Follow The Money: 10 VC Investments To Watch In July
Show Me The Money
There was no shortage of capital in July as venture capital firms continued to invest in a broad swath of technology companies at various stages of their development throughout the month.
Cloud-related companies dominate the roundup here, fitting for the channel as the industry chats up the shift to the cloud amongst each other and with their customers.
The month's activity is not confined to what appears in these slides, but what follows is a taste of some of the investments that were made during the month.
Matterport
Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.
CEO: Bill Brown
New Funding: $16 million
Round: Series B
Backers: DCM Ventures led the round, which also included AME Cloud Ventures, Lux Capital, Felicis Ventures, Greylock Partners, Navitas Capital, AMD Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Rothenberg Ventures, Sling Media Co-Founder Blake Krikorian and Crate & Barrel Founder Gordon Segal
Matterport's camera sensors scan rooms and then send that information to the cloud where 3-D models, aimed at real estate agents, hotels and museums, are generated. It rolled out its Matterport Pro 3-D Camera in March; it sells for $4,500. The latest funding is expected to help it expand into the consumer mobile space.
CTERA
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif. (U.S.)
CEO: Liran Eshel
New Funding: $25 million
Round: Series C
Backers: Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, which included Benchmark Capital, Cisco and Venrock, along with existing company investors
CTERA is in worldwide growth mode. Its latest funding should help with that scaling. The company is the developer of the cloud storage solution Cloud Storage Services Platform, which offers backup and sync, and share software. CTERA said its technology has been deployed by more than 21,000 businesses, including an insurance company with thousands of branch offices and a finance company with more than 50,000 users.
Cloudian
Headquarters: Foster City, Calif.
CEO: Michael Tso
New Funding: $24 million
Round: Series C
Backers: INCJ and Fidelity Growth, along with Intel Capital and other existing investors
Cloudian's Series C funding comes on the heels of the $5.1 million round it closed in January. The hybrid cloud storage solution provider will continue to grow its business with the latest capital through global marketing to gain its share of the enterprise storage market.
The company boasts a partnership with Amazon Web Services' Amazon S3 system. It also partners with Citrix Cloud Platform, Apache CloudStack and OpenStack, and counts Nextel and Vodafone as customers.
NewVoiceMedia
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Jonathan Gale
New Funding: $50 million
Round: E
Backers: Round was led by Technology Crossover Ventures and also included Bessemer Venture Partners, Highland Capital Partners Europe, Eden Ventures, Notion Capital and salesforce.com
NewVoiceMedia's cloud-based solution, ContactWorld, is a call center platform for companies that manage calls from a telephone and PC connected to the Internet and can be integrated with Salesforce. The company doubled its headcount in the past 12 months to accommodate its customer base of more than 250 companies.
Malwarebytes
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
CEO: Marcin Kleczynski
New Funding: $30 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Highland Capital Partners
Security vendor Malwarebytes launched in 2008 and just received its first round of funding.
Up until recently, it grew using its own capital and via antivirus solutions, the Anti-malware Pro being its flagship product. It gained ground at the consumer level and rolled out in 2012 a version for small business and enterprise. The company said in January it inked a deal with Clearwater, Fla.-based distributor Tech Data and recently rolled out its first formal channel partner program.
mNectar
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Wally Nguyen
New Funding: $7 million
Round: Series A
Backers: New Enterprise Associates
mNectar's technology -- which lets users take an app or game for a test drive before actually downloading it -- helps drive ad revenue growth, the company said. Here's the thinking: A plethora of apps can leave many new ones to get lost in the shuffle. Letting customers sample an app ensures a developer is acquiring quality customers. It's won over Bash Gaming, Big Fish Games, King Digital and Zynga, among other customers.
The company plans to grow its executive ranks and engineering teams with the new funding.
IIX
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
CEO: Al Burgio
New Funding: $10.4 million
Round: Series A
Backers: New Enterprise Associates
Peering solutions provider IIX rolled out its first product, Internet Exchange Points, about three years ago and now does business in the U.S., Canada and Europe. It said its customers include Microsoft, Box and LinkedIn, among others.
The new funding is expected to go toward hiring along with product and business development.
Capillary Technologies
Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.
CEO: Aneesh Reddy
New Funding: $14 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners
Capillary Technologies works with retailers and restaurant operators to help them manage and retain their customer bases via a cloud-based platform. The company has more than 150 customers, many of them big-name brands such as Puma, Nike and Pizza Hut. Its latest funding follows a $17 million Series A round in 2012 and will be used to expand its partner base and for product development. News of the funding was also tied to the company's disclosure that it brought on Alpharetta, Ga.-based hospitality software developer Agilysys as a partner.
Intigua
Headquarters: Newton, Mass.
CEO: Shimon Hason
New Funding: $10 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Intel Capital led the round, which also included Bessemer Venture Partners and Cedar Fund
The first half of the year has been a busy one for Intigua, a virtualization management company.
It added new customers, including a global bank and Fortune 500 tech company. It said this month it partnered with BMC, CA Technologies and Splunk. It also continues to be a member of IBM and VMware's partner programs.
Intigua added backup, security and monitoring support applications to its platform in April.
NextNav
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.
CEO: Gary Parsons
New Funding: $70 million
Round: Series D
Backers: New Enterprise Associates and Oak Investment Partners, along with Columbia Capital, Telcom Ventures and Goldman Sachs Investment Partners
NextNav's latest capital fusion will go toward expansion of its positioning network, Metropolitan Beacon System (MBS),which provides location information inside of buildings, urban areas or other places where it's difficult to get a GPS signal. It's good for a number of devices, including mobile phones. The company got its start looking to provide a solution for emergency calls, but scaled from there with its MBS network.