10 Cool Tech Companies That Raised Funding In March 2024

Funding for IT startups remains tight, continuing a slowdown that began in early 2022. But some startups with bold business plans and game-changing technologies are winning big investment deals. Here’s a look at 10 companies that successfully raised new funding in March.

Follow The Money

Venture capital investments for IT startups remain in the slump that began in early 2022. Global venture capital investments in the January-March quarter fell to $75.9 billion – a nearly five-year low – according to PitchBook statistics cited in a Reuters story.

And yet some startups are bucking the trend and announcing significant funding rounds, some in the nine figures, as seen in our Follow the Money monthly roundup.

Prior to the funding slump businesses with game-changing cybersecurity and big data products were the most popular investments for the Sand Hill Road crowd. That continued to be the case in March, although any startup with “artificial intelligence” or “generative AI” in its name or business plan is also very popular.

Topping the list for March was Axonius, a cybersecurity asset management technology developer, which raised $200 million in a Series E funding round. Other cybersecurity companies with impressive funding rounds included Claroty, Coro Cybersecurity and Nozomi Networks – all with $100-million funding infusions.

Observe, which develops a platform for storing, managing and analyzing machine-generated data for a range of applications, was No. 2 on the March list with a $115-million Series B funding round.

Big data tech developers Ocient, Unstructured and Dymium were among the companies collecting significant financing in March.

Here’s a look at 10 companies that raised funding in March 2024.

Axonius

Headquarters: New York

CEO: Dean Sysman

Funding: A $200 million Series E funding round at a $2.6 billion valuation.

Investors: The round was led by Accel and Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from existing investor Stripes.

What company does: Axonius provides cybersecurity asset management technology.

CEO Quote: “We have customers of every size, every industry, every region. And what we're realizing is that the problem we're solving is very universal. Every organization needs it. It's a very foundational thing of every security and IT program. Today we have about 630 customers. It's very easy to imagine us getting to 6,000 or even 60,000 customers. And that means that we really have the potential to be one of the major software companies of the world.”

Observe

Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.

CEO: Jeremy Burton

Funding: A $115 million Series B funding round.

Investors: The round was led by Sutter Hill Ventures with participation from existing investors Capital One Ventures and Madrona and new investor Snowflake Ventures.

What company does: The Observe platform is used to store, manage and analyze machine-generated data.

CEO Quote: “We had a great year last year. Our fiscal year 2024 ended at the end of January. We almost tripled revenue, and we’re seeing great net revenue retention, which is a measure of how sticky the product is. So we feel very good about our growth. For the coming year, I think a big chunk of that money is going to go towards expanding the sales teams. Not just sales reps, but technical people to support sales, and folks who can help with customer implementations.”

Claroty

Headquarters: New York

CEO: Yaniv Vardi

Funding: $100 million in strategic growth funding that brings Claroty’s total funding to $735 million.

Investors: Participants included lead equity investor Delta-v Capital, as well as AB Private Credit Investors at AllianceBernstein, Standard Investments, Toshiba Digital Solutions, SE Ventures, Rockwell Automation, and Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank.

What company does: Calroty’s CPS security system is used by organizations to secure cyber-physical systems across industrial, healthcare, commercial and public sector environments.

CEO Quote: “The past year has brought unprecedented geopolitical, macroeconomic, and regulatory changes that have created new trends and challenges for those charged with protecting the world’s critical infrastructure. With our deep domain expertise, unmatched technological capabilities in our comprehensive platform, and extensive partner ecosystem, Claroty is uniquely equipped to help CPS defenders navigate these changes.”

Coro Cybersecurity

Headquarters: New York

CEO: Guy Moskowitz

Funding: The $100 million Series D funding round brought the company’s total funding to $255 million in the last 24 months.

Investors: The round was led by One Peak with participation from existing investors Energy Impact Partners and Balderton Capital.

What company does: Coro develops a cybersecurity platform that’s purpose-built for small and mid-size business and organizations. The software includes endpoint protection, email and user protection, and network and cloud protection capabilities.

CEO Quote: “We are a channel-first company — 70 percent of our revenue comes from the channel. We expect that to grow dramatically in 2024 and 2025.”

Nozomi Networks

Headquarters: San Francisco

CEO: Edgard Capdevielle

Funding: A $100 million Series E funding round.

Investors: New investors Mitsubishi Electric and Schneider Electric participated in the round along with previous investors Activate Capital, Energize Capital, Forward Investments, GGV Capital U.S., Honeywell Ventures, In-Q-Tel, Johnson Controls, Keysight Technologies, Lux Capital, Planven Investments SA, Samsung, Porsche Ventures, Telefónica Ventures, and Triangle Peak Partners.

What company does: Nozomi Networks develops security products for IoT and operational technology (OT) networks.

CEO Quote: “As we meet with customers around the world, the reality is that they operate highly heterogeneous environments and are looking for a security platform that can effectively defend those environments. This investment clearly underscores the need and support for OEM-agnostic security solutions in light of today’s escalating attacks against critical infrastructure around the world.”

Todyl

Headquarters: Denver

CEO: John Nellen

Funding: A $50 million Series B funding round.

Investors: The round was led by Base 10 Partners with participation from Anthos Capital, Tech Operators and StoneMill Ventures.

What company does: Todyl’s security platform for small and mid-size businesses incorporates SASE, endpoint security, SIEM, MXDR, SOAR and GRC into a cloud-first, single-agent platform.

CEO Quote: “Small and medium businesses are facing sophisticated cyber threats at an unprecedented frequency. The cost and complexity have kept the capabilities required to defend against ever-changing tactics and adversaries in the hands of large enterprises. Our revolutionary, cloud-first platform levels the playing field for businesses of all sizes. We purpose-built our platform to utilize a single agent that delivers the capabilities of multiple point solutions.”

Ocient

Headquarters: Chicago

CEO: Chris Gladwin

Funding: The $49.4 million funding is an extension of Ocient’s Series B financing.

Investors: The Series B round was previously led by Greycroft and OCA Ventures and included new venture investors Buoyant Ventures, Levy Family Partners, Riverwalk Capital, and Wolf Capital Management, as well as all prior major investors.

What company does: Ocient develops data analytics software for compute-intensive analysis of complex, large-scale data.

CEO Quote: “Organizations are being challenged to deliver energy-efficient, hyper-growth data analysis without accelerating costs, which has become increasingly challenging as real-time analytics, SQL, AI/ML, and geospatial workloads typically require more energy consumption. The close of this latest round of financing is an indication that the need for the solutions we bring to market is growing across industries, and geographies.”

Unstructured

Headquarters: San Francisco

CEO: Brian Raymond

Funding: The $40 million Series B round brought Unstructured’s total capital raised to $65 million.

Investors: The round was led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Databricks Ventures, IBM Ventures, Sacramento Kings Chairman Vivek Ranadive, DataStax CEO Chet Kapoor, Allison Pickens of the New Normal Fund, and Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures, along with existing investors Madrona, Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), and Mango Capital.

What company does: Unstructured develops technology for data ingestion and pre-processing for large language models.

CEO Quote: “A critical bottleneck to realizing the emerging value of LLMs is the ability to ingest and preprocess any human-generated data into an LLM-ready format. 2024 will be the year of moving LLM prototypes into production and organizations of all types and sizes are hungry to build out these architectures efficiently and at scale. Automating the process of structuring data and seamlessly delivering it into storage is critical for enterprises that want to build solutions on this new tech stack and go to market quickly.”

BlueFlag Security

Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.

CEO: Raj Mallempati

Funding: BlueFlag Security emerge from stealth with a $11.5 million seed funding round.

Investors: The funding was led by Maverick Ventures and Ten Eleven Ventures with participation from Pier 88 Investment Partners.

What company does: BlueFlag Security has developed a software development lifecycle (SDLC) security and governance platform for identity-centric protection through the software development process.

CEO Quote: “Our mission is to provide developers with a clean, trustworthy environment. The BlueFlag platform doesn’t just add another layer of protection; it introduces a fundamentally different philosophy that places identity security at the heart of SDLC security and governance.”

Dymium

Headquarters: Los Gatos, Calif.

CEO: Denzil Wessels

Funding: The company exited stealth with $7 million in funding.

Investors: The funding was led by Two Bear Capital with $5 million and an additional $2 million from angel investors.

What company does: Dymium has developed a data access management platform that provides secure access to data “where it lives.”

CEO Quote: “The practice of copying data to provide teams with data in myriad formats, each with different access controls, policies, and security requirements, has led to unprecedented complexity that impedes innovation and undermines security and governance. Dymium eliminates the need to make copies of the data, allowing you to secure data where it lives. It provides greater agility and secure access to a single version of the truth using a zero trust architecture, centralized access policies, and real-time data transformation services.”