Cloud and Edge Computing needs an overhaul

Cloud Computing has been around for a while and its momentum is not stopping anytime soon. It has made computing ubiquitous, allowing anyone to access unlimited amounts of storage wherever there is an internet connection. With the boom of machine generated data, AI acceleration and low latency edge computing, the Cloud is now also utilized to provide scale for computing power.

However, there are colossal challenges ahead. To date, our computers have been built as stand-alone units and their ability to coordinate with each other to accelerate computing workloads has been designed with layers and layers of middleware and redundant software that have made a huge legacy burden.

A powerful technology already proven at scale

Hadean is building a cloud-first OS for real-time distributed computing that is orders of magnitude more reliable and scalable than anything available today. Hadean’s goal is to remove the layers of redundant software and offer a robust new foundation for large-scale distributed computing.

Servers using Hadean will all work as one large-scale supercomputer, meaning that anyone using a computer that is part of the Hadean network will have access to the combined computing power of every single server within that network. Developers will be able to accelerate their workload “on-demand” with a guarantee of predictability and security.

While Hadean is a ‘Deep Tech’ play and requires a longer-term approach towards commercialization, the team has made remarkable progress in the short term by focusing on gaming, where the performance they offer matters today. They have successfully deployed application libraries for real-world customers and have recently announced partnerships with Microsoft Azure, that now power Hadean’s Aether Engine, and with CCP, the studio that created EVE Online, for EVE: Aether Wars, a real-time 10 000 player deathmatch demo that will explore opportunities for large-scale multiplayer simulation in CCP’s current and future games.

Beyond gaming, the company also has traction with customers such as the Francis Crick Institute for genomics, and develops products for other verticals including finance, AR/VR and industrial simulation.

An outstanding team combining tech expertise and go-to-market drive

Last but not least, we were genuinely impressed by the team and their customer-first approach, which is incredibly valuable for DeepTech start-ups. Rashid and Craig form the perfect tandem of founders, a young and outstanding computer scientist with a great vision working alongside a world-class CEO that has been able to bridge Tech and Business as soon as he joined the company.

We have seen countless companies in DeepTech trying to launch ambitious projects. The UK and Europe are not lacking strong tech. However, we have chosen to support Hadean thanks to their go-to-market approach and the focus that they have on delivering real impact for their customers.

We believe Hadean will transform the way computers empower humans by virtually giving everyone a supercomputer. However, challenges ahead are many. The company needs to deliver their technology roadmap and ship products to their customers in a rapidly changing field, but this is where we believe we can help. Combining our Business Hub with our entrepreneurial experiences, we will support Hadean in generating and signing commercial opportunities within our sectors, while also assisting their team scale in a fast and sustainable manner.

Conversational Assistants are at a crossroad

We are definitely in a booming market. Starting with home assistants, Alexa has been leading the charge with a new way to interact with machines using our voice, with other Tech Giants (both Americans and Chinese) also extremely active. The promise is ambitious: this will allow humans to talk to computers the same way we talk to other humans, removing a lot of the friction that is linked to using a mouse, a search bar or a keyboard. And this is working. Voice assistants are ranking as best seller products (more than 25 million units sold in 2018) and usage metrics show great feedbacks from customers. It is actually cool to ask a machine about the weather, the menu for food delivery or the availability of Uber. Up to a certain point…

The frictionless interaction with voice assistants disappears as soon as you start asking “human-like” questions rather than simple commands. In fact, the problem of designing an assistant that is scalable to all use cases is far from being solved and thus, the promise of frictionless interaction not yet fulfilled.

This leaves space for new entrants such as Wluper, with the condition that they bring strong value propositions and adequate market positioning.

Wluper’s unique technology and approach

In order to solve those issues, Wluper has steered away from traditional rule-based, handcrafted methods and developed new techniques to optimise user satisfaction and machine’s knowledge acquisition by leveraging state of the art deep neural network technologies. Wluper’s AI is able to learn from conversations in an unsupervised manner, meaning that businesses don’t need to develop “skills” by producing questions/answers and labelling every single sentence by hand.

Being able to learn faster without human intervention is also a way to scale. Wluper’s AI can answer complex questions with several levels of intent or context, capability which is far beyond the existing assistants that mostly handle one-way commands.

Positioned as a platform, Wluper is initially focusing on the mobility sector to provide navigational intelligence to mobility service providers and help them reduce friction with commuters in an ecosystem that is increasingly multimodal and complex.

Team culture and momentum

Last but not least, we were also quite impressed by the team and what they have achieved, not only before we met but also during the fundraising period. The founding team is made up of skilled engineers, researchers and entrepreneurs and we have been impressed about the traction that they have managed to build in a very short amount of time on different fronts.

We have seen countless companies in the field of chatbots and conversation assistants, many of them having some traction and credible products. However, we have been struggling to identify scalability factors or relevance in a market ruled by the Tech Giants. Wluper, however, has the potential to defend its space by making conversation assistants much more intelligent, human-like, and effortless to build.

We believe Wluper will transform the way humans interact with machines by making voice interfaces scalable and frictionless. Challenges ahead are many. The company needs to scale fast and conquer market shares, while improving their product and technology continuously but this is where we can help. Through our Business Hub, we will support Wluper to generate and sign commercial opportunities within our sectors.

World class founding team

The company was created in 2015 at the Team8 Lab, the leading Israeli cybersecurity think tank and company creation platform. Together with former Israeli Defence Force’s intelligence unit 8200 leadership, Amir Zilberstein (CEO and co-founder), Benny Porat (CTO and co-founder) and Galina Antova (CBDO and co-founder) had one mission: put together their previous experience to develop a global adopted solution to secure and optimize the industrial control networks that run the world. Previously the three co-founders had very significant experience; 1/ Amir co-founded Gita Technologies and Waterfall Security Solutions, creating some of the first and strongest security gateways specific to critical infrastructure; 2/ Benny was a security researcher at NorthBit and previously commanded a strategic research team within an elite cyber unit of the Israeli Defence Force; 3/ Galina was the Global Head of Industrial Security Services at Siemens, a unit she actually initiated and built up, after spending 5 years at IBM.

At Aster we are in constant search of inspiring leaders and innovators and we are fortunate enough to start working with a team of such amazing founders.

Large and growing problem to address

Especially in the last couple of years the volume and sophistication level of cyber threats is exploding, with a business falling victim to a ransomware attack every 40 seconds, and attacks growing at a yearly rate of 350%, according to some sources such as the Forbes Technology Council. While IT networks have been typically under scrutiny for several years and relevant solutions have been adopted, IoT devices and in general physical assets have been neglected, thus becoming a preferred target with increasing frequency. We often overlook things that have become must have standards in today’s lives, such as 24/7 electricity supply, cellular communication, emergency rooms and medical care. And we are probably not too much aware that the above are based on critical control systems that are increasingly more targeted by criminal attacks.

This creates a massive opportunity for a company such as Claroty who can certainly aim at becoming the worldwide leader of a new category within the large cybersecurity space.

Their unique approach

Claroty is an Industrial Control System cybersecurity solution that aims at securing and optimizing OT networks that run on critical infrastructures. The company’s OT security platform is designed to address safety and reliability requirements necessary to protect industrial networks.

We have seen many companies within the nascent industrial cybersecurity space, many of them were quite ambitious and developing credible technological answers to the main problems identified as critical by large customers. However, we’ve been struggling to see a demonstrable scalability, from both a market/commercial and a product point of view. What we are observing at Claroty looks different: we have been impressed by the capability of the company to adapt easily to industrial control systems’ different protocols – which is in general a big headache –, stacks and network configurations from one customer to another. Furthermore, the strong expertise of the OT world they have developed, and thus their ability to render information that is easily understandable for OT teams and to enable a genuine collaboration between IT and OT worlds is a clear advantage to convince different decision makers – CEO/CSO, CISO, Engineering.

Such a company, dramatically transforming the way we can take care and improve traditional industrial networks, relying on a deep expertise in cybersecurity and led by an amazing team, perfectly fits with Aster’s model. Today, Claroty team has a big challenge ahead of them: to scale fast and consolidate their market leadership, especially in regions such as Europe where they are relatively less present. And this is where we can help. Our goal and mission are to act as a catalyst thanks to our ecosystem of industrial partners and to stand by the company to support their ambitions to become the category leader of the global industrial cybersecurity market. Through our Business Hub organization, we will support Claroty to generate and finalize commercial opportunities within and beyond our family of Corporate Sponsors.

A need to redesign existing public transportation systems

Public transit systems are highly subsidised in France. Local authorities support 60 to 75% of the budget, while the rest is paid by the end-users. These incentives have enabled the development, in most large cities, of a very high-quality mass transit network. The design of a mass transit network that brings a high quality of service while enabling a low environmental footprint of commuters at the best cost is a challenge in any case: the estimation of flows before creating the infrastructure is uncertain, and the evolution of the flows over the years is rarely compatible with the lack of flexibility of the infrastructure. Therefore, some lines are over-crowded (try Line 13 in Paris at 8.30 in the morning if you want to experience it), and some lines are under-optimized in suburban and rural areas, either with an important passenger cost/km, or with a quality of service that does not match commuters’ expectations.

Private companies want to be part of the game

Local authorities used to organize the shared mobility: from the traditional tramways and buses to the more innovative bike sharing systems, they do not generally operate the services but grant companies such as Transdev or JC Decaux a right to do so.

Start-up companies are changing the game: Chariot created several private and flexible bus lines in San Francisco (and got acquired by Ford), CityMapper launched its own bus line in London, Ofo and Mobike have deployed millions of free-floating bikes around the world, and the new kid in town, Bird, deploys thousands of e-scooters in California.

Sometimes operating in a grey zone from a regulatory point of view, they all have the same motto: customer-centric (convenience for the commuters), and VC-backable (infrastructure-light if not asset-light).

Among them, a few short-distance carpooling platforms.

Karos, driving the growth of short-distance carpooling

Historically, there has been several attempts in the carpooling space but only few of them eventually succeeded. For the record, Blablacar was actually launched as a short distance carpooling app and then pivoted to long distance trips. In theory, daily carpooling offers obvious advantages: less congestion, less greenhouse gas emissions, more flexibility for commuters. However, such initiatives used to be hindered by cultural, financial and technical barriers, including the lack of trust in the network, the lack of liquidity – usually leading to the desertion of the platform –, and the low attractiveness for drivers.

We believe such barriers can be overcome thanks to a tech-enabled great customer experience and the support of enterprises and local authorities; both at the core of Karos’ ambitious project.

The company already provides a seamless and flexible in-app customer journey, based on in-house algorithms that learn your habits and only suggest the most relevant commuters. It also integrates intermodality options, which makes the application even more valuable.

Finally, we believe in the alignment of interest of enterprises and local authorities with Karos, to promote the app as an alternative and complementary offer to their transport networks. Karos has already proven its value through a proof of concept that was recently experimented in the Paris region, alongside Ile-de-France Mobilités. The application has experienced a tremendous growth over the last 9 months (8% weekly growth in active users), attracted thousands of daily users and captured 50% of the market share. Many cities and regions think about similar projects, and the financing of short-distance carpooling is expected to be a key topic of the Mobility bill, expected to be approved in the coming months.

Such a company, transforming the mass transit ecosystem with a digital and community-driven experience fits perfectly with Aster’s model. Our goal and mission are now to act as a catalyst thanks to our ecosystem of industrial partners to facilitate Karos’ geographic expansion in France and abroad.

Why the time is right for DCbrain

The company was created in 2014. After a couple of years of experiencing the utilities and logistics operators market and enforcing their technical support, DCbrain has found an engaging route using Artificial Intelligence to optimize flows, prevent anomalies and create network evolutions. We met the company last year during a couple of events and we’ve been immediately impressed with their achievements in a bootstrap manner and their proper vision of the market, especially regarding the challenges ahead for complex network operators.

Drawing on this, the main question was to decide to what level we should to get involved. For investors, it’s sometimes easier to answer to the founders: “look, it’s interesting but it’s too soon for us”. However, this time, we felt we had to join the adventure from an earlier point: the more we were spending time with the founding members, the more we were convinced by the fact that DCbrain has the potential to become a game changer for large industrial sectors that deal with complex networks – and proof has already been made by their early commercial wins achieved without any funding.

Why Aster believes in it

Today, DCbrain is selling to large corporates that are dealing with complex networks. Classical tools have been designed to secure networks, but they typically fail when it comes to network’s daily management. DCbrain has built a solution to balance the networks’ flows to address not just security but also additional key needs, for instance i) optimize the operating budget and decrease the associated costs and ii) manage capacities to allow higher volumes, all in a real time manner. This way DCbrain allows customers to react quickly to unforeseen events, such as technical faults/failures, changing weather conditions, strikes, etc.

In addition, we also see some reinforcing trends that will increasingly call for new ways to manage large and complex networks:

• in the case of Utilities, we see more and more complexity as more distributed intermittent capacity and prosumer consumption endpoints get connected;
• in the Logistics, we see an increasing level of demand from more sophisticated clients, and thus new challenges such as the management of peak times and short time delivery;
• regarding Industry 4.0, we see the need to identify anomalies and gain productivity to optimize the operating processes.

At Aster we strongly believe that the process of energy transition and the acceleration of the decentralized economy are creating enormous pressure on the way we manage physical networks. The need to manage increasing complexity and to react fast to unplanned changes, call for sophisticated capabilities of generating meaningful information from an increasing quantity of data.

Why it’s a match

DCbrain AI driven technology is in our view quite unique in enabling network managers to take advantage of the data available to respond efficiently to the challenges of current and future physical flows, responding appropriately to the customer’s needs, being top line or cost efficiency related.

We also believe that such a company suits the Aster model well. Our goal and mission are to act as a catalyst thanks to our ecosystem of industrial partners. We will stand by the company to support its ambitions to become the reference player of AI driven solutions for large and complex networks for a variety of industries. Through our Business Hub organization, we will support the company to generate and finalize commercial opportunities within and beyond our family of Corporate Sponsors.

Why do we believe in Habiteo’s capacity to become a key player in the transformation of the real-estate sector?

Habiteo is a sales and marketing solution for real-estate developers. It helps them sell their properties faster by generating sales content (3D models, video clips…), and manage their workflow and sales process on different channels, to ensure a high-quality customer experience.

The company was created in 2014 by Jeanne Massa, after a very successful experience at TheFork (acquired by TripAdvisor) as COO. Denis Fayolle (CEO of TheFork) and Jean-Claude Szaleniec (ex-head of BNP Paribas Real Estate, ex-DG of BPD Marignan) also participated to the creation of the company and are still actively supporting the company.

While the old property market already started to embrace digitalization with websites such as SeLoger or ImmobilienScout24, the real estate development companies still use outdated commercial solutions, paper-based sales collaterals as well as paper contracts. Habiteo provides an innovative and unified solution that enhances the property development company productivity and eases the customer journey through the housing acquisition process.

The company has continously improved its solution and now supports more than 150 real estate-developers in their digital transformation.

A two-tier transformation of the real-estate sector

Digital trends affect homes. It may have started slowly with the first bulky and complex domotic systems, but the pace is clearly accelerating: a spate of connected products such as cameras or thermostats appeared on the shelves of all the DIY and consumer electronics shops. The US giants Amazon and Google have clearly stated their ambitions while launching their Home AI assistant: they want to become the brain of home.

The way people design their homes also changed. Social platforms such as Houzz or Pinterest have raised hundreds of millions with the promise of helping homeowners design their home by inspiring them with peers’ projects.

By contrast, real estate developers remained rather conventionnal in their approach in this rapidly changing environment. Most of them still propose more or less the same products than 20 years ago (with better energy-efficiency performances), at the same price if we put apart the variation in the real estate market, with the same customer experience.

First, the “one size fits all” strategy doesn’t work anymore. Acquirers wants to personalise their home design, and want to buy a property in a program that corresponds to their way of living.

Second, the battle for customer acquistion shifted online. While most of the sales process was done in pop-up stores (or agencies) located close to the future real-estate programs, customers are now looking for their homes online.

Nascent real-estate developers such as Habx or Buildrz in France started with a clean sheet, and the ambition to build a real-estate developer 2.0: online targeting of customers and online sales, connected homes, home personalization, etc. The growth challenges remain important for new entrants, such as cash constraints and the complexity to source new projects and to develop them quickly.

At Aster, we do think that Habiteo has a key role to play to transform the way real-estate developers sell homes, by mastering the digital experience they offer and eventually drive a transformation in the industry.

The promoters will have to adapt their customer experience to the digital natives

As for the car-retail market, most future buyers start their quest for the perfect home online. After a long screening on the internet, most of them have a clear idea of what they would like to buy before going to the local shop dedicated to a specific program. In other words, quite a big chunk of the sales process is now online. In other words again, targeting the right customers at the best cost online, and bringing them the best quality content to attract them becomes key in the sales process.

That’s where Habiteo started 3 years ago. Since then, the company never stopped to increae the visual quality of the 2D views generated for 2D plans, and innovate continuously with virtual vists, flat-configurators, etc.

A home purchase is not like any other purchase. There is no doubt that part of the process will stay offline. But the role of the real estate pop-up stores or agencies changes. These spaces, initially dedicated to the information of potential acquirers and to the signature of paper-based documentation, are turning into experience spaces, where the end-game is first, to confirm the impression of the potential acquirers about the reliability and the quality of the real estate developers, and second, to help the potential acquirers feel the atmosphere of their future neighboorhood. Digital technologies such as Augmented Reality might help, but the main challenge will be to create a true omnichannel experience for the future buyers. Know your customer before he gets in, know his doubts, where he is in his buying process, in order to provide him with a best-in-class customer experience.

Habiteo has helped more than 150 developers in this journey. It is by far the clear leader in France and the company succesfully started an expansion in Europe with first projects in Spain and UK.

Such a company, participating to the digital transformation of a traditionnal sector with internationnal ambitions, fits perfectly our model. Our goal and mission is now to act as a catalyst thanks to our ecosystem of industrial partners providing access to preferred markets, and to facilitate Habiteo’s geographic expansion with support from Aster’s various branches around the world (San Francisco, Beijing, Tel Aviv, Nairobi and Paris).

Aster Capital recently led the €2m Series A round of ekWateur, alongside BNB Paribas Développement and Bouygues Telecom Initiatives. Founded in November 2015 with the ambition to become a key energy retail player in France, the company provides an innovative and truly seamless customer experience in a collaborative environment, while offering a 100% green energy at a competitive price. The company also has an ambitious and clear vision for energy services development to complement its energy retail business.

Following the initial commercial launch in September 2016, ekWateur Q4 2016 achievements are impressive. The company already provides green energy to more than 4,000 clients, including a contract with French Procurement Department (DAE) for the supply of 2,600 public sites over 3 years, and its portfolio is experiencing a triple-digit month-over-month growth.

Why do we at Aster believe in ekWateur’s capacity to become a key player in the and competitive French energy retail market? How could the company establish itself as a relevant player alongside EDF, Direct-Energie, and other alternative retailers in the near future?

1. A fast-changing energy retail market in France

Despite deregulation of the residential energy retail market in France in 2007, market concentration remains much higher in France than in other European countries. 4 to 6 players are fiercely competing for the domestic UK, Belgian or German market for instance. Those markets used to be geographically fragmented (linked to network ownership of various companies per region before liberalization) and each historical regional leader now capture approx. 10-25% of the customer base. While EDF still holds a strong position in France (related to the historical national monopoly of the company – a key difference vs. other European countries), the French market is bound to follow its neighbors’ de-concentration trend as customers get educated and competition increases.

In addition to deregulation, a couple of drivers impacting end-customers and potential new entrants will further foster market fragmentation in the years to come:

• First, Regulated Tariffs have been steadily increasing since 2007 (+2-5% p.a.), which has induced end-customers to look around for alternative / cheaper offers. Price remains the primary reason for customer churn. Subsequently, relevance of green offerings is gaining momentum for a growing number of customers;
• Second, a set of financial and regulatory incentives is creating favorable conditions for the emergence of alternative offers (e.g., sharing of bad-payers’ costs across the value chain, ENEDIS subsidies for small retailers, etc.)

At Aster, we dedicate a lot of effort to identifying, meeting with and selecting the startups which seem to us to be the most promising, with the necessary strengths and talented teams as well as the ability to adapt, pivot and magnify their company’s technological and commercial potential. But we also feel that success is driven by vectors of transformation and disruption of markets, which act as catalysts for sector trends. These forces that often operate on certain markets and these breakthroughs that are often a result of the efforts of young companies can affect all sectors, including so-called traditional sectors in manufacturing and infrastructure like water, energy, transport, materials, food and construction. We believe ekWateur is a clear example of such transformation in the energy retail market in France.

2. A truly innovative new player on the market

ekWateur web platform, used for subscription and account management, is unique on the market and has been successfully designed and developed by the founding team to provide a UX in line with telecom / internet standards. Prospect customers can easily upload their energy bill on ekWateur website. From this, the platform would automatically pre-fill all the customer information (contact details, PDL/PCE numbers, etc.) and perform an estimation of the potential savings achieved with ekWateur vs. current energy provider. Beyond green energy offering at a lower price, this allows incredibly quick and seamless subscription process for customers. In addition, we are excited by the company’s ambition to create a truly collaborative customer base and by its roadmap for services development and commercialization starting in 2017.

Last but not least, the entire Aster team have been impressed by the capacity of the founders to quickly develop ekWateur offer, to gather a strong and committed development team and to constantly adjust to fast-moving market conditions (e.g., evolution of market prices, impact of EDF nuclear plant closure, etc.). We are excited to team up with Julien and Jonathan and are opening the full spectrum of our resources to help the company grow and lead the way towards a cheaper and greener energy supply for individuals in France.

1.   Background

Aster Capital recently led the $5m Series A round of OpenDataSoft, alongside Salesforce Ventures and returning backers Aurinvest Capital. The additional capital inflow will allow the company to better structure their international expansion as well as reinforce their leadership position in the French market.

Founded in 2011 with the mission of becoming the global leader in data publishing and sharing solutions for governments and private companies, the company is already the market leader in Europe with close to 100 clients, growing triple digit year over year. They have developed a user-friendly solution to allow data to be easily visualized, shared and reused in real-time across multiple layers of data access permissions, cross functionally and in a ubiquitous way, as it is deployed fully on cloud. Legacy systems, frequently presented in large organizations, are not an obstacle as the solution is agnostic, developed partly using Open Source standards, and features a large number of API/connectors to allow easy and seamless integration with enterprise / governments infrastructures in practically no time.

2.   Headline of why we invested

At Aster we recognize that building a truly successful story is matter of a few elements: a great and passionate funding team, a solid technical foundation and differentiated business idea or product and a large and sustainable market trend opportunity.

We have been impressed by the founding team: Jean Marc Lazard, Franck Carassus and David Thoumas all worked together before, have had previous experience including at least one other venture backed success story, and feature strong complementarity. In addition, their drive made them standing above the crowd and made us feeling “we want to have them in the Aster family”.

Their product is highly rated by their customers, easy to use with impressive utilization rate among their users and is clearly the result of a top notch team led by one of the co-founders. We have been impressed by the meticulous approach in dealing with their development, the customer needs, the future product roadmap.

And then the drivers of change that we expect to reinforce in the near future: at Aster we have experienced a profound evolution of the dynamics of how large organizations and cities interact with their main stakeholders. In particular the way we plan, design and improve our cities as well as our daily life within cities will become increasingly a matter of good data management. By the same token, the need of transparency and real time communication between Corporates and current and perspective customers, is becoming an element of differentiation, especially in some sectors that are perceived “less friendly” for the health and wellbeing of the planet. In other words, we believe that the promises of the Open Data are finally materializing and in our view OpenDataSoft is positioned as an enabler of this global Data Revolution.

3.   Trend/reference market

A few years ago, the USA became the first country to make all data collected by its government and related bodies “open by default”, with exception of personal and sensitive information such as the one security related. Now there are more than 50 countries and counting that have adopted the same paradigm, and no month passes by without a new government announcing to implement the same strategy soon. Although some of this data was already published in some form even before, it was mostly featuring poor visualization and usability. Now this is changing also thanks to big data infrastructure becoming largely more affordable and as result of that also large corporate organization are slowly but surely adopting the same strategy. It is not without reasons that analysts talk about the impact of the Open Data in sectors such as Education, Transportation, Healthcare, Government, Construction and Utilities could surpass $1tn in both US and Europe in the foreseeable future.

4.   Why/how well the company fits in this trend

In such a sizeable shift, OpenDataSoft is particularly well positioned to take advantage of the willingness of a large variety of sectors to make their data available and usable in short time, without costly implementation and with a great flexibility in terms of both client infrastructure and data security. Furthermore, their solution will allow a more efficient use of data also internally and will give customers the opportunity to take advantage of the Big Data trend which promises to help organizations to improve their internal operations and their effectiveness to go to market.

5.   What we look for at Aster

At Aster, we dedicate a lot of effort and spend considerable time to sit down with ambitious and passionate founders and unfortunately we cannot partner with all. Therefore, we have to make choices and often we need to select also based on what the company has been able to achieve without funding and limited resources. OpenDataSoft is a particularly clear example of how to take advantage and to certain extent enable a profound transformation of a very large sector in a very efficient and targeted manner.

Now, as we recognize a strong opportunity to expand globally, which is in part already underway, we have been excited to the opportunity to back such an ambitious founding team and are thrilled to support their plan.

We absolutely see the company at the heart of the digital transformation and data management, addressing a variety of large sectors, led by a top notch founding team, that has proven excellent execution with a global mindset. These are elements that fit perfectly with Aster’s model: local support with global reach, equally well connected with traditional and Corporate VCs as well as a large ecosystem of industrial partners providing access to large markets. We will stand by OpenDataSoft expansion, supporting them in the four continents with our various branches around the world (San Francisco, Beijing, Tel Aviv, Nairobi and Paris).