10 Cool Tech Companies That Raised Funding In March 2021

Cybersecurity and big data innovators were among the companies that reported new rounds of funding in March.

Follow The Money

Cybersecurity and big data startups continue to attract a big share of the venture funding flowing to IT startups.

Snyk, Orca Security, Aqua Security and Opswat all reported impressive triple-digit rounds of financing in March – in some cases vaulting their valuations over the $1 billion mark – while a number of big data companies, including Striim, ThoughtSpot and Rivery, celebrated funding rounds below $100 million.

What follows are our picks for 10 cool tech startups that landed new funding in March.

Aqua Security

Headquarters: Ramat Gan, Israel

CEO: Dror Davidoff

Funding: $135 million Series E to reach a $1 billion valuation.

Investors: Round led by ION Crossover Partners with broad participating from existing investors including M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), Lightspeed Venture Partners, Insight Partners, TLV Partners, Greenspring Associates and Acrew Capital.

What company does: Develops a cloud-native security platform that provides prevention, detection and response automation across an entire application lifecycle to secure cloud infrastructure and running workloads.

CEO Quote: “I am proud of what the Aqua team has accomplished in five short years. We delivered on our vision and have a clear direction forward to provide the best platform for cloud native security. We’ve shown that our research and development teams are ahead of the market with the launch of innovative products such as Aqua DTA, our new Kubernetes Security Posture Management, and the Aqua CSPM solution. As attacks targeting cloud native applications are now a fast-growing threat, we are here to empower our customers to protect their investment and secure their future in the cloud.”

Axonious

Headquarters: New York

CEO: Dean Sysman

Funding: $100 million Series D. The company has raised $195 million in five funding rounds and has reached a $1 billion valuation.

Investors: Round led by Stripes with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, OpenView, Lightspeed and Vertex.

What company does: Axonious markets cybersecurity asset management tools used to inventory IT assets, identify gaps in security coverage and enforce security policies.

CEO Quote: “This new round of funding with the most successful investors in our industry highlights the incredible work our team has done so far, as well as our commitment to our customers. I often say that time is the enemy of cybersecurity, and the rate and pace of change mean that IT and security teams can no longer afford to spend time manually compiling data about devices, users, and cloud instances for things like incident response, audits, and compliance. We’re committed to solving a real problem to let our customers focus on what’s important.”

HYCU

Headquarters: Boston

CEO: Simon Taylor

Funding: $87.5 million Series A.

Investors: Bain Capital Investors led the round with participation by Acrew Capital.

What company does: HYCU provides the HYCU Protégé multi-cloud data management, protection, and backup and recovery software.

CEO Quote: “As the cloud and multi-cloud environments take root, the channel is evolving,” he said. “There’s interest in supporting customers with storage for their journey to the cloud. We want to make sure the channel is a key part of our strategy and make sure it’s a primary driver of our strategy. We want to find out from channel partners what we need to be successful and then answer the call.”

Opswat

Headquarters: Tampa, Fla.

CEO: Benny Czarny

Funding: $125 Growth Investment

Investors: Brighton Park Capital

What company does: Opswat develops critical infrastructure cybersecurity technology that protects mission-critical organizations from malware and zero-day attacks.

CEO Quote: “We’re thrilled to have Brighton Park as a strategic, growth-focused partner and look forward to benefiting from their proven sector expertise as we advance our mission to protect the world’s mission-critical infrastructure. With a strong foundation and global organization in place, today’s announcement marks a new era at OPSWAT, and wouldn’t have been possible without the dedication and hard work by our exceptional and growing team. We are excited to partner with the Brighton Park team as we capitalize on the substantial opportunities ahead.”

Orca Security

Headquarters: Los Angeles

CEO: Avi Shua

Funding: $210 million Series C, bringing its total to $292.5 million and an $1.2 billion valuation.

Investors: Led by Capital G, Alphabet’s independent growth fund and Redpoint Ventures.

What company does: Orca develops cloud security technology, including its SideScanning technology that detects vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, weak and leaked passwords and unsecured personal information.

CEO Quote: “By creating a security solution that actually works, we are solving a fundamental problem that has been broken since the inception of cloud security. In the face of increasing threats and rapidly expanding cloud estates, organizations can’t be burdened with installing and maintaining agents and sidecars. We enable our customers to instantly protect their cloud environments, eliminate attack paths, fuel digital transformation, and meet compliance mandates.”

Rivery

Headquarters: New York

CEO: Itamar Ben Hemo

Funding: $16 million Series A

Investors: The financing round was led by Entrée Capital and existing investor State Of Mind Ventures.

What company does: The Rivery DataOps Platform offers capabilities for data operations management and the orchestration of such processes as data transformation and data migration.

CEO Quote: “This new round of funding is an exciting milestone for Rivery, and validation that the massive cloud data industry is looking for a centralized DataOps platform. The Rivery DataOps platform is empowering companies to centralize, control, automate, and orchestrate all of their data flows - in the cloud.”

Striim

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.

CEO: Ali Kutay

Funding: $50 million Series C, bringing its total funding to $108.5 million.

Investors: The round was led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity with participation by Summit Partners, Atlantic Bridge Ventures, Dell Ventures and Bosch Ventures.

What company does: Striim develops a real-time streaming data platform that enables continuous data ingestion, data stream processing and data delivery across diverse systems in the cloud or on-premises.

CEO Quote: “From day one, our vision has been to enable access to real-time data at enterprise scale – across massive, heterogeneous environments. We are seeing firsthand the tremendous rate at which the world’s largest enterprises are joining the digital-first economy through the adoption of modern data platforms especially in the cloud.”

Snyk

Headquarters: Boston

CEO: Peter McKay

Funding: $300 million Series E, putting the company’s valuation at $4.7 billion

Investors: Co-led by Accel and Tiger Global with participation from existing investors Addition, Boldstart Ventures, Canaan Partners, Coatue, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Salesforce Ventures, Stripes and funds managed by BlackRock. New investors included Alkeon, Atlassian Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Geodesic Capital, Sands Capital Ventures and Temasek.

What company does: Snyk develops a cloud-native application security platform that provides security visibility and remediation for all components of modern applications including application code, open-source libraries, container infrastructure and infrastructure as code.

CEO Quote: “Our relentless focus on the experience of the 2.2 million developers building applications of all kinds securely with Snyk has resulted in our success to date, and we believe there is an exponential, generational opportunity still in front of us. This latest investment allows us to accelerate our growth at every level – doubling down on our successful product led growth strategy, adding to our customer roster, recruiting talent to our team worldwide and expanding geographically.”

ThoughtSpot

Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.

CEO: Sudheesh Nair

Funding: Data cloud giant Snowflake acquired an equity stake (size undisclosed) in ThoughtSpot with a $20 million investment.

Investors: Snowflake

What company does: ThoughtSpot develops search- and AI-driven business intelligence software.

CEO Quote (or) Additional Information: “We’re all racing to capture as much data as possible, but the reality is, data is useless unless we can quickly unearth insights and use them to create personalized experiences for customers. Doing so requires a completely new, modern approach. Snowflake is the creator of the data cloud, changing the entire industry in the same way Oracle did in the 90s and Salesforce did in the early 2000s. Customers who embrace this new world will differentiate themselves on both the quality and agility they deliver to customers. Doing so, however, requires a new kind of analytics that brings the power of the data cloud to everyone through the ease of a simple, yet powerful analytics.

WorkFusion

Headquarters: New York

CEO: Alex Lyashok

Funding: $220 million Series F

Investors: The round was led by Georgian, a fintech company that invests in high-growth technology companies.

What company does: Workfusion develops intelligent automation and robotic process automation software.

CEO Quote: “It takes a high-performance team, driven by a shared purpose and looking in the same direction, to build long-term value. Our unique approach of automating industry-specific, document-heavy operations with advanced AI is yielding remarkable success for our banking customers. Now we can take that success to a wider audience at greater speed and unlimited scale. We have a winning playbook and the market is vast. We are excited to move forward.”