Follow The Money: 10 Recent Tech VC Investments To Watch In August

Deep Pockets

Tech startups are once again pounding the pavement for backers with deep pockets, and for some -- particularly in the cloud, networking, storage, analytics and mobility segments -- there have been some handsome paydays in recent weeks.

Every month here on CRN, we'll track some tech company funding rounds from the past four to six weeks worthy of industry attention. Here's a look at the latest notable infusions -- and the companies that drove them.

Apigee

HQ: Palo Alto, Calif.
CEO: Chet Kapoor
New Funding: $20 million
Round: E
Backers: Focus Ventures, Bay Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, SAP Ventures, Third Point Ventures

Apigee offers the Apigee Enterprise API Platform, a cloud-based service that helps businesses deliver, manage and measure the effectiveness of APIs deployed and applications built on those APIs. The company counts some 20 percent of the top 100 companies listed in the Fortune 500 among its customers, and it is growing aggressively, having recently acquired Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) to expand its services.

Basho Technologies

HQ: Cambridge, Mass.
CEO: Don Rippert
New Funding: $11.1 million
Round: F
Backers: Yahoo Japan Corp., Georgetown Partners, others

Basho in mid-July said it had entered a strategic relationship with IDC Frontier, a subsidiary of Yahoo Japan Corp., which took a $6.1 million stake in the company and will deploy Basho cloud storage and distributed database technology in its cloud platform. That came on the heels of a $5 million infusion from Georgetown Partners. Basho's products are the Riak NoSQL database and Riak CS cloud storage platform, the latter of which is a competitor to Amazon S3 and other cloud storage options. It's made some noise lately, not least for its 2011 hiring of longtime Accenture CTO Don Rippert as its new chief executive.

Box

HQ: Los Altos, Calif.
CEO: Aaron Levie
New Funding: $125 million
Round: E
Backers: General Atlantic, Bessemer Venture Partners, DFJ Growth, New Enterprise Associates, SAP Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Social+Capital Partnership, Andreessen Horowitz, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Emergence Capital Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, Meritech Venture Partners

There are VC paydays and there are VC paydays, and Box's $125 million July round definitely qualifies as the latter. The cloud-based storage provider confirmed in July that it will continue to grow its customer base and also the channel partner program it launched a year ago to help spread its influence among enterprise customers.

Boom Financial

HQ: Palo Alto, Calif.
CEO: Bill Barhydt
New Funding: $17 million
Round: C
Backers: Digicel Group, RRE Ventures, Matt.org

M-Via last year came to market with a service called Boom, with the idea of better enablement for immigrant customers who want to send money to their home countries. The company's various backers include Digicel, one of the largest telecom providers in the Caribbean and Central America, which was part of a $17 million round for M-Via, since renamed Boom Financial. Instead of traditional wire payments that charge per transfer, Boom users pay a yearly account fee of $25, then a smaller fee every time they want to make a deposit but no fees for individual wire transfers, which they can make via mobile devices.

Cortica

HQ: Tel Aviv, Israel
CEO: Igal Raichelgauz
New Funding: $7 million
Round: A
Backers: Horizons Ventures, others

Israeli company Cortica makes image recognition technology for enabling computers to recognize and interpret photo and video content on the Web, from objects and faces to products and corporate logos. The company stated during its early August investment announcement that its commercial team will relocate to the United States, with offices planned for New York and Silicon Valley.

Egnyte

HQ: Mountain View, Calif.
CEO: Vineet Jain
New Funding: $16 million
Round: C
Backers: Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Polaris

Egnyte offers cloud file server solutions, and in March 2011, it launched an inaugural channel program for solution providers looking to build storage clouds for SMB customers. Egnyte's Hybrid Cloud file server accounts for the sharing of some 1 billion files a day by businesses, the company says.

IntelliBatt

HQ: San Rafael, Calif.
CEOs: Tom Barton, Todd Ford
New Funding: $22 million
Round: n/a
Backers: Columbia Capital, CBC-Capital

IntelliBatt's roots go all the way back to 1992, when it was Data Power Monitoring Corp. and focused on UPS and battery monitoring -- and it still focuses on those markets today. Along with the $22 million investment, IntelliBatt in late July confirmed new senior management. Tom Barton, former Rackable Systems CEO, became its chief executive officer, and Todd Ford, formerly president at Rackable, became co-CEO and COO.

Meteor Development Group

HQ: San Francisco
CEO: Geoff Schmidt, Matt DeBergalis, Nick Martin (Meteor co-authors)
New Funding: $11.2 million
Round: A
Backers: Andreessen Horowitz, Matrix Partners, others

Meteor, with its Series A round of funding, has a formidable list of advisers and directors on board, including Spring Framework creator and former VMware executive Rod Johnson (left). Meteor's open-source software applications run from a user's computer or mobile device to retrieve needed data from cloud services -- something Meteor's backers maintain offers users a cleaner, faster experience than the running of applications on far away servers.

Openbucks

HQ: Santa Clara, Calif.
CEO: Marc Rochman
New Funding: $4.8 million
Round: A
Backers: Former Yahoo executives Jerry Yang, Terry Semel, Greycroft Partners, BV Capital, Clearstone Ventures, Morado Ventures, Novel TMT Ventures, Inspiration Ventures, CrunchFund, SV Angel, TiE Angels

Openbucks has made some noise lately behind its Openbucks Gift Card Payment Network, which allows users who don't use credit or debit cards -- or who want to keep their financial information private -- to make transactions online using gift cards from major retailers like CVS, Burger King and Shell. Ex-Yahoo Yang stated, "Openbucks stands at the forefront of the future of online payments as it provides a simple solution to the twenty-five percent of U.S. households and most U.S. teens who have no or very limited access to credit cards along with the many consumers that are leery of providing their financial information online."

Zebit

HQ: San Diego
CEO: Michael Thiemann
New Funding: $25 million
Round: D
Backers: Mohr Davidow, Crosslink Capital, Leapfrog Ventures, QED Investors, others

Microlending platform Zebit's funding round actually happened at the beginning of the summer, but the buzz on the company -- which describes itself as "the first end-to-end big data platform-as-a-service provider in the financial space" -- has been strong enough to hold industry attention for the last few months. Zebit's platform essentially offers online retailers and other transacting companies the ability to prove credit to customers who can't otherwise obtain it, using analytics to identify responsible customers and manage risk. The company said it's completed well over 1 million transactions.