10 Cool Tech Companies That Raised Funding In November 2022

Security tech providers Apiiro and Bishop Fox, big data software developers Alation and MotherDuck, and machine learning startup Galileo are among the companies that raised new financing in November, a list led by data and memory connectivity technology startup Astera Labs.

Follow The Money

The availability of venture capital and other funding for IT startups and IT companies seeking financial resources to maintain growth continues to shrink with fewer companies reporting successful funding rounds in recent months and far fewer winning funding rounds of $100 million or more.

But some IT companies continue to attract significant financing. In November Astera Labs, a developer of purpose-built data and memory connectivity solutions that remove performance bottlenecks from data center systems, raised an impressive $150 million in a Series D round.

WekaIO, which provides a cloud-based data management system for next-generation workloads, raised $135 million, also in a Series D round. And data intelligence platform marketer Alation reported a $123 million Series E round.

As has been the case this year most of the companies on the November list are either in the big data space, including MotherDuck, EdgeDB and Momento, or in the cybersecurity arena including application security company Apiiro, offensive security provider Bishop Fox, and DevSecOps platform developer Boost Security.

Machine learning also remains a hot sector for startups, represented in November by Galileo, which raised $18 million in a Series A funding round.

Here’s a look at 10 companies that raised funding in November 2022.

* Astera Labs

* WekaIO

* Alation

* Apiiro

* MotherDuck

* Bishop Fox

* Galileo

* EdgeDB

* Momento

* Boost Security

Astera Labs

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

CEO: Jitendra Mohan

Funding: The $150 million Series D funding round brought the company’s valuation to $3.15 billion.

Investors: The round was led by Fidelity Management and Research with participation from existing investors including Atreides Management, Intel Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures.

What company does: Astera Labs develops purpose-built data and memory connectivity solutions, including silicon, software and system-level products, that remove performance bottlenecks from data center systems.

CEO Quote: “Astera Labs continues to surpass every milestone for a technology start-up, and we are now deep into the next stage of evolution for our company as we accelerate growth. This latest funding round is a testament that we are not only invested in the right growth markets such as cloud, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and hyperscale infrastructure, but that we are also able to consistently execute and deliver breakthrough connectivity products that are critical to our customers and partners.”

WekaIO

Headquarters: Campbell, Calif.

CEO: Liran Zvibel

Funding: A $135 million Series D funding round.

Investors: The round was led by Generation Investment Management along with participation by new and existing investors including 10D, Atreides Management, Celesta Capital, Gemini Israel Ventures, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hitachi Ventures, Key1 Capital, Lumir Ventures, Micron Ventures, Mirae Asset Capital, MoreTech Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Nvidia, Qualcomm Ventures and Samsung Catalyst Fund.

What company does: The Weka Data Platform is a cloud-based data management system for next-generation workloads including AI and machine learning tasks.

CEO Quote: “In 2013, WEKA set out with a bold vision to create a fundamentally new approach to managing and storing data that could power the possibilities of the future by eradicating the compromises of the past. This funding round represents a tremendous milestone in realizing that vision, and we are grateful to our new and existing investors for their support. The new capital will allow us to invest in our product and go to market, maintain hypergrowth, and gives us the runway we need to become a profitable, independent company.”

Alation

Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.

CEO: Satyen Sangani

Funding: The $123 million Series E funding round brought the company’s total financing to $340 million and boosted its valuation to more than $1.7 billion.

Investors: The round was led by Thoma Bravo, Sanabil Investments and Costanoa Ventures with participation from new investor Databricks Ventures. Existing and other investors that participated included Dell Technologies Capital, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Icon Ventures, Queensland Investment Corp., Riverwood Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and Union Grove.

What company does: Alation provides enterprise data intelligence software for data search and discovery, data governance, data stewardship, analytics and digital transformation.

CEO Quote: “The modern enterprise needs data in good times … and even more so in bad. With a challenging economic outlook, companies are looking to their data for direction, to drive operational efficiencies, and gain or maintain a competitive advantage. Alation makes that happen consistently with clients increasing their spend year-over-year. Our calling cards are consistent ROI, engagement, and adoption. This latest funding round will help us go even faster, so more organizations can harness the power of their data and convert this wealth of information into usable, trusted insights.”

Apiiro

Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Israel

CEO: Idan Plotnik

Funding: A $100 million Series B funding round.

Investors: The round was led by General Catalyst with participation from Greylock and Kleiner Perkins.

What company does: Apiiro develops cloud-native application security technology that security and development teams use to proactively fix security risks before applications are released to cloud platforms.

CEO Quote: “The unrelenting demand for next-generation application security solutions has allowed us to deploy our product at-scale with leading Fortune 500 customers. Early innovation enabled us to grow faster and more efficiently than the competition and we are building the company for hyper growth. The combination of our team, business momentum, and support from top-tier investors positions Apiiro to continue to lead a growing industry.”

MotherDuck

Headquarters: Seattle

CEO: Jordan Tigani

Funding: The $47.5 million in funding included a $35 million Series A round and an earlier $12.5 million Seed round.

Investors: The Seed round was led by Redpoint while the Series A round was led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors included Madrona, Amplify Partners and Altimeter.

What company does: MotherDuck develops a serverless data analytics platform, based on the open-source DuckDB database.

CEO Quote: “The fact is, ‘Big Data’ is dead; The simplicity and the ease of making sense of your data is a lot more important than its size. Laptops today are faster than a data warehouse. With advances in hardware, distributed computation is no longer necessary for most workloads. Cloud data vendors are focused on the performance of 100TB queries, which is not only irrelevant for the vast majority of users, but also distracts from vendors’ ability to deliver a great user experience. We are taking the power of DuckDB and combining it with serverless analytics to help scale up and scale down with ease.”

Bishop Fox

Headquarters: Phoenix

CEO: Vinnie Liu

Funding: WestCap provided $46 million in growth funding with additional contributions from NextEquity Partners and Rockpool Capital. The funds, combined with a $75 million investment from Carrick Capital earlier this year, brought Bishop Fox’s Series B funding round to $129 million in total. The company has raised a total of more than $154 million.

Investors: WestCap, NextEquity Partners and Rockpool Capital.

What company does: Bishop Fox provides offensive security solutions ranging from continuous penetration testing, red teaming, and attack surface management to product, cloud, and application security assessments.

CEO Quote: “We’ve been very selective, deliberate and measured in our approach to external investment, and our business strength affords us that ability. We’ve also been equally selective in the partners we’ve chosen and the value they can provide in expertise and resources. We’re very excited to have WestCap on board and look forward to maximizing our partnership.”

Galileo

Headquarters: San Francisco

CEO: Vikram Chatterji

Funding: The $18 million Series A funding round brought the company’s total funding to $23.1 million.

Investors: The round was led by Battery Ventures with participation from previous investor The Factory and new investors Walden Catalyst and FPV Ventures, along with individuals Anthony Goldbloom, Pegah Ebrahimi (former Morgan Stanley COO) and Wesley Chan (former general partner at Google Ventures).

What company does: Galileo develops a machine learning data intelligence platform for unstructured data that allows data scientists to inspect, discover and fix critical machine learning errors throughout the entire ML lifecycle.

CEO Quote: “While data powers ML, debugging unstructured data is incredibly manual and time intensive. My co-founders Atindriyo Sanyal, Yash Sheth and I noticed a complete absence of data focused tooling for unstructured data ML while at Apple, Google and Uber AI. We repeatedly heard the same from data science teams across the globe. This is why we started Galileo - to build ML unstructured data tooling.”

EdgeDB

Headquarters: San Francisco

CEO: Yury Selivanov

Funding: A $15 million Series A funding round.

Investors: The round was led by Nava Ventures and Accel with participation by Vercel, Firebase, GitHub, IBM, OpenAI, ICONIQ Capital and Netlify.

What company does: EdgeDB has developed an open-source, graph-relational database with a goal of redefining legacy relational database software.

CEO Quote: “Databases have always been and will always be the defining piece of any technological stack. While there has been a lot of activity and interesting developments in databases in the past decade, relational databases are built on a model that is decades old and has become increasingly inadequate for the rapidly transforming software development field. Organizations are looking for modern, scalable systems that can help reduce costs while accelerating development, which is why we built EdgeDB.”

Momento

Headquarters: Dallas

CEO: Khawaja Shams

Funding: Momento exited stealth mode in November with $15 million in a seed funding round.

Investors: The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from The General Partnership and angel investors Marianna Tessel (CTO at Intuit), Neha Narkhede (co-founder and former CTO at Confluent), Tom Killalea (first CISO at Amazon), Don MacAskill (CEO of Flickr/Smugmug) and John Lilly (former CEO of Mozilla).

What company does: Momento develops serverless cache technology that boosts the performance of cloud databases.

CEO Quote: “The serverless revolution is radically boosting developer productivity, which has an inspirational impact on the pace of innovation in society. Momento aims to fill the missing pieces in the serverless era - and empowers customers by replacing a complex caching stack with a simple abstraction.”

Boost Security

Headquarters: Montreal, Quebec

CEO: Zaid Al Hamami

Funding: A $12 million seed funding round.

Investors: The round was led by Sorenson Capital with participation from Hoxton Ventures, Golden Ventures, Firebolt Ventures, Transform VC and Security Leadership Capital.

What company does: Boost Security provides a developer-first DevSecOps automation platform that is designed to build security into the “software supply chain” including the develop, build, test and release stages of a CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) process.

CEO Quote: “Most software organizations do not have the resources to implement the same grade of automation and optimization as hyperscale companies do when it comes to shipping software fast and securely. BoostSecurity empowers organizations of any size to implement the same DevSecOps processes and technologies that the most advanced organizations have refined, ultimately closing the trust gap between DevOps and security. Our platform enables early detection and remediation of security vulnerabilities at every layer of the stack while ensuring the continuous integrity of the software supply chain at every step from the developer’s keyboard to cloud production.”