical founders with a GTM playbook to help our portfolio companies scale from zero to $1M ARR and then to $10M ARR.
• No-code startups i.e. applications with minimal coding requirements and offer tools for non programmers, are on pace to raise $500M in 2020. Given this interest in the space and the remote working trend, our portco Almanac has grown their user base exponentially, while Openprise ranked first in customer satisfaction in the G2 Enterprise Grid? Report for Data Quality Fall 2020 for the seventh consecutive quarter.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Marketing, customer service, and sales were identified as the top three functions where AI can realize its full potential according to a survey of 1,093 executives by Forbes. At Array, AI and big data is at the core of what we do. We look for investments in AI companies that make every sector efficient as you can see from our investments in every sector from healthcare, fintech, martech, to security.

Ecommerce

• U.S. ecommerce sales will reach $794.5Bn this year, up 32.4% year-over-year. B2B ecommerce in 2019 grew 9 times faster than the growth in all U.S. manufacturing and distributor/wholesaler sales. As ecommerce becomes the new retail, it will be important to provide similar customer experiences online and smoothen the buying process. At Array, companies like Uniform, Modal, Vue.ai and Invisible Commerce are a few examples of companies that can help bridge the gap for retail companies looking to go digital.
• Walmart Inc. has surpassed eBay Inc. in share of U.S. e-commerce sales for the first time furthering the trend of traditional brick-and-mortar stores going digital during the pandemic.

Fintech

• Fintech investment from $100M rounds grew 24% compared to Q2. This mirrors our confidence in fintech as we back companies looking to solve problems ranging from revenue automation (Leapfin) to card fraud detection (Dyneti).
• U.S. account holders surveyed showed that migration to mobile & digital banking ramped up during the pandemic. Our Portco Stronghold is operating in this space, creating virtual networks to help connect legacy and next-generation payment infrastructure.

Healthcare

• $4Bn invested in US-based digital health startups through Q3 brings the year’s running total to $9.4Bn, far exceeding what used to be the largest annual sum of $8.2Bn in 2018. Given the pandemic and the shift to preventive care, our Portcos Rad AI (radiology automation) and PrecisionGX (health insurance) look set to benefit from the uptrend in healthcare solutions.
• Healthcare AI companies received more than $2Bn in equity funding across 121 deals, setting a new high for the sector.

Other Non-funding Portfolio Updates and Press Mentions:

• Xwing (automated aviation solutions) unveils autonomous flight system for regional planes, made especially for the Cessna Grand Caravan, a common plane used by companies like FedEx
• Stronghold (payment infrastructure) and Treez have launched an integration as a part of Treez Pay, to deliver a seamless, secure, and compliant transaction experience for consumers
• Mapistry (environmental compliance software) partnered with the California Metals Coalition (CMC), a statewide trade association to help them maximize collaboration, visibility and control over their environment, health, and safety (EHS) compliance and risk operation
• Vertalo (asset data management platform) has been licensed by MountX Real Estate Capital to design and launch tokens for at least 15 digital real estate projects in Mexico and Canada through 2020 and early 2021
• Zendar (high-definition radar automation) collaborated with the capstone team of the Fung Institute engineering which won the Video Pitch Winner award for “Developing An Affordable Alternative For Autonomous Vehicle Localization Using High-Definition Radar Images”
• Openprise (automated RevOps) was mentioned as 1 of 4 Customer Data Platform (CDP) case studies and how Wabel uses Openprise Agile #CDP to connect retail buyers, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) suppliers
• Blendid (food robotics) debuts new smoothie making robot at Walmart in Fremont, CA after their initial launch at University of San Francisco
• Lennd (live events management) partnered with the PGA to help create a wireframe for the virtual event hosting of the PGA Championship
• Placer (foot traffic analytics platform) partnered with Cushman & Wakefield to deliver real estate retail analytics
• Safegraph (geospatial data platform) has launched Neighborhood Patterns, a dataset to help using anonymized and aggregated location data to understand how devices move within and around Census Block Group. Safegraph was also mentioned in Fortune
• Pulse (crowdsourced CIO community platform) founder Mayank Mehta gave an update on how the new customer solution leverages AI to engage and support community members
• Catch&Release (creative technology platform) launched First Look, finely-curated collections of images and videos based on timely advertising moments, trends, and evergreen topics which can be used for high-exposure, high-impact commercial campaigns
• Art19 (podcast tech) launched an Inventory Management and Forecasting Platform, announced expanded podcast tools and launched a new division, Art19 Media, that will focus on podcast production, show-specific advertising deals, and voiced reads
• Zecops (cybersecurity) partnered with Edison Mail Partners to monitor potential new email vulnerabilities and with Zimperium for its automated agentless Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) capabilities
• Blumira (cybersecurity) saw record growth in Q3 2020 in new bookings with 300% increase in adoption, while doubling employee hires and increasing new customers
• Liftlab (digital spend management) wrote a post on the top 10 lessons learnt in Q3
• Productiv (enterprise SaaS) announced Productiv Essentials, a free tier of its customer-proven enterprise SaaS Management Platform
• Empinfo (automated employment & income verification) partners with Unicorn HRO and will be integrated with Unicorn’s payroll and benefits platform
• CasaOne (furniture rental) raised $50M in Debt Financing from Credit Suisse

Also, I try to pubish this newsletter once a quarter. For updates between newsletters follow me on Twitter and Substack. 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!