Enterprise Weekly #439: NYC Reigns King of Early-Stage Deals, Fund Construction, and More
According to a new Preqin data, “the East Coast is the new king of early-stage deals” 👑
In 2022, there were more early-stage deals in NYC than in SF for the first time. We’re not surprised as we saw Seed financings hold up fairly well, representing the largest Series with 21 deals and 44% of total 1H 2023 NYC enterprise tech fundings.
Meanwhile, VC legends - Fred Wilson and Roger Ehrenberg, co-founders of two of the best performing early-stage funds in history - are preaching about constrained fund sizes and concentrated portfolios.
We heard from Fred Wilson that, “If you want a VC fund to be aligned with you, pick a fund that doesn’t have a lot of money. You want a fund who will invest $5M to make $200M. Not the one that invests $100M to make $200M — big funds are NOT your friends.”
Coincidentally, Roger Ehrenberg chimed in yesterday with a “Contrarian view of how Seed funds should operate - concentrated portfolio, follow on checks with conviction, high degree of recycling.”
This couldn’t be more aligned with Jon Lehr’s TechCrunch byline which dropped last week. He argued how the benefits of receiving hands-on resources from concentrated Seed firms (like Work-Bench 😉) often outweigh the shorter-sighted approach of accepting a high valuation from Y Combinator, high-volume Seed firms, and multi-stage firms who offer limited resources to accelerate their startups’ growth trajectory.
Lastly, we’re excited to announce our Work-Bench Next NYC Network 🥳 This curated group of functional leaders across Sales, Marketing, Product, Customer Success, Engineering, and more, from the world’s fastest growing enterprise companies based in NYC has joined our bench to help our enterprise community scale with playbooks on how to go from $0 to $100M to IPO.
If you are or know any functional leaders at an enterprise software company in NYC, and want to gain access to:
Proven tactics and strategies
High-quality connections
Invites to exclusive events
📚 Read more news:
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Insider: The Modern CEO Job Is Completely Broken — But AI Could Make Executives Useful Again
Insider: ChatGPT Is Losing Hype, As Traffic Falls For Third Month In A Row
NY Times: Arm Soars 25% in the Year’s Biggest Initial Public Offering
The Verge: What To Expect From the Google Search Antitrust Trial
📚 Read more (th)reads:
Company: FireHydrant
Role: Senior Customer Success Manager
Technology: Site Reliability & Incident Management Platform
Funding: $32.5M from Work-Bench, Menlo Ventures, Harmony Partners, Salesforce Ventures
🌟Company of the Week🌟
LastMile AI raises $10M led by Gradient
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • New York, NY
Founders: Sarmad Qadri (CEO), Andrew Hoh (CPO), Suyog Sonwalkar (CTO)
Gable raises $7M led by Zetta Venture Partners, Crane Venture Capital and Essence VC
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • Seattle, WA
Deduce raises $9M led by Freestyle Capital
Risk / Security • Seed • New York, NY
Usage raises $9M led by Amity Ventures
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Seed • New York, NY
AuthMind raises $11M led by Ballistic Ventures
Risk / Security • Seed • Bethesda, MA
Exostellar raises $15M led by Celesta and Cambium Capital
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Series A • Ithaca, NY
Zenity raises $16.5M led by Intel Capital
Risk / Security • Series A • Tel Aviv, Israel
Port raises $18M led by Team8
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Series A • Tel Aviv, Israel
Binalyze raises $19M led by Molten Ventures
Risk / Security • Series A • London, UK
Druid raises $30M led by TQ Ventures
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series B • Bucharest, Romania
SQream raises $45M led by World Trade Ventures
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series C • New York, NY
Pixis raises $85M led by Touring Capital
Sales / Marketing • Series C • San Francisco, CA
Enfabrica raises $125M led by Atreides Management
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series B • Mountain View, CA
Denodo raises $336M led by TPG
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series B • Palo Alto, CA
Databricks raises $500M led by T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley and Others
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series I • Palo Alto, CA