BACKGROUND

Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z), founded in 2009 by business partners Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz are a Tier One Venture Capitalist fund straight out of Silicon Valley. Through their agnostic approach when it comes to investments into industry, and size means that they boast over $33.3B in assets across their funds including the likes of Airbnb, Asana and Slack to name a few – some of these you may have heard of.

A16Z’s goal is to become the ‘premier global tech institution’ by scaling their portfolio, services and network. Their 5 key pillars of investment – Enterprise, Consumer, Bio, Fintech and Crypto allows us interesting insights into upcoming trends and perceptions into where the world is heading when it comes to innovation. For example, Andreessen Horowitz encourages all their portfolio companies to have a remote first strategy, proving how we are not going back to how we worked in a pre-covid society.

Here are some highlights from the day…

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STARBURSTDATA

Founded: 2017

Capital Raised: $414m, Series D

People: Justin Borgman– Co-Founder and CEO

Notable Clients: Slack,Tesla, Bank of America Citi Bank

Starburst Data are in A16Z’s growth portfolio and refer to themselves as the fastest, most efficient analytics engine for the data mesh. They feature the ability to unlock the value of an organisations distributed data by making it fast and easy to access and query, no matter where it lives without storage.  

Starburst’s open-source platforms queries data across any database including On Prem, Hybrid, Cloud and Multi Cloud, making it instantly actionable for organisations driven by data. Through varying permission levels and access control users can discover, create, publish and manage data products based on multiple data sets.

With Starburst, they are turning the data warehousing model inside out so that teams can lower the total cost of their infrastructure and analytics investments, prevent vendor lock in and carry on using the existing tools that work for their business through their pay for consumption model.
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FIVETRAN

Founded: 2012

Capital Raised: $728m, Series D

People: Mike Boyarski – CMO, Will Parker – Account Executive, Dominic Orsini – Solution Consultant

Notable Clients: BP, Deliveroo, Nintendo, DocuSign, Morgan Stanley

Fivetran offer a SaaS managed service data integration platform that is ‘powering your data movement’ and promises to be a key piece of the modern data stack. Fivetran is the next generation of ELT – Extract, Load and Transform tools for any organisations data stack.

Trusted by over 3,500 customers to date, the data movement platform maintains over 180 fully managed connectors from Marketing, Finance, Sales, Customer Success functions to all popular data sources including partnerships with Oracle, Microsoft Azure and AWS and automatically makes updates to those connectors, making it ‘easier than ever to make all your data a force in your company’s future.’ The platforms output? Analysis ready schemas transformed by SQL.

Boasting a record of 99.9% uptime and new data sources able to be added within minutes, Fivetran are quickly becoming the industry leader in automated, scalable and secure data movement. They have set their sights on making data as accessible and reliable as electricity.
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SOURCEGRAPH

Founded: 2013

Capital Raised: $248m, Series D

People: QuinnSlack – Co-Founder and CEO, Khoshal Wial – Sales Leads, EMEA

Notable Clients: Department of Work and Pensions, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Salesforce, Uber

Sourcegraph are quickly becoming known as ‘the Google for your codebase.’ We were first introduced to Sourcegraph on the 2022 US Research Tour in Silicon Valley. The team have created an intelligence platform that helps its users deliver high quality digital products to market faster, decreasing developer ramp time and increase operational effectiveness through a universal code search automation.  

Their research from the 1.2 million developers using the platform shows that on average, a single developer can save around 30 minutes a day searching for code when using Sourcegraph as well as cutting two weeks from the developer on boarding timelinef or understanding existing codes. Imagine that time saving across a large team of developers in a year in a multi-national enterprise organisation.

As engineering systems and teams have become more complex, it has become increasingly difficult for developers to achieve their highest possible productivity. Over 75% of a developer’s time is spent trying to understand where and how code is used, with only a fraction of their day spent delivering new code that drives business value – Sourcegraph solves this issue through the four main features of the platform - Code Monitoring, Code Insights, Batch Changes and Notebooks.
 

UDACITY

Founded: 2011

Capital Raised: $240m

People: Marc Jones – Regional VP UK and Ireland

Notable Clients: US Military, Ford, Shall, Amazon, Nestle, L’Oréal, 3, Vodafone

Udacity is the 100% online learning platform designed to quickly upskill your team with the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in the new digital revolution of The Great Resignation and the current Digital Skills Gap. Udacity is on a mission to train the world’s workforce in the careers of the future. They partner with leading companies including the US Airforce, Airbus and Vodafone to learn how technology is transforming industries, then teaching them the criticalt echnology skills that individuals need for emerging roles. 

With Nanodegree programs ranging from AI and Azure to Data Science, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Cybersecurity, their training platform helps even the busiest learners prepare themselves for the most in demand tech roles. Udacity is the brainchild of Sebastian Thrun, a godfather of AI. His vision is to take the theory that is learned at university and turn it into a hands-on application when the demand for digital skills is at an all-time high, companies are no longer competing with peer companies – they are competing with everyone.

Their mission of digital talent transformation is working with over 15 million users across 240 countries using the platform. Users are engaged with how Udacity’s nanodegrees developed by industry leading subject matter experts enables hands on experience alongside mentoring with digital skills in subjects such as Data Science, AI, Programming, Cloud computing, Cybersecurity with tangible results, practitioner-based learning, leaving them at the end job ready with immediate impact, high graduation rates and highly scalable.
 

WORKBOARD

Founded: 2013

Capital Raised: $142m

People: Deidre Paknad – Co-Founder and CEO

Notable Clients: T-Mobile, Renault, Dominoes and AstraZeneca

Workboard have developed a ‘Strategy Execution Platform’ that empowers the digital operating rhythm for companies around the globe, providing organisation wide clarity, alignment and insights for growth. With an investment from Microsoft to develop the product further, many companies rely on Workboard’s platform, playbook and expertise to accelerate results by aligning OKRs, simplifying business reviews and scorecards, focusing weeklies on outcomes, and leveraging analytics. Workboard enables enterprises to align and execute business strategies across teams from the C-Suite to the front-line workers and drive change forward.

Existing users have reported back that they have seen execution capacity increase by 25% and execute their strategy plans 30% faster. By using Workboard integrated with Teams, Azure DevOps, Slack O365 and Salesforce (to name a few), organisations are able to organise, align, mobilise, track, energise and adapt their strategy and objectives for growth.

The visual data and analytic dashboard outputs that the platform provides allows an accelerated course as users are instantly able to track progress to see what objectives and tasks are on track, what is needing attention, where the bottlenecks are. Full transparency is given on what everyone in the organisation is working on and what their targets are. Perfect for organisations to keep a focused collaboration with their hybrid workforce working across the country or even the world to ensure everyone is aligned by defining and visualising a long-range strategy.

Find out how you can join Ntegra and future events like this by contacting us.