The last few months have been strange times to live in. The good news is that technology and innovation are playing an important part in contributing solutions as the world looks to work through and come out of the ongoing crises.

The role of Intelligent Software in solving tough problems and helping humans do their work better is clearer than ever. The companies we work with have been busy helping their customers get back in business, improve their resilience, collaborate remotely, or become more efficient. In this update, we share a few examples of how they are making this happen.

Our entrepreneurs and their companies have held up very well over the past couple of quarters. Given our focus on founders who can leverage cross-geography models, many in our portfolio were already adapted to remote collaboration before March. In addition, most of our companies are capital efficient and have solutions relevant to today’s problems. Many are now running faster than ever. Q2 and Q3 have been the strongest quarters to date for several companies we work with. We truly appreciate the resilience, determination, and resourcefulness of all the entrepreneurs we are fortunate to work with!

On a directly related note, we had several follow-on funding rounds in the portfolio during Q2 and Q3, and we cover some of the announced ones below. There were a few more which we can’t talk about just yet.

As a refresher,  Emergent leads seed rounds in Intelligent Enterprise Software startups led by high-potential founders and helps them refine product-market fit and develop go-to-market capabilities. Our Intelligent Software focus includes themes such as Augmented Intelligence/AI, Cloud Infrastructure, Enterprise Automation, Smarter Mid-market Software, and the Future of Work.

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Portfolio Fuels Up

Coverage of major recent funding rounds in the Emergent portfolio

Observe.AI raises $54M to transform customer service with AI - Observe.AI recently announced $54 million in Series B financing. Menlo Ventures, Next47 and NGP Capital joined the growing list of marquee investors supporting the company. Observe’s Voice AI solutions help brands gain deeper visibility into their customer service operations. The company is rapidly expanding its customer footprint and rolling out products to make customer service experiences better for everyone. As the lead investor for the pre-seed round in 2017, Emergent is privileged to have been the first investor in the company (Link)

SupportLogic gets more investor support - SupportLogic announced $12M in Series A and Seed funding led by Sorenson Ventures and Sierra Ventures. SupportLogic’s software ‘reads’ all of an organization's support tickets, extracts sentiment and signals, and then enables various teams in an organization to collaborate and act on that valuable information. This leads to demonstrably better and faster support - all at a lower cost to the organization. (Link)

BoostUp boosts its funding - BoostUp announced $6.25M in funding led by Canaan Partners. BoostUp helps sales teams get more productive and drive more revenue. It helps B2B companies better predict revenues and optimize customer lifetime value using their contextual intelligence solution. The BoostUp team is excited about data eating software, data making existing software intelligent, and data making humans smarter at their jobs. So are we! (Link)

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The Emergent portfolio helps businesses survive and thrive

Our portfolio entrepreneurs have been busy helping their customers address the challenges arising out of the pandemic and lockdowns. Here are a few examples.

From InstaHiring to Remote Hiring and University Admissions - Talview has doubled its customer base in the past 6 months. Talview’s Interview, Interviewer, and Proctoring Intelligence platform is enabling organizations such as Amazon and Sephora to embrace Remote Work and Learning seamlessly. In addition, the company has witnessed a surge in demand for online assessments, remote proctoring, and video interviewing solutions from education institutions and certification providers across the globe. Its Video AI technology is now helping many institutions move their admissions processes online and conduct exams remotely while maintaining the integrity of results. This has enabled many students and candidates to continue with their learning and career plans without disruption (Link)

Enabling the “New Normal” for essential workers - Oloid AI has emerged out of stealth to enable businesses in essential industries to resume operation while ensuring safety of the workforce. This could not have happened at a more relevant time when all of us are dealing with the new normal. Oloid is an AI-led software company committed to providing secure and privacy-forward authentication across the entire day-of-the-life of deskless workers within essential industries such as manufacturing, food supply chain and healthcare. Oloid has extended its worker identity and contactless biometric platform to add pandemic safety features such as automated temperature scanning and wellness attestations. Oloid has enabled one of the largest contract manufacturers, Flex, with significantly reducing safety, security and compliance risk at their factories and warehouses. (Link)

Helping companies transition their contact centers to a remote model - As contact centers have gone remote, Observe.AI has helped them continue serving their customers with a distributed workforce, often while simultaneously handling a surge in call volumes. Observe.AI helps its customers with speech analytics and service quality management using its Voice AI. Observe launched a bundle to assist companies with call centers to effectively transition agents to remote work, keeping them connected and productive from home (Link).  Observe.AI was also featured in “AI 50 - America’s Most Promising AI Companies”, a list of the top 50 companies that are using artificial intelligence in meaningful business-oriented ways. The list was curated by Forbes, Sequoia Capital, Meritech Capital, and expert judges from a set of several hundred candidates. (Link)

Getting local businesses back to work, safely and efficiently - Delightree is building tools that help owners of franchise and local businesses take their operations and workflows digital. One of the challenges for businesses such as restaurants, stores and hotels opening up post lockdowns is to earn their customers’ trust that it is safe to dine, stay and shop with them. To fill this trust deficit, Delightree launched Delightcomply. Businesses can simply download the app on their phone and get started with the latest CDC/WHO guideline templates. The app reminds employees to follow guidelines and standard operating procedures such as checking their temperature and sanitizing premises. All of this can be shared with their customers on a public page like this on their social media or on-premise. Emergent recently led a $3M seed round in the company, along with Accel Partners. The TechCrunch piece has more details. (Link)

Bringing digitization benefits to truckers’ lives - BasicBlock enables faster and safer payments for truck drivers. They provide trucking companies with a workflow solution to streamline the collection of paperwork for invoicing. By building a layer of intelligent software, the product ensures that truck drivers get paid in hours rather than the current 1-3 months. Moreover, the solution enables truck drivers to avoid high traffic areas such as truck stops which were needed for sending out paperwork. The company has seen a surge in demand for its offerings. Emergent led a $1.5M seed round in the company earlier this year. (Link)

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Emergent Digest

News and views from the Emergent team

Emergent doubles down on Intelligent enterprise software and cross-geo entrepreneurs - We did the first close of our Fund 2 and began investing from it in Q2. We have already partnered with three fantastic teams from this fund. Q2 and Q3 have been a very active time for new deal activity, as we are seeing very high-quality opportunities across the Intelligent Enterprise Software landscape.

Portfolio hiring across the board - As our companies expand their products and distribution, many are expanding their teams. We often play the role of matchmaker, helping connect the right talent with the right opportunities. Emergent companies that are currently hiring range from seed to growth stages and operate across the enterprise software landscape. Functions include everything from engineering and product to sales, marketing and customer success. Please drop us a note if you or someone you know would like to chat about working for startups.

Helping founders cut through the noise and navigate the crisis - As the world went into a phase of uncertainty in March, founders were receiving many noisy signals and disparate sets of advice. We have been working closely with our founders on helping cut through the noise and think granularly, rather than apply one-size-fits-all advice. In the midst of it all, we were able to capture some of our thoughts in the written form. Anupam shared why granularity was paramount for startups as they planned to navigate through COVID times (Link). In another post, we shared thoughts and tactics for SaaS founders on navigating the crisis as it was beginning to unfold in March. (Link)

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Portfolio Features

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

Enabling developers to write more secure and effective code - DeepFactor has built an innovative pre-production monitoring platform for software developers. The platform combines security, performance and behavior monitoring in one offering.  It surfaces potential security and performance issues as well as risky and unexpected behavior changes between versions of applications. (Link)

Deconstructing AI-enabled tech support - In this post, the SupportLogic team talks about how technical support organizations are looking up to AI-enabled technologies to help them transform the way they listen to and respond to customers. (Link)

Choosing the right model for continuous software delivery - Spinnaker is a widely deployed open source continuous delivery platform adopted by thousands of enterprises. In this blog post, Gopal Dommety (CEO & co-founder of OpsMx) takes a look at three approaches to deploying Spinnaker, perspectives on their ROI implications, and how OpsMx is taking an ROI-optimized approach to Spinnaker. (Link)

Protecting your company data during the work-from-home era - As more workers log in from home and use personal devices for work, companies are re-architecting how they secure their data and IT assets. Nick Halsey (CEO of Okera) shares insights on how data protection must replace network protection in this WFH era. (Link)

What consumers are buying from D2C brands - In this TechCrunch article, Ashwin Ramasamy (co-founder of PipeCandy) writes about how the Direct to Consumer eCommerce space has evolved during the pandemic and shares the impact on various categories. One of his findings is that anything that helped numb the reality (alcohol), sweeten the reality (food), distract from reality (baby care and pets), survive the reality (fitness), or hallucinate an alternative reality (nutraceuticals) did well. (Link)

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