Enterprise Weekly #496: 2024 Reflections
Work-Bench is an enterprise software VC firm leading Seed rounds. If you are or know anyone thinking about founding an enterprise software startup — we’d love to meet! Please reach out to chat. 📩
As 2024 winds down, we’re reflecting on an incredible year full of milestones and momentum:
💰 We led investments in 7 new Seed-stage portfolio companies
💪 We workshopped 100+ hours of GTM strategies and tactics with our founders and intro’d countless customers
🤓 We met 1500+ founders, future founders, and operators
🎟️ We hosted 50+ events for the NYC enterprise software community
🚀 We promoted 3 team members
🎉 We celebrated Jess’ wedding in South Africa as a team
🍕 We ate more pizza & Olive Garden than we’d like to admit (iykyk)
From our most vibrant NY Enterprise Tech Meetup series yet to our NY Enterprise Operators Retreat to our growing Womenterprise Community, 2024 has been about dreaming bigger, building stronger, and supporting founders every step of the way. Here’s to continuing this momentum into 2025! Thank you to everyone for being part of this journey and reading this little piece of internet every week — we appreciate your support!
Before we close out, here’s a highlight reel of our most impactful GTM playbooks from the year:
And some of our favorite research pieces:
Learnings from Building & Investing in Business Process Automation
Transforming Data Manipulation in Python Through the Convergence of SQL and DataFrames
Lastly, we're thrilled to announce that Work-Bench led Prequel's $3.3M Seed round🎉. They’re helping DevOps teams identify and resolve infrastructure issues across OSS, misconfigurations, and developer-introduced bugs. Their problem detection and management platform features an out-of-the-box detection library, a problem detection community, and the industry’s first reliability research team. We’re excited for this next leg of the journey for co-founders Lyndon Brown and Tony Meehan and the team!
📚 Read more news:
TechCrunch: OpenAI Brings Its AI-Powered Web Search Tool to More ChatGPT Users and OpenAI Brings ChatGPT to Your Landline
NYTimes: Databricks Is Raising $10B
📚 Read more (th)reads:
2025 will be 12 years of Work-Bench! As we head into our next chapter with $375M AUM, we are growing our small but mighty team across 3 key roles: Head of Growth, Researcher, and Operations Manager.
Prequel raises $3.3M led by Work-Bench
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Seed • Remote
Starboard raises $5.5M led by Eclipse
Future of Work • Seed • Toronto, Canada
Kurrent raises $12M led by Crane Venture Partners
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Venture • Bath, UK
Nuon raises $16.5M led by Uncork Capital and M12
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Seed & Series A • San Francisco, CA
Anatomy Financial raises $19M led by Canapi Ventures
Future of Work • Series A • San Francisco, CA
Cimulate raises $28.5M led by Spark Capital
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series A • Boston, MA
Bureau raises $30M led by Sorenson Capital
Risk / Security • Series B • San Francisco, CA
Decart raises $32M led by Benchmark
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series A • San Francisco, CA
SandboxAQ raises $300M led by Parkway VC, Breyer Capital and Others
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Venture • Palo Alto, CA
Databricks raises $10B led by Thrive Capital
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series J • San Francisco, CA
Arctic Wolf acquires the Cylance for $160M
Risk / Security • Acquisition • Waterloo, Canada
Grammarly acquires Coda for an Undisclosed Amount
Collaboration / Productivity • Acquisition • San Francisco, CA
Perplexity acquires Carbon for an Undisclosed Amount
Collaboration / Productivity • Acquisition • Seattle, WA
Sonar acquires Tidelift for an Undisclosed Amount
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Acquisition • Boston, MA
Together AI acquires CodeSandbox for an Undisclosed Amount
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Acquisition • Amsterdam, The Netherlands