Enterprise Weekly #441: Enterprise Budget Priorities, 5 October Meetups, and More
This week, Battery Ventures published their quarterly State of the Cloud Spending Survey and while enterprise budgets remain relatively stagnant, there’s a shift in where and how that budget is being deployed. Here are two major trends:
1. The buzz around AI continues to strengthen. While we’ve been seeing enterprises express interest in the category, but hesitate to invest in and adopt generative AI, it looks like the next couple years will be a turning point. 59% of survey respondents expect to increase AI/ML spending in the next 6 months (a 24% increase from Q1 2023) and 79% expect to deploy generative AI/LLMs in the next 12 months (vs. 32% 6 months ago).
2. Enterprise deals are still getting done…but slowly. While 53% of survey respondents plan to increase budget over the next 6 months, where that budget is going is being heavily scrutinized as buyers are increasingly responsible for improved ROI and securing higher-than-usual levels of stakeholder approval. This is causing major delays in the buying process as 93% of survey respondents indicated unchanged or slower approval cycles.
Additionally, we’re seeing continued headwinds for bottoms-up GTM strategies as survey respondents indicated they will continue to tighten self-procurement from developers in dev/test environments.
So how does this impact startups slinging enterprise deals? For mission-critical software, not much. Even through the market peak in 2020/2021, we’ve been encouraging startups to stick to first principles – prioritize selling value over features, target solutions to real and known pain points, and give champions ammunition to work internally to get the deal done 💪
🖥️ Join more Work-Bench events:
October 4th: Work-Bench Wednesdays, a monthly happy hour with NYC's top founders and operators
October 11th: Next NYC Sales Night with the Head of Sales at Retool and Head of Enterprise Sales at Persona
October 12th: Next NYC Product Night with the SVP of Products at MongoDB
October 17th: Next NYC Marketing Night with the Head of Marketing at Mutiny and VP of Marketing at RippleMatch
October 18th: NY Enterprise Tech Meetup on “Mastering GTM From Open Source to Enterprise” with the COO of Grafana, VP of Product at Vercel, and Senior Director of Developer Experience from Apollo
📚 Read more news:
LinkedIn: Top Startups 2023: The 50 U.S. Companies On The Rise
Pitchbook: Meet The Top 10 VC Fund Families
WSJ: Cisco, Splunk CEOs Say Future of Cybersecurity Turns on AI
📚 Read more (th)reads:
**Take a survey on CTI Networking (2023 Sequel)**
Company: Arthur
Role: Machine Learning Engineer
Technology: AI Monitoring & Explainability
Funding: $60.3M from Work-Bench, Index Ventures, Acrew, Plexo Capital, Homebrew
🌟Company of the Week🌟
PartyKit raises $2.5M led by Sequoia Capital
Infrastructure / Dev Tool • Pre-Seed • London, UK
Founders: Sunil Pai (CEO)
Rollstack raises $1.8M led by Kima Ventures, Roosh Ventures and Others
Collaboration / Productivity • Seed • New York, NY
Mintago raises $4.8M led by BlackLion Ventures
Future of Work • Series A • London, UK
SigNoz raises $5.4M led by SignalFire
Infrastructure / Dev Tool • Seed • San Francisco, CA
Cognota raises $5.5M led by Grotech Ventures
Future of Work • Series A • Toronto, Canada
Digma raises $6M led by Sorenson Ventures
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Seed • Santa Clara, CA
UserEvidence raises $9M led by Crosslink Capital
Sales / Marketing • Series A • Jackson, WY
Senser raises $9.5M led by Eclipse
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Seed • Tel Aviv, Israel
Echomark raises $10M led by Craft Ventures
Risk / Security • Seed • Kirkland, WA
Erudit raises $10M led by Conexo Ventures, Athos Capital and Others
HR Tech • Series A • Miami, FL
Revefi raises $10.5M led by Mayfield
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • Seattle, WA
Nexusflow raises $10.6M led by Point72 Ventures
Risk / Security • Seed • Palo Alto, CA
Nextdata raises $12M led by Greycroft and Acrew Capital
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • San Francisco, CA
Kolena raises $15M led by Lobby Capital
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series A • San Francisco, CA
Nx raises $16M led by Nexus Venture Partners and a16z
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Series A • Remote
PortX raises $16.5M led by FUSE and Curql
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series B • Mercer Island, WA
Gem Security raises $23M led by GGV Capital
Risk / Security • Series A • New York, NY
Series raises $25M led by 776 and Basis Set Ventures
Future of Work • Seed & Series A • San Francisco, CA
Lumu raises $30M led by Forgepoint Capital
Risk / Security • Series B • Doral, FL
Slope raises $30M led by Union Square Ventures
Future of Work • Venture • San Francisco, CA
Transfr raises $40M led by ABS Capital
Future of Work • Series C • New York, NY
Nord Security raises $100M led by Warburg Pincus
Risk / Security • Venture • Vilnius, Lithuania
AlphaSense raises $150M led by Bond
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series E • New York, NY
Salesforce acquires Airkit.ai for an Undisclosed Amount
Sales / Marketing • Acquisition • Redwood City, CA