10 VC Investments To Watch In 2015

Through The Looking Glass

Venture capital investments brought billions of dollars last year to tech startups that are developing innovative solutions around big data, cloud, storage and more.

Take a look at 10 of those investments that are worth keeping an eye on in 2015.

Intigua

CEO: Shimon Hason

Intigua takes virtualization one step further than storage, servers and networking to cover the management of the entire IT stack. By increasing monitoring, companies can ramp up performance and mission-critical app availability. Last year Intigua added backup, security and monitoring support applications to its platform.

The Newton, Mass.-based company made big strides in 2014, reeling in $10 million in Series B funding and adding new customers, such as a Fortune 500 tech company and a global bank. It also added partnerships with major vendors such as CA Technologies, BMC Software and Splunk.

Netskope

CEO: Sanjay Beri

Cloud app analytics and policy enforcement company Netskope made big growth moves last year. In April, the Los Altos, Calif.-based company launched its first formal channel program for the SaaS platform and hired more than 100 employees. Then, just a month later, the company announced $35 million in Series C funding to put toward growing its business, including R&D, sales, marketing and more. The latest round brings the company's total capital raised to $56.4 million since its October 2013 launch.

MapR Technologies

CEO: John Schroeder

MapR Technologies reeled in a blockbuster June venture capital investment of $110 million, led by big names such as Google Capital, Qualcomm Ventures and more. MapR Technologies has made a name for itself in the tech world with its enterprise-grade platform for Hadoop, NoSQL, database and streaming applications. CEO John Schroeder was recently recognized as a Top 100 Executive by CRN. The company said it would put the financing toward engineering resources, particularly for its open-source projects such as Apache Drill, Apache Spark and Hadoop 2.2 with YARN.

Igneous Systems

CEO: Kiran Bhageshpur

Igneous Systems is helping change the way enterprises are building and scaling data centers around cloud technologies. However, the company has kept a tight lid on the data center infrastructure product it is working on beyond that. What we do know is that the company lineup brings together a stellar roster of executives from major cloud vendors, such as Amazon Web Services, Azure, EMC and NetApp. The company's Series A round of funding in May brought in $23.6 million to put toward accelerating product development.

CloudPhysics

CEO: Jeff Hausman

Big data startup CloudPhysics offers a SaaS solution that uses configuration, performance, failure and event data to offer its customers predictive data center analytics. Founded by former VMware employees in 2011, the Mountain View, Calif.-based startup raised $15 million in Series C funding in June. A month later, CloudPhysics brought former Hewlett-Packard and Symantec executive Jeff Hausman on board as CEO.

Infrascale

CEO: Ken Shaw Jr.

May was a busy month for cloud-based data protection startup Infrascale. In addition to a $16.3 million Series B funding, the El Segundo, Calif.-based company announced an acquisition of Eversync, which develops on-premise data protection appliances that interface with the cloud. Infrascale has already seen incredible growth, with more than 1,000 solution provider partners with 250,000 customer companies. The new funding will be put toward continuing that growth trajectory in 2015 for the already profitable business, CEO Ken Shaw Jr. told CRN at the time.

Lookout

CEO: Jim Dolce

It was a blockbuster year for mobile security platform startup Lookout. In August, the San Francisco-based company reeled in $150 million in funding from a Who's Who of Silicon Valley VCs, including T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bezos Expeditions, Andreessen Horowitz and more. Lookout also made a key hire with the addition of former Juniper worldwide channel chief David Helfer to build a channel strategy as head of global channels.

Snowflake Computing

CEO: Bob Muglia

Snowflake Computing came out of stealth mode in October as it revealed $26 million in Series B funding for its big data warehousing services via the cloud. The idea of the solution, the company said, is to offer a more flexible, easier-to-manage alternative to on-premise data warehouses. The company is led by Bob Muglia, the former president of Microsoft's Server and Tools business and former Juniper vice president of software and solutions. The solution is currently in beta with big names such as Conde Nast and Adobe, and Muglia said he expects it to be generally available in the first half of 2015.

Docker

CEO: Ben Golub

Open-source startup Docker had a big year in 2014, with two rounds of funding and a major IBM partnership announcement. In January, Docker landed $14 million in Series B funding, followed up by a September announcement of $40 million in Series C funding. More recently, Docker announced an alliance with IBM, under which Big Blue will offer its container technology for building and running applications as part of its Bluemix application development Platform-as-a-Service solution. If 2015 is anything like 2014, Docker will definitely be a startup to keep an eye on.

Bonus: MemSQL

CEO: Eric Frenkiel

Led by former Facebook engineers, MemSQL has made a name for itself in the world of big data startups with its in-memory, clustered application designed to support high-volume online transaction processing and analytics. The San Francisco-based company kicked off the year with a $35 million Series B funding round that it said it would put toward product development and expanding its customer base. The startup was recognized throughout the year as having one of the 10 Coolest Big Data Products of 2014 by CRN.