End of year Newsletter

It’s been a busy 5 months since our last newsletter, with several new deals coupled with the 4th edition of Flight, our annual Enterprise Seed Summit. We and 100+ enterprise founders from across Europe who attended Flight were fortunate to be joined by leading GTM experts David Sacks (Craft Ventures, Yammer), Marten Mickos (HackerOne CEO), Jen Bers (VP Sales Onfido) and numerous others.  Please check out what we all learned this year.

2020 has continued to be a year of building at Crane. We welcomed two new members to the Crane team. We’re excited to announce that software marketing veteran Aneel Lakhani has joined Crane as an Advisory Partner to support our portfolio. Check out his slides and talk from Flight 2020 on The Uncomfortable Truths to Bringing Products to Market.  Lucy Illidge also joined as our first GTM Intern. She has been busy working across our portfolio and working on a few top secret projects which we will be launching in the New Year.

With new investments over the past few months, we now have enterprise and deep tech startups HQ’d in 7 European countries. We’re still passionate about redefining the enterprise work experience alongside our founders, so if you or anyone you know are starting a new company, building a new product and launching a new (open source) project – please feel free to reach out.

All the best,
The Crane Team

Latest Investments 

• From the German seaside in Kiel, Gitpod raised $3m to scale the first open source developer platform to automate the provisioning of ready-to-code development environments. They recently announced a partnership and native integration with Gitlab providing the “last missing piece” in the GitLab DevOps pipeline.

• An all-star payments team of Adyen alums, Dutch headquartered Silverflow raised $3m to upgrade the 30 to 40-year-old global payments technology stack. They’re building the first cloud-native card payments platform that connects directly to card networks.

• Procurement automation pioneer Paid raised $2.9m to continue their mission to create equal opportunity for businesses of all sizes, all over the world, by streamlining and automating the procurement and supplier management process of large enterprises.

• Oxford-based PQShield raised $7m to continue building cryptographic solutions for a future when quantum computers may render many current cybersecurity approaches useless. They’ve assembled a world-class team with the world’s highest concentration of quantum cryptography PhDs outside academia and classified agencies. Excited to co-invest with old friends Kindred Capital and OSI.

Crane Herd News 

• Harbr has big ambitions to bring an enterprise data exchange to every major company in the world and they recently announced their $38.5m Series A led by our friends at Dawn Capital and Tiger Global.

• 7Bridges has been busy helping large healthcare and retail companies keep their critical logistics operations running smoothly. For you logistics nerds they have just released a Whtie Paper on the major threats to business arising from logistics disruption during the current pandemic https://content.the7bridges.com/download-resilience-whitepaper

Go-To-Market

• Crane Co-Founder Krishna Visvanathan was invited by the  European Startup Podcast to share our enterprise seed thesis, why we built a GTM team and deep tech GTM vs enterprise GTM. Listen here.

• Our in-house Customer Success Guru and Venture Partner Rav Dhaliwal (ex Slack, Zendesk) has been busy hosting founder hours and our Customer Success Brain Trust. He also just wrote Builders vs Scalers and Taking Care of Existing Business – both are fantastic reads for 1st time founders.

• Alongside our friends at Dawn and Femstreet, we hosted our 2nd Women in Enterprise Tech. Read Megan’s write-up on The 9 Key Lessons from Enterprise Experts.

What the Crane team has been reading during lockdown