Cervin Ventures 2020 Recap Newsletter

2020 in Review

2020 was a year for the record books. It’s one that we’ll remember forever. It was a year of change where our collective patience and ability to adapt was tested. Many of us are ready to put this year behind us, but before we do, let’s take a look back at some of its bright spots. We wanted to share a look back at major events from our portfolio companies, insights from the team, and give a sneak peek of the year ahead.

team and investments

Over the last year, the Cervin family has grown. In the 2nd half of the year, our Content Marketing Manager, Ashley Daniels, joined the team, and our Office Manager, McKayla Nevins, and her husband welcomed a baby boy.

We participated in important funding rounds to drive growth for new and existing portfolio companies, including:

In October our portfolio company AllyO was acquired by HireVue. HireVue is the global leader in virtual interviewing and assessment solutions for over 700 companies and organizations worldwide.

portfolio spotlights

In 2020, we showcased a few of our portfolio companies and the impacts they are having on their respective industries.

Q4 of 2020 brought very important milestones for a few of our portfolio companies:

thought leadership

Here’s a look back at the pieces our partners wrote this year on their particular areas of expertise and interest.

Happy New Year 2021

Looking ahead to 2021

In 2021, we expect companies to continue to invest in their IT infrastructure. Cybersecurity spending will continue to increase. Goldman reports that Security remains top of mind for CIOs across the board. Cyber threats will continue to increase both in number and sophistication. New innovative solutions to keep up with the bad actors are desperately needed and will continue to emerge.

In addition, we expect the continuation of a dramatic increase in the quantity and importance of data. Along with the increase in data comes the need to store it, analyse it, manage it, govern it and secure it. While there are solutions for these needs, we expect innovative new solutions to emerge. We agree with the Gartner thesis on the future of the cloud being distributed and that public cloud solutions will be distributed closer to actual usage. This is a combination of the public cloud and CDN industries — we think that the public cloud vendors will continue to manage this. AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud will continue to be the top 3 vendors — the Alibaba Cloud growth is likely to slow down as a result of the US government’s stance on China and the company being wrapped up in an antitrust case.

We also expect that collaboration and AI are here to stay. While the growth in WFH solutions will slow down from the torrid pace in 2020, we expect that WFH, remote work, and the investments in the workflows required to manage large, disparate, and remote teams will continue.

Finally, we think that Quantum Computing will continue to emerge in 2021. In August 2020, the US government announced a $1B investment in 12 AI and Quantum Research institutes through the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. While the Quantum hardware industry is still a few years away from breaking out, we will see investments in quantum research solutions. Some industries, such as pharmaceuticals and finance, may begin to invest earlier. We will continue to monitor this carefully — as the saying goes in venture capital — it’s early, until it isn’t.

We are all looking forward to 2021!

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Cervin Ventures is actively investing in entrepreneurs and companies that intend to rapidly disrupt the B2B software space

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Cervin Ventures

Cervin Ventures is actively investing in entrepreneurs and companies that intend to rapidly disrupt the B2B software space