The last few months have been eventful and active across the broader technology landscape, as well as in enterprise software and SaaS.

The number of IPOs and private funding volumes are at multi-year highs, with a significant uptick in the last few months. Exits and outcomes for venture-backed companies have been larger than most expected. Macro events such as unprecedented money supply and shift of capital towards tech and growth assets are certainly some drivers.

But this phenomenon is also underwritten by superlative growth rates of tech businesses across the board, from early-stage to growth and public markets. Many tech markets have proven to be much larger than expected. Most B2B and SaaS businesses were once assumed by investors to have a ceiling somewhere around $1B valuation / $100M annual revenues. That ceiling has been breached spectacularly. A case in point is Freshworks, which went public on NASDAQ recently and has a market cap north of $10B. The company is building SaaS products for global markets with a team that is based largely in India. It now has annualized revenues of over $300M, and is still growing at 50% year over year.

While markets are brimming with liquidity, raising venture funding from quality investors continues to be hard for most entrepreneurs at the earliest stages of their companies. That is, the stage before there are concrete proof points and before a compelling story has crystallized.

At Emergent, we continue to partner very early with entrepreneurs in ‘pre-hype, pre-momentum’ rounds and build conviction before there are meaningful third-party signals. We have closed several new investments in recent months. We are as bullish as we’ve ever been about Intelligent Software driving trillions of dollars of value creation over the coming decades.

We are fortunate to be partnered with many companies that are scaling new heights. Many have gotten to product-market fit, and several are now at growth stages. Some updates are included below, and there is a lot more to come. The rapid progress of our portfolio companies is a testament to the hard work of the teams we are partnered with, and is validating the trust our fund investors have put in Emergent. This is just the beginning. We are here for the long game.

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Portfolio Fuels Up

Coverage of selected recent funding rounds in the Emergent portfolio

AccelData raises $35M to improve data observability – Even as the amount and velocity of data within organizations continue to increase at a rapid clip, the visibility into the infrastructure behind it remains a key bottleneck. Acceldata helps organizations overcome this bottleneck. Their product helps businesses gain better visibility into their data pipelines, and helps improve reliability, accelerate scale, and lower costs. The company announced $35M funding from Insight Partners, March Capital, Lightspeed, Sorenson, and Emergent. Emergent has been fortunate to have partnered with the founders since inception and we are pleased to support their terrific ramp-up (Link)

DeepFactor raises $15M to help developers write secure code – Companies are releasing next-generation software applications at an increasing pace. These applications are getting more complex with the push for digital transformation and the adoption of DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, containers, and cloud-native architectures. This results in more areas to attack and a significant increase in security and compliance risks. DeepFactor empowers engineering teams by providing unprecedented runtime visibility and control over an application’s supply chain, security and compliance. Emergent led the seed round last year. The company recently announced $15M funding led by Insight Partners, with participation from Tricentis (a leading test automation company) and existing investors. (Link)

Talview raises $15M to help businesses speed up hiring – Talview helps businesses hire faster and better with their intelligent interviewing and hiring solutions. During the last year, the company tripled its customer base, grew revenue more than twice, and launched a remote and live proctoring solution for education and certification institutions. Emergent has continued to invest in and support the company since their Seed round (Link)

BoostUp raises $14M to reshape the Revenue Intelligence market – BoostUp has an intelligent SaaS platform for managing revenue operations (RevOps). Their product enables sales teams to improve their revenue forecasts and close more deals. Customers have achieved 95% forecast accuracy and increased sales manager and sales representative capacity by over 15%. Emergent has partnered with Boostup since the company’s earliest days (Link)

Mile Auto raises $10.3M to provide better auto insurance – Mile Auto uses computer vision and machine learning to provide more cost-effective car insurance to low-mileage drivers. Mile Auto has partnered with leading auto OEMs including Ford and Porsche. Emergent was among the first institutional investors to back the company, well before launch (Link)

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Of Mergers and Acquisitions

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Zoominfo Acquires Insent – ZoomInfo (NASDAQ: ZI) announced that it has acquired Insent.ai to enable sales and marketing teams to engage and convert more website visitors. Emergent led Insent’s seed round just a few months before this transaction. Insent gives ZoomInfo customers the ability to listen to and detect interesting activity on their websites, then engage with prospective buyers through intelligent chat experiences. We wish the team the best as they go on and execute as part of a larger platform. This was a successful outcome for Emergent and our investors. (Link)

This is the fifth successful exit for Emergent in a relatively short period of time. The Enterprise/B2B space is extremely acquisitive with numerous scaled-up companies now looking to expand into newer segments and/or consolidate their positions. We believe we will continue to see an increasing interest in startups that have built strong products and businesses.

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Emergent Digest

News and views from the Emergent team

Emergent doubles down – Emergent has launched Fund 2, and we have already partnered with several fantastic companies from this fund. We are seeing very high-quality opportunities across the Intelligent Enterprise Software landscape. Several Fund 2 companies have already gone on to the next milestone in a short amount of time! Please drop us a note if you’d like to learn more about our thesis and investment style for this fund.

Working at startups – Many Emergent companies are hiring across functions, including engineering, data science, product, sales, marketing, customer success, and finance. Please reply to this email or use this form if you or someone you know would like to chat about working for startups.

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Portfolio Features

Latest in the world of Intelligent Enterprise Software, from the lens of Emergent portfolio entrepreneurs

Among the top Artificial Intelligence companies - Forbes published AI 50 in collaboration with a couple of storied venture capital firms. AI 50 is a list of private, promising North American companies that are using artificial intelligence in ways that are fundamental to their operations. Observe.AI, which helps improve and automate contact centers, was featured on this list. Separately, Observe was also featured as a part of KMWorld AI50. Observe has announced $88M in funding to date. It rubs shoulders on these lists with a number of significantly larger companies. (Forbes) (KMWorld)

The video industry gets an intelligent atlas - $250 Billion is spent annually on video content by streaming companies, broadcast networks, OTT players, and others. The consumption of video in various forms is exploding. Yet there has been no reliable and comprehensive source of information on the deals, key players, and relationships in this space. Vitrina has built an AI-fueled platform to parse out and capture data across the length and breadth of this vast industry. The company launched the video industry’s first leaderboard for worldwide deals. A lot more is on the way, stay tuned. (Link)

Bringing access control to the 21st century - There is a lot of friction today in the physical security and access control space. Oloid has built a modern software-centric solution to transform this space. Their software reader helps businesses modernize their Physical Access Control Systems with an inexpensive retrofit approach. Powered by AI and computer vision technology, Oloid’s smart access readers are the industry’s first software-based multi-modal applications that provide frictionless and modern access control features on off-the-shelf hardware in harmony with the existing systems. (Link)

Enhancing human-to-human communication with AI - Krishna Raj Raja, founder and CEO of SupportLogic, discusses how AI can help service agents detect customer signals, picking up on how a customer is feeling, understanding context, and dynamically flagging or escalating a case before an annoyance turns into a major problem. (Link)

Towards better marketing performance - Factors.ai launched a community of Analytics, Demand Gen, and Content Marketing leaders. The community will hold events and discussions on how SaaS businesses can improve their marketing performance. (Link)

Innovating in Georgia - MileAuto was featured as one of the top 10 most innovative companies as part of the Georgia Technology Summit ‘21.  Mile Auto is a pay-per-mile auto insurance company using patented computer vision technologies to help low mileage drivers save money. (Link)

Made in Nebraska - Nebraska Made weaves a narrative journey that follows some of Nebraska’s best-known brands, the individuals behind them, and their efforts to turn a kernel of an idea into a workable business. Taylor Monks, Co-founder and CEO of BasicBlock talks about how the company aims to revolutionize the trucking industry. (Link)

Getting the point across - Creating business presentations is a manual process with many areas of friction. prezent.ai is on a mission to democratize great business presentations for all levels of an organization. Its AI-powered platform supercharges communication productivity of teams by combining audience empathy, business understanding and beautiful design. Please reach out if you'd like to use the product. (Link)

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