10 Cool Tech Companies That Raised Funding In September 2023

With the venture capital space showing signs of life, investors are opening their wallets to provide funding for both early-stage startups and established companies - including Anthropic and Databricks - in cybersecurity, data analytics and all-things AI.

Follow The Money

With the venture capital space finally showing signs of life, investors are opening their wallets to provide funding for both early-stage startups and established companies in cybersecurity, data analytics and AI – especially where some of those technologies come together.

Generative AI platform developer Anthropic was the big winner this month when it struck a blockbuster, multi-faceted deal with Amazon under with the giant company will invest up to $4 billion in the AI startup.

Data lakehouse and AI platform developer Databricks, which would likely have gone public by now under better market conditions, instead raised $500 million in a Series I funding round to help maintain the company’s meteoric growth.

This month’s Follow the Money roundup spotlights funding announcements for companies – including many early-stage startups – in cybersecurity, AIOps, data protection, data analytics and networking/SASE.

Here’s a look at 10 companies that raised funding in September 2023.

Anthropic

Headquarters: San Francisco

CEO: Dario Amodei

Funding: Up to $4 billion

Investors: Amazon is investing up to $4 billion in Anthropic and will have a minority ownership position.

What company does: Anthropic develops AI systems including its flagship Claude AI assistant product.

CEO Quote: “We are excited to use AWS’s Trainium chips to develop future foundation models. Since announcing our support of Amazon Bedrock in April, Claude has seen significant organic adoption from AWS customers. By significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organizations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’s leading cloud technology.”

Databricks

Headquarters: San Francisco

CEO: Ali Ghodsi

Funding: The Series I funding round of $500 million brought the company’s total funding to some $4 billion and boosted its possible valuation to $43 billion.

Investors: The round was led by previous investor T. Rowe Price Associates. New investors included Nvidia, Capital One Ventures and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. Previous investors participating in this round included Andreessen Horowitz, Baillie Gifford, ClearBridge Investments, funds and accounts managed by Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), Fidelity Management & Research Company, Franklin Templeton, GIC, Octahedron Capital and Tiger Global.

What company does: Databricks develops the Databricks Lakehouse Platform for a range of data management, data analytics and AI tasks.

CEO Quote: “The commitment from long-term, focused strategic and financial partners reflects Databricks’ continued momentum, the rapid customer adoption of the Databricks Lakehouse, and the success customers are seeing from moving to a unified data and AI platform.”

Cato Networks

Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Israel

CEO: Shlomo Kramer

Funding: A $238 million Series F funding round that brought the company’s total financing to $773 million and pushed its valuation to over $3 billion.

Investors: The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Adams Street Partners, Softbank Vision Fund 2, Sixty Degree Capital and Singtel Innov8.

What company does: Cloud networking specialist Cato Networks develops a single-vendor secure access service edge (SASE) platform.

CEO Quote: “This funding round reflects investor confidence in Cato’s leadership in the single-vendor SASE market. Cato’s SASE platform uniquely enables organizations of all sizes to optimally secure their businesses without the cost, complexity, and risk of owning and maintaining a pile of point solutions. Cato provides the only SASE platform creating a seamless customer experience and empowers IT to move at the speed of business.”

MotherDuck

Headquarters: Seattle

CEO: Jordan Tigani

Funding: The Series B funding round raised $52.5 million, bringing the company’s total financing to $100 million and boosting its valuation to $400 million.

Investors: The funding round was led by Felicis along with new and existing investors a16z, Madrona, Amplify Partners, Altimeter, Redpoint, Zero Prime and others.

What company does: MotherDuck develops a serverless data analytics platform built on the DuckDB OLAP database.

CEO Quote: “We’re proud of what we’ve been able to achieve over the last year alongside the DuckDB community and the DuckDB Labs team. Our initial funding allowed us to grow our engineering team to get our platform launched and in use by almost 2,000 analysts,” he said.

Lumu

Headquarters: Miami, Fla.

CEO: Ricardo Villadiego

Funding: The Series B funding round raised $30 million bringing its total funding to $38 million.

Investors: The round was led by Forgepoint Capital with participation from existing investors BIP Ventures, Exceptional Capital and SIMMA Capital.

What company does: Lumu develops its Continuous Compromise Assessment cybersecurity technology that detects incidents, threats and attacks worldwide.

CEO Quote: “SOC analysts face soaring alert volumes and false positives amid high-pressure situations where small mistakes have severe consequences. I founded Lumu with the belief that a paradigm shift was needed in cybersecurity and I’m thrilled to see the market and investors recognizing our network-centric approach to threat detection and response as well as security analyst-focused experience.”

Alcion

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

CEO: Niraj Tolia

Funding: The Series A funding round raised $21 million, bringing the company’s total funding to $29 million.

Investors: The round was led by data backup and replication tech developer Veeam. All prior investors also participated including Lip-Bu Tan, chairman of Walden International and Intel board member; Debanjan Saha, DataRobot CEO; Abhinav Asthana, founder and CEO of Postman; and Amarjit Gill, a “serial entrepreneur” and investor at Nepenthe Capital.

What company does: Alcion develops data protection and data backup-as-a-service technology with data resiliency capabilities that protect data from loss or disaster and provides ransomware protection. The Alcion system is built on the open-source Corso technology.

CEO Quote: “Data protection is more critical than ever. Since exiting stealth in May, we’ve witnessed a 700 percent increase in organizations using the platform, propelling Alcion to a petabyte of managed logical backups. This round of funding positions us to rapidly scale our mission of protecting all the world’s data against both malicious threats and accidents. Alcion customers and the rapidly growing open-source Corso community will benefit from greater functionality, ease of use, and heightened ransomware detection.”

Senser

Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Israel

CEO: Amir Krayden

Funding: A $9.5 million seed funding round as the company emerges from stealth.

Investors: The round was led by Eclipse with participation from Amdocs and other private investors.

What company does: Senser, which calls itself the pioneer of zero-instrumentation production intelligence, develops an AIOps platform (based on Extended Berkeley Packet Filter or “eBPF” technology) that provides observability into complex cloud and IT environments.

CEO Quote: “Downtime costs enterprises an average of $1 million per hour and a long-term loss of customer trust. We built Senser to make it easy for [site reliability engineering] and DevOps leaders to go past alerts and dashboards and solve issues quickly. The average Senser customer reduces mean time to detect by 83 percent – an outcome made possible because eBPF enables immediate visibility across production systems with no overhead, and ML delivers answers, rather than alert floods.”

Legit Security

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.

CEO: Roni Fuchs

Funding: A $40 million Series B funding round.

Investors: The round was led by CRV with participation from existing investors Cyberstarts, Bessemer Venture Partners, and TCV.

What company does: Legit Security develops an enterprise application security posture management platform.

CEO Quote: “We founded Legit Security with the mission to secure the world’s software with a platform that continuously manages application security from code to cloud. We are honored to work closely with our customers to solve these challenges, and their insights have pushed us to develop a holistic approach to modern application security that brings security and development closer together for greater speed, efficiency and collaboration. With this investment our mission gains additional traction and speed, including new capabilities to extend visibility, security and governance to AI-generated code and embedded Large Language Models in applications.”

Net at Work

Headquarters: New York

Co-CEOs: Alex Solomon and Eddie Solomon

Funding: A growth investment of an undisclosed amount.

Investors: Lovell Minnick Partners

What company does: Net at Work is a leading digital operations technology provider that offers next-generation solutions, cloud and managed IT services, and fractional CIO and advisory services for small and mid-size businesses.

CEO Quote (Solomon): “This investment from Lovell Minnick Partners is a significant milestone for Net at Work. It will not only empower us to better help our customers and partners thrive in today’s digital economy but also to expand the career options for our employees and talent in the market. Together, we will continue to redefine excellence in technology partnership to lead the industry.”

Veza

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.

CEO: Tarun Thakur

Funding: Amount undisclosed.

Investors: The Syndicate Group

What company does: Startup Veza develops next-generation identity security technology that helps businesses and organizations better visualize identity security risks and secure the access of identities.

CEO Quote: “Channel partners were quick to see that traditional identity tools could no longer keep pace with the speed of enterprise access processes. Security-focused partners have been instrumental in helping Veza reach new market segments. As identity security becomes a strategic imperative, we’re excited to double-down and collaborate with these partners.”