April 2021

This calendar year we expect 7-8 portfolio companies from across the Janvest family of funds to begin raising their next rounds of financing ranging from modestly sized seed rounds to large growth rounds, and everything in between. It is our position, and one which we communicate often to our portfolio entrepreneurs, that start-ups should raise capital when they can and from a position of strength, as opposed to raising when they are forced to do so and with their backs against the wall. The current market conditions have never been better for entrepreneurs to execute a raise - tremendous amounts of available venture capital and significant competition for the best deals, which when combined, often send valuations soaring. Despite the fact that a few of Janvest’s aforementioned portfolio companies could wait until early 2022 to kick off their next round, it is our advice to entrepreneurs to take advantage of these market conditions in order to bolster their cash reserves in advance of what we believe to be a recessionary period in the not too distant future. Even with these advantageous market conditions, the fact remains that raising capital is but a means to an end, not an end itself. In addition, the more capital a company raises across an increasing number of dilutive events, the more difficult it is to generate great returns. Therefore, one of the places where we as Janvest lean in is “right sizing” a round. A company should raise enough to have some cushion, but not too much whereby wasteful spending and a lack of focus on efficiency infect the organization. Valuations should be thoughtful and give a company room to grow. Too large a round at too high a valuation too early presents the same sort of risk as too small a round. Finding that balance is critical.

Of course, not all start-ups will succeed in their raise. Despite the quantity of capital in the market, sometimes entrepreneurs fall short of their goals for a variety of reasons - limited access to a large cross-section of relevant capital sources, operating in a non-trendy or ‘un-sexy’ sector, sub-optimal metrics, etc. Furthermore, some companies may decide that achieving additional metrics is a greater priority than taking advantage of the current market conditions. The Janvest General Partners have and will continue to support each of our founding teams in their efforts, but at the end of the day, we have to strike the appropriate balance between providing support and doing the work for them. Allowing entrepreneurs, especially first-time entrepreneurs, to run their own capital raises will also provide the experience necessary to raise future rounds, which will be critical for the success of their businesses. In this update we will highlight some of the portfolio investments heading out to raise over the next 6-8 months, the basis for those raises, and corresponding raise strategy.

ALTOSTRA (Fund III, SPV III) - www.altostra.com
HQ: San Francisco, CA
R&D: Tel Aviv, Israel

SUMMARY: Since completing a Janvest-led seed round in late 2019, Altostra’s team has been heads-down developing a platform that automates software developer functions thus dramatically reducing the cost and time associated with new application production and release. Altostra’s no-code infrastructure is coming to market at a time when enterprises are struggling to get the most out of their limited R&D resources, which has driven a lot of venture funds to take interest in this space. Despite spending most of the last 18 months on R&D rather than commercialization, Altostra has announced a number of very promising and high profile partnerships with companies like GitHub, CircleCI, and Auth0, which will facilitate a bottoms-up go to market effort. To fuel that go to market and to start capitalizing on a growing pipeline of interested users/customers, Altostra will need to expand their team and thus conduct a raise.
PLANNED CAPITAL RAISE: $7MM+ Series A concluded by Q4, early Q1 2022
RAISE STRATEGY: Altostra’s CEO splits time between the Bay Area and Tel Aviv and as such has had the ability to develop relationships with investors on both sides of the ocean. That being said, it is the preference of Altostra’s leadership team, as well as the company’s pre-existing investors, all of whom are American funds or individuals, that the raise be focused on tier one West Coast funds.

ATOMATION (Fund II, III) - www.atomation.net
HQ: St. Louis, MO
R&D: Tel Aviv, Israel

SUMMARY: In 2019, Atomation appointed former CIO of Emerson Electric (NYSE: EMR) Steve Hassell to CEO of the company who began a year long product and market pivot providing utilities, telecommunications providers, and heavy machinery operators with a smart connectivity and data platform for previously unconnected legacy infrastructure. Atomation’s pivot and corresponding 2020 plans were heavily impacted by COVID and pushed many of their planned engagements into early 2021. Despite this, Atomation closed 2020 with 300% revenue growth over the previous year and dramatically expanded their pipeline of prospective customers. In just the first quarter of 2021, Atomation saw more revenue than in all of 2020. In addition, the company’s lead pipeline and upsell requests from existing customers has begun to overwhelm the Atomation team, thus driving the need to raise capital and increase headcount.
PLANNED CAPITAL RAISE: $10MM+ Series A concluded by end of Q2, early Q3
RAISE STRATEGY: Atomation is not the typical B2B SaaS business that most venture funds are used to seeing. For this reason, Atomation has spent the better part of the last year cultivating relationships with a select group of venture funds in the Midwest that gravitate towards (and understand) their technology, go to market, and the corresponding market opportunity. While there are ongoing conversations with a few venture funds, Atomation will be expanding the list of potential financing partners and beginning conversations and processes with them over the next 2-3 weeks.

CORALOGIX (Fund II, SPV III) - www.coralogix.com
HQ: Tel Aviv, Israel
Offices: San Francisco, CA / Delhi, India

SUMMARY: Coralogix has emerged as one of the leading innovators in the fast growing Observability (DevOps) market. In just the last 18 months or so, the company has been able to attract $35MM in venture capital via a $10MM Series A in late 2019 and a $25MM Series B in late 2020. With this capital, the company has grown their team to almost 100 people spread across three countries - the U.S., Israel, and India - and attracted more than 2,000 enterprise customers driving triple digit year over year growth. Combining the current market conditions with the fast rate of growth Coralogix is experiencing, the company has seen an influx of blue chip venture funds from across the globe show an interest in a large preempted Series C round of funding. While Coralogix does not necessarily need the capital at the moment, an injection of $50-100MM will only accelerate their growth plans and so the company’s leadership and Board of Directors is considering whether to conduct a raise by end of year. If that is the case, this will most certainly be a highly competitive round with a significant corresponding valuation. Worth noting, Janvest LP II was the company’s first investor with a cost basis of around $2.5MM.
PLANNED CAPITAL RAISE: $50MM+ Series C kicked off in Q3/Q4 and concluded most likely within a month or so.
RAISE STRATEGY: Coralogix is in a fortunate position to have top venture funds courting them for access to their next round. At present the company’s CEO, Ariel Assaraf, is building relationships with the funds that he believes would be the best match to accompany Coralogix in their next phase of growth. Once a raise is officially kicked off, we expect that the round will come together fairly quickly.

OBSECURE (Fund IV) - www.obsecure.com
HQ: New York, NY

SUMMARY: In early 2020, Janvest led Obsecure’s pre-seed round to enable the business to start building out some R&D infrastructure towards their ultimate goal of introducing the next generation of digital identity verification. Throughout the last year, Obsecure’s executive team spoke with dozens of Fortune 1000 executives in order to validate their approach and start putting together an initial version of their product based on that feedback. With a few design partnerships coming into focus, it is important for Obsecure to expand their engineering capabilities to meet the demand of their new partners and to be able to service an initial set of prospective customers.
PLANNED CAPITAL RAISE: $4MM+ seed round to be kicked off in H2 2021 and concluded either by end of year or early 2022.
RAISE STRATEGY: While Obsecure’s founding team is Israeli, they are based in New York and as such have reach to venture funds in both Israel and the northeast U.S. Previous conversations with funds in both markets have proven productive with what appears to be significant initial interest in what Obsecure is doing. It is the desire of the Obsecure team to continue conversations with Israeli and American funds leading up to the official kickoff of their seed round in order to have a large cross section of investors from which to choose the best match for the next round.

REPOSIFY (Fund III) - www.reposify.com
HQ: Tel Aviv, Israel

SUMMARY: Reposify is operating in the fast growing External Surface Management market and provides enterprises with real-time visibility into their known and unknown digital assets thus eliminating any attack vector blind spots. In Q4 2020, Reposify successfully completed a $3.5MM seed+ round of financing to drive continued growth in preparation for a Series A round of financing. Thus far in 2021, the company has not only added a number of engineers to their headcount, but they have generated more revenue in Q1 than they did in all of 2020 while at the same time displacing a number of their larger competitors within name brand multi-national enterprises such as Unicredit, Generali, FICO and PWC . In addition, Reposify was recently recognized by Gartner as one of the top emerging technologies in their respective market - recognition that is both validating and important from a PR perspective. Reposify’s team is confident that as they progress through the rest of H1 2021, they will strengthen their proposition to Series A investors interested in seeing the company use that capital to further build out their marketing and sales functions.
PLANNED CAPITAL RAISE: $7MM+ Series A to be kicked off in H2 2021 and concluded either by end of year or early 2022.
RAISE STRATEGY: Reposify’s team has some connections to foreign investors; however, the Israeli Series A funds are the most likely candidates to lead this next round given their proximity to Reposify and their knowledge of the CEO and his reputation as a talented technologist.

RUPERT (Fund IV) - www.hirupert.com
HQ: New York, NY
R&D: Tel Aviv, Israel

SUMMARY: In Q2 2020, Janvest led a pre-seed round in Rupert followed shortly by participation in the company’s seed round led by prominent NY-based seed fund IA Ventures. Rupert’s aim is to bring to market the first data analyst backlog management solution, which in turn democratizes data and knowledge across mid-size to large enterprises. Over the last year or so, Rupert has done a good job of onboarding a number of initial design partners with whom to test and refine their solution. One of those design partners is Janvest portfolio company Coralogix. The feedback from those partners has been positive and providing some indication that the direction Rupert is heading has a lot of potential. The next phase in Rupert’s development is to refine their initial product and start building out a sales and marketing engine to attract prospective customers and start generating some initial revenues. While having some revenue is typically required for a Series A, the current market conditions allow for a business with a talented team, a validated approach, and referenceable design partners but perhaps limited revenue to effectively execute a raise.
PLANNED CAPITAL RAISE: $7MM+ Series A to be kicked off in H2 2021 and concluded either by end of year or early 2022.
RAISE STRATEGY: Rupert’s executive team is in NY. In addition, their lead seed investor, IA Ventures, has a following of blue chip American funds that have already expressed interest in Rupert’s next round. Once the round officially begins, it is the desire of Rupert’s team to focus exclusively on U.S. investors, especially given the inbound interest they’ve already received from a number of name brand funds.

SHIELDIOT (Fund III) - www.shieldiot.io
HQ: Tel Aviv, Israel

SUMMARY: ShieldIoT spent much of 2020 re-developing their Internet of Things security platform to be ‘lighter’ from a deployment and integration standpoint. The latest iteration of their offering is targeting mass scale networks of IoT devices - lighting systems, smart grids, surveillance networks, transportation infrastructure, etc. In parallel with having a new product better suited to the market, ShieldIoT started to receive attention from investors impressed with the performance of their technology, which has proven to be 20x more accurate in identifying anomalous (dangerous) behavior on a network. ShieldIoT’s team decided to convert some of this attention from investors into a proper Series A round of financing, which they kicked off in late Q4 2020.
PLANNED CAPITAL RAISE: $5MM+ Series A, the lead investor is Israel-based NextLeap Ventures run by former Intel executives and who invest in best-in-class deep tech solutions. The raise is expected to conclude in early to mid-Q2 with interest from a number of strategic investors as well.
RAISE STRATEGY: With a lead investor secured, ShieldIoT is in the process of attracting additional participants to the round - participants in the form of Israel-based investors, but also multi-national enterprises interested in possibly making a strategic investment.