Boldstart Winter Update - January 2018
Founders, Friends, and Family:

Happy New Year! We are excited about what’s ahead in 2018 and please read on for our annual 2018 enterprise forecast and a quick recap of boldstart in 2017.

Jumping right in, Ed joined Jason on This Week in Startups last month to discuss boldstart’s first check model and opportunities in the enterprise market. Also checkout his panel @ AWS loft sharing thoughts on the year ahead.

On the portfolio company side, two of our NYC-based security companies raised new, follow on rounds of funding. Security Scorecard announced their $27.5mm Series C from Nokia Growth, GV, Sequoia, Evolution Equity, and boldstart. Hypr added an additional $2mm to its Series A round with Mastercard joining as a strategic with lead investor RRE. Our third NYC security co, BigID was named a Top 10 Hot Company by Forrester in data privacy and security.

MState.io (formerly known as Hyperfab) also officially launched. We brought on seasoned operator Rob Bailey as CEO (former COO Kustomer and CEO Datasift) and co-founder and are excited to welcome our first class. As part of this effort to accelerate adoption of the blockchain in the enterprise, we partnered with IBM, an enterprise leader in blockchain, and Comcast Ventures.

Thank you for your continued support and partnership, we are excited about the year ahead.

Best,
Ed, Eliot, & Jeff
Boldstart Corporate Engagement
One of our core tenets is to help our founders connect and navigate Fortune 500 customer relationships. To that end, we were excited to participate in a of couple key events. 
Eliot was a speaker at the Waters Conference which is the largest gathering of capital markets CIOs and CTOs. We were also joined by portfolio companies Wallaroo Labs, DeepCurrent, and Blockdaemon who had the chance to present their solutions to the audience. 
The boldstart team was also at AWS Reinvent with several portfolio companies and hosted a dinner with our corporate partners and founders. One of the highlights was IOpipe kicking off the AWS event at Midnight Madness. From there, Ed attended the Pivotal Built to Adapt event where he was able to meet a number of Fortune 500 IT Executives who are leading their digital transformation efforts and get an idea for what’s ahead in 2018.
Boldstart also cohosted NYC's first enterprise blockchain meetup in November. Turnout was tremendous and our speakers included Maja Vujinovic who is heading up blockchain initiatives at GE and currently Chief Innovation Officer. You can see more photos here.

Looking ahead we will be speaking to corporates on Intelligent Automation and bringing portfolio cos Catalytic, DeepCurrent, and FortressIQ to Cintrifuse's Intelligent Automation Day, Capital One's day of automation, and in front of McKinsey's partners and customers in February.
Boldstart Highlights
boldstart in 2017, enterprise tech in 2018 – boldstart ventures – Medium
2017 was another year of growing, learning, investing and partnering with amazing founders. Once again, we are grateful to have the opportunity to work with so many amazing founders, advisors, co…
Ed talks with Jason on This Week in Startups - December 17, 2017
E12: “Angel” podcast: Boldstart Founder Ed Sim on 20yrs seeding 50+ enterprise co’s, how his father’s fleeing N. Korea shaped his VC, NYC deep tech, & being 1st dollar in to guide founder-product fit to product-market fit to self-sustainability
Talking Enterprise with Verizon
Verizon's Serhad Doken and Boldstart's Eliot Durbin discuss enterprise applications of 5G and edge computing at the opening of their Open Innovation Center in NYC in December. 
YOLO (You Only Launch Once), The Six-Week Fundraising Rule, CryptoKitties, and Measuring Diversity in the Startup World | AWS Startups Blog
First Round Capital’s Hayley Barna and Boldstart’s Ed Sim look back on the startup landscape in 2017, and toward the trends powering the year ahead. You can listen to their full discussion here (on soundcloud).
Ed's thoughts on AI in 2018 in a recent Forebes article - If you are a software company and are not thinking about adding some type of intelligent AI layer on your product or service, then you will be lagging behind others who will. AI is like water or the air around us -- it's not a category, but it's everywhere and will be embedded in most software we use whether we know it or not.
Portfolio News
Security Scorecard added some amazing partners in this round with Nokia, Intel Capital, Axa Insurance, Moodys and existing investors Sequoia, GV, Evolution Equity and boldstart
Excited to add Mastercard as a strategic investor to Hypr's latest Series A round to expand its technology to Mastercard’s ecosystem as well as major banks and financial institutions. Hypr is all about decentralized biometric authentication.
great post on how Kustomer is reinventing support starting with a customer first view vs a ticket based platform
Excited to add blockdaemon to the boldstart portfolio and MState class. We are super excited about blockdaemon because we believe the blockchain world parallels the web world in many ways meaning that app developers need to be able to deploy nodes on any blockchain on any cloud in seconds without knowing the complexity of the infrastructure. Think nodes as a service - we believe blockdaemon will be a core enabler for enterprises to easily deploy and scale new decentralized apps. 
Build Data Apps Without Worrying About Scale // Vid Jain, Wallaroo Labs (FirstMark's Data Driven) - YouTube
BigID named a Top 10 Hot company by Forrester in data security and privacy - if 2018 is the year for GDPR, BigID will be well positioned
Read on for a great look at Rahul Vohra from Superhuman about how he is trying to reinvent email for work - "Gmail, Outlook, and some exciting startups are all trying to rebuild email for 2017."
https://twitter.com/Boldstartvc/status/941654164442107906
great story, nice shoutout to @IOpipes for serverless APM and alerting system - "After completing a 10-year effort to migrate systems from mainframe to a modern Java stack in 2015, Matson, Inc., a 135-year-old leading U.S. shipping carrier in the Pacific, spent the next year…"
Big question: who’s going to build the universal OS for #cloudinfrastructure - read on for more from Forbes and why multicloud is the way to go in 2018

https://twitter.com/Boldstartvc/status/935583430364090368
Portfolio co Emissary releases its latest platform, contrarian as it may seem, making the case that in a world increasingly dominated by data, human insights and relationships still mattered. 
Portfolio company Snyk scans for open source vulnerabilities and summs up the problem many developers face in securing open-source applications with lots of dependencies.
Forward the best in enterprise to a friend, thank you!
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