1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shuly Galili of UpWest Labs (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you’re mostly doing B2B. Is that a reasonable point?

Shuly Galili: I would say that most of our companies are B2B. We do have a few companies that are more on the consumer side, and most recently, in the esports domain.

Sramana Mitra: Can you share a little bit about the Israeli startup ecosystem’s philosophy? Is the assumption always that US is the market you’re going after or are you going after other markets as well?

Shuly Galili: European and Asian markets are always interesting and becoming more and more relevant. For a lot of Israeli companies, they are secondary and third markets to go after the US. The US is always the first market for 90% of the companies that we see. They’re looking at a market that is large, cohesive, and much easier to access. For some companies, Europe is close and may be a good place to start. From our experience, it’s a good place to go after you’ve conquered the US market.

Sramana Mitra: The beauty of the US market is the US market knows how to buy early-stage technology. That is not necessarily true for all the other markets. They’re learning. It’s not like they don’t know. The US market is a lot more mature of a system of how to bring in early-stage technology into their systems.

Shuly Galili: Absolutely. We see that as well. The early adoption here in customers that are open to try and test new things is really a tremendous asset for startups that are starting out. They want to navigate new areas. Maybe for some companies, it’s safe to start elsewhere. I could tell you that Airobotics started in Australia because it has such deep mining industry. That was their first market where they were really able to capture the attention of a lot of great customers. The US followed. For most companies, primarily if you’re doing enterprise SaaS, US is the safe bet.

Sramana Mitra: You mentioned cybersecurity. Israel has always had a long track record of cybersecurity startups. It’s a very active area. What are you seeing in your companies in terms of penetrating cybersecurity customers?

What I’m hearing from a lot of the larger buyers of cybersecurity is that they are overwhelmed by the number of vendors out there. It’s tough for a small company to penetrate that large number of vendors and to get to the buyer in large enterprises. How do you deal with that?

Shuly Galili: It’s a challenge. I would tell you that in the last three years, we scaled back our cybersecurity investments for that reason. We did invest recently in a very exciting company in cybersecurity that is taking on a more different approach. They’re super agile and very sophisticated in approaching customers and get them on board.

I agree with you that in the last three years, we’ve seen so many cybersecurity companies. It was very hard to determine what will stick and what will not. CISOs were overwhelmed trying to sift through many solutions. I do question how these companies are going to be able to scale given the super competitive landscape out there.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shuly Galili of UpWest Labs
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