Follow The Money: 10 Recent Tech VC Investments To Watch in December
Money In The Bank
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 six weeks worthy of industry attention. Here's a look at the latest notable infusions -- and the companies that drove them.
CipherCloud
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
CEO: Pravin Kothari
New Funding: $30 million
Round: A
Backers: Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, T-Venture, others
CipherCloud bills itself as the leader in cloud information protection and, while there are plenty of other companies that would challenge that "leader" descriptor, the startup is definitely at the center of a hot market. What it offers is cloud-based encryption and "tokenization gateways" to make it easier for companies to securely use cloud applications. Its supported products include Salesforce.com, Force.com, Chatter, Gmail, Office 365 and Amazon Web Services.
Cloudera
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
CEO: Mike Olson
New Funding: $65 million
Round: Undesignated
Backers: Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel, Meritech Capital Partners, others
Cloudera is smack dab in the center of the big data trend, thanks to its commercial distribution of the Apache Hadoop platform and support and management suites. Cloudera told CRN in early December that some of its $65 million purse would go toward the buildout of its channel program, which already boasts about 450 partners.
Datadog
Headquarters: New York
CEO: Olivier Pomel
New Funding: $6.2 million
Round: A
Backers: Index Ventures, RTP Ventures, IA Ventures, Amplify Partners, Contour Ventures, NYCSeed
Data monitoring startup Datadog positions itself as different from traditional monitoring companies because it can offer an integrated view of how various tools and services are used in a data center while also customizing the data delivered to various team members. It also aggregates data from applications, cloud providers and other management tools to present an end-to-end view, and touts its product as being "up and running in 5 minutes."
Kaltura
Headquarters: New York
CEO: Ron Yekutiel
New Funding: $20 million
Round: D
Backers: Mitsui & Co. Global Investment, ORIX Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Intel Capital, 406 Ventures, Avalon Ventures
Kaltura has gotten raves for its open-source video platform, which includes both commercial video applications and an open-source development platform with hundreds of APIs. Both its platform and its applications can be deployed on-premise or via public or private cloud services, and its customers include global media companies looking to make their content delivery platforms more efficient.
Mailjet
Headquarters: Paris
CEO: Julien Tartarin
New Funding: $3.3 million
Round: A
Backers: Alven Capital, Lauren Asscher, eFounders
Mailjet, which launched in 2011, offers a cloud platform for managing how emails sent by Web applications and e-commerce platforms are sent and tracked. Apart from easier email management, another goal is to help legitimate email messages avoid being flagged as spam -- one in five legitimate emails do not reach their intended recipient, according to Mailjet. The company said it has about 10,000 active clients of all sizes.
Origami Logic
Headquarters: Menlo Park, Calif.
CEO: Opher Kahane
New Funding: $9.3 million
Round: A
Backers: Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, others
Origami Logic targets marketing professionals with a visual, self-service analytics platform. Though little is known about the exact nature of the product, the company was founded and is run by veterans from Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Juniper and other companies and is planning to launch next year, according to reports.
Platfora
Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.
CEO: Ben Werther
New Funding: $20 million
Round: B
Backers: Battery Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Sutter Hill Ventures
Well-regarded startup Platfora built a business analytics platform on top of Hadoop and exited stealth mode in October 2011. Its latest funding round is part of a series of big VC infusions into the big data space and the idea, according to interviews Werther has given with the tech media, is to make Hadoop less unwieldy while disrupting a business intelligence market dominated by Oracle and Teradata.
Qumolo
Headquarters: Seattle
CEO: Peter Godman
New Funding: $24.5 million
Round: A
Backers: Highland Capital Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Valhalla Partners, others
Is the big data trend going to catalyze the need for "big storage?" Qumolo certainly thinks so. The data storage startup claims to have technology that can rapidly scale, specifically to handle virtualized workloads that are taxing traditional storage systems. Its funding round is the latest in a number of recent, substantial VC takes for storage companies, including Pure Storage and Nimble Storage.
ScaleIO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
CEO: Boaz Palgi
New Funding: $12 million
Round: Undesignated
Backers: Greylock IL Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, others
ScaleIO, which came out of stealth mode in early December, has a technology it calls Elastic Converged Storage that it said eliminates the need for traditional SANs by tying together the storage capacity of multiple servers. How it works, according to Palgi, is that customers can build a virtual SAN on the servers they use for their business applications and don't need to buy SANs, switches or host bus adapters.
ShopKeep POS
Headquarters: New York
CEO: Jason Richelson
New Funding: $10 million
Round: B
Backers: Canaan Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners, TTV Capital
Move over Square? Step aside traditional POS? That seems to be the message form ShopKeep POS, which offers an iPad-based point-of-sale application for use by small businesses. The company said it has more than 3,000 customers already and is armed with research it said shows that 62 percent of businesses plan to upgrade their POS systems in the next two years, and that 60 percent of those are looking for a mobile POS solution. ShopKeep POS has continued to build its platform and is partnering with mobile payment providers such as LevelUp, Dwolla and PayPal.