Enterprise Weekly #417: Resilience During The Banking Crisis, Womenterprise Summit, and More

It’s been a wild week for tech, that’s for sure. If you want to read post-mortems on what went wrong inside SVB, check out these explainers: The New York Times, Business Insider, Stratechery.

While SVB is the 2nd largest bank failure in U.S. history, they are the 1st bank run in the digital age. Meaning, their demise was accelerated from weeks to just hours by the speed at which panic and information was spread primarily on Twitter. 

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Work-Bench General Partner, Jon Lehr, spoke to the WSJ this week about what the future enterprise tech startup pipeline might look like, and while some argued this will hinder innovation as funding slows, Jon has a more positive view on the future for enterprise startups. During his time in Morgan Stanley’s IT department at the tail end of the 2008 financial crisis, he saw: 

Commercial activity with enterprise startups actually increased in order to support the efficiencies and new capabilities the bank required. It was the legacy vendors who had bloated, multi-million dollar contracts and weaker capabilities that we actively negotiated down or terminated contracts with. 

While recognizing that today’s environment is unfavorable, we expect that enterprise software, as a category, will be similarly protected. Beyond hype-y new technologies, there are tons of top of mind initiatives for Fortune 500s across security, cloud deployments, developer efficiency, and more for startups to address.

In other banking news, contagion spread to First Republic Bank, whose stock tanked 74% this week. Given the concerns of another bank run and the instability of the market, they began exploring a potential sale. However, yesterday, 11 of the world's largest banks (JPMorgan, Bank of America, etc.) gave FRB a liferaft of $30B to restore fleeting customer confidence.

Lastly, Microsoft announced a new AI-powered “Copilot” for its Microsoft 365 apps and services yesterday, designed to help people generate documents, emails, presentations, and more. We also started hearing about cool GPT-4 use cases, given that the powerful chatbot update was released this week. What’s the coolest business productivity hack you’ve tested GPT-4 with so far? Let us know in the comments:

Jonathan Lehr @fendien

Since the release of GPT-4 I've seen some incredible uses on Twitter + from many of our founders 💡I'm curious what’s the coolest *business productivity* hack you’ve tested GPT-4 with so far? Ones that can ideally bring major efficiency or automation to everyday workflows

OpenAI @OpenAI

Announcing GPT-4, a large multimodal model, with our best-ever results on capabilities and alignment: https://t.co/TwLFssyALF https://t.co/lYWwPjZbSg

👩‍💻 Join our Womenterprise Summit:

We’re bringing back our Womenterprise Summit on April 26 - the only summit exclusively focused on celebrating women in enterprise software! Join us for a half-day summit with 250+ female founders, operators, executives, and investors from pre- and post-IPO companies, fast-growth startups, Fortune 500 companies, and more.

📚 Read more news: 

• Axios: Payments Giant Stripe Raises $6.5B At A $50B Valuation

• Economic Times: YC Shuts Late-Stage Investment Fund

• NYTimes: The Fed Is Trying To Tame Inflation Without Wrecking The Economy

• Reuters: Stripe Integrating OpenAI's New GPT-4 AI

• WSJ: Cybersecurity Tops CIO Agendas as Threats Escalate

Jonathan Lehr @fendien

It's been a heck of week 😵‍💫 That said, now is an even more critical time to celebrate company wins with your team To help founders do so, here's a🧵 on drafting "Win Flash" emails Thx to our port co @Tamr_Inc for the inspiration here (Melissa Campbell + @andyhpalmer) 👇

• @mitchellh on Hashicorp’s startup banking story (*a must read!) 

• Ben Winn on incredible lightning talks

• @rajko_rad on OSS business models

• Sam Bond on 3 most important sales metrics

• @abarrallen on YC’s growth stage shut down

Company: Octane
Role: Head of Marketing
Technology: Usage-Based Billing Platform
Funding: $2M from Work-Bench, Basis Set Ventures, and others

🌟 Company of the Week 🌟
Prescient AI raises $4.5M led by Blumberg Capital
Sales / Marketing • Seed • Miami, FL
Founders: Mike True (CEO), Cody Greco (CTO)

Entre raises $1.6M led by Octane Fund
Future of Work • Seed • Austin, TX

Deeploi raises $3.2M led by Cherry Ventures
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Seed • Berlin, Germany

Upduo raises $4M led by Impact Venture Capital
Future of Work • Seed • San Francisco, CA

Monitaur raises $4.6M led by Cultivation Capital
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Venture • Boston, MA

Elate raises $4.9M led by WestWave Capital
Future of Work • Series A • Indianapolis, IN

HeadRace raises $6M led by Greylock, Susa Ventures and Breyer Capital
HR Tech • Seed • Austin, TX

Zed raises $10M led by Redpoint Ventures
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Series A • Remote

Wingspan raises $14M led by Andreessen Horowitz
HR Tech • Series A • New York, NY

Seldon raises $20M led by Bright Pixel
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series A • London, UK

Mitiga raises $45M led by ClearSky Security
Risk / Security • Series A • Tel Aviv, Israel

Adept raises $350M led by General Catalyst and Spark Capital
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series B • San Francisco, CA

Silver Lake and CPP Investments acquire Qualtrics for $12.5B
Future of Work • Acquire • Seattle, WA

Grafana acquires Pyroscope for an Undisclosed Amount
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Acquisition • Oakland, CA