Follow The Money: 17 Tech VC Investments In March
Early Spring Green
In the natural world, spring is the time for growth. While growth is certainly an all-season goal in the business world, the onset of spring this year is really bringing out the green of venture capital money to fund some fast-growing IT startups.
Here are 17 startups whose technologies and investments caught our attention in March.
SimpliVity
Headquarters: Westborough, Mass.
CEO: Doron Kempel
New Funding: $175 million
Round: Series D
Backers: WayPoint Capital, Accel Partners, Charles River Ventures, DFJ Growth, Meritech Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
SimpliVity is a leading challenger to established IT vendors in the hot area of hyper-converged IT infrastructure. The company's flagship product, OmniCube, has only been on the market for two years and yet this latest round of funding puts the company's valuation at more than $1 billion.
Elastica
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
CEO: Rehan Jalil
New Funding: $30 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Third Point Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Pelion Venture Partners
As the cloud market continues to grow, Elastica is working to make sure that it's secure and compliant with a "new breed" of cloud app security solutions. The company will use its $30 million in additional funding to expand globally, drive channel sales and grow its technical teams for its CloudSOC platform. The company said it has already seen strong channel growth, landing big-name partners such as Accuvant and NTT Com Security since the launch of its CloudSOC platform last year.
Zuora
Headquarters: Foster City, Calif.
CEO: Tien Tzuo
New Funding: $115 million
Round: Series F
Backers: Wellington Management Company, BlackRock, Premji, Passport Capital, Benchmark Capital, Greylock, Redpoint Ventures, Index, Shasta, Vulcan, Next World Capital, Workday CEO David Duffield, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff
Zuora develops a Software-as-a-Service relationship business management platform that companies with a subscription-based business model use to manage the life cycles of subscriber customers, including recurring billing and payments, revenue recognition and subscription metrics. Zuora describes its product as a new category of software that resides between traditional ERP and CRM applications.
Zuora, founded in 2007, has raised $250 million in venture capital. The company said that in 2014 it recorded 109 percent year-over-year growth in invoice volume running through its systems.
Cohere Technologies
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
CEO: Shlomo Rakib
New Funding: $35 million
Round: Series C
Backers: Telstra, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Lightspeed Ventures, Macquarie Capital, AME Cloud Ventures
Wireless connectivity vendor Cohere Technologies received $35 million in new funding in March, which it says it will put toward scaling up the company and bringing new products to market to meet growing wireless network demand. In particular, the company said the new funding would help get its new modulation product, Orthogonal Time Frequency and Space, off the ground, into the market and integrated with new investor Telstra. The new technology specifically helps address the issues of capacity, coverage and cost faced in wireless communications.
FinancialForce.com
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Jeremy Roche
New Funding: $110 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Technology Crossover Ventures, Salesforce Ventures
FinancialForce.com markets cloud ERP applications that it developed on Salesforce.com's Salesforce1 Platform. The company, in fact, is closely allied with Salesforce, which is also an investor. FinancialForce will use the new funding to expand all aspects of the business, including product development, sales, marketing, partner alliances and customer support.
In January, the company said its subscription run-rate grew by 91 percent in 2014, bringing its annual revenue run-rate to $50 million. While the company sells its service directly, about 80 percent of deals involve a partner such as Bluewolf or Centerstance.
Day1 Solutions
Headquarters: McLean, Va.
CEO: Luis Benavides
New Funding: $2 million
Round: Seed Capital
Backers: Undisclosed
In a funding win for the channel, cloud services and solutions provider Day1 Solutions landed $2 million in initial seed capital to put toward investments in acquisitions, and expanded technical and sales headcount. The funding comes as Day1 continues a period of hypergrowth, with revenue jumping more than 1,600 percent last year.
"This funding is a testament to our investors' confidence in Day1 Solutions' leadership team, business model and ability to consistently deliver an exceptional cloud experience to a rapidly growing base of enterprise customers moving mission-critical IT operations to the cloud," CEO Luis Benavides said in a statement.
FusionOps
Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.
CEO: Gary Meyers
New Funding: $12 million
Round: Series B
Backers: New Enterprise Associates, Series A investors
FusionOps develops cloud-based supply-chain analytics software that can analyze huge amounts of real-time transactional data with the goal of decreasing costs, growing revenue and improving customer service. The company will use the new financing to accelerate product development and continue its global expansion, especially across multiple vertical industries.
The FusionOps tools can be accessed directly through Salesforce.com and are also integrated with Oracle's Enterprise Business Suite ERP applications.
Solebit LABS
Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Israel
CEO: Boris Vaynberg
New Funding: $2 million
Round: Seed Capital
Backers: Glilot Capital Partners
Solebit LABS has landed $2 million in funding for its cybersecurity software to help enterprise customers battle advanced threats and zero-day attacks by examining all files and objects before they enter a company's network. This is especially important, the vendor said, as 38 percent of enterprises still don't have the technology to detect advanced threats. The company will use the new funding to expand product development, as well as increase its sales and marketing efforts.
InsideSales.com
Headquarters: Provo, Utah
CEO: Dave Elkington
New Funding: $60 million
Round: Series D
Backers: Salesforce Ventures, Microsoft, Polaris Partners, Hummer Winblad, U.S. Venture Partners, Epic Ventures, Zetta Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
InsideSales.com markets a sales acceleration platform that's built on the company's Neuralytics "predictive and prescriptive self-learning engine." The platform's communications, gamification, predictive analytics and data-visualization tools are designed to boost sales representative performance.
The company plans to use the additional financing to expand its international operations and boost sales to enterprise customers.
Altocloud
Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.
CEO: Barry O'Sullivan
New Funding: $2 million
Round: Seed Round
Backers: Delta Partners, Digicel Group, ACT Venture Capital, Enterprise Ireland, Western Development Commission
Altocloud exited stealth mode in March with its cloud-based predictive communications platform and announced it had raised $2 million in additional seed funding, bringing the company's total financing to $3 million. Altocloud's software looks to bridge the gap between marketing data and communications with customers, improving customer sales and engagement. CEO Barry O'Sullivan led Cisco's unified communications, contact center, VoIP and WebEx businesses as senior vice president until February of last year.
Alation
Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.
CEO: Satyen Sangani
New Funding: $9 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Costanoa Venture Capital, Data Collective Venture Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Bloomberg Beta, General Catalyst Partners, several individual investors
Alation came out of stealth mode on March 31, debuting its data-accessibility technology that's designed to help people more easily find, understand, use and govern their data for making better and faster decisions.
Alation said its platform is already in use by a number of customers, including eBay, MarketShare and Inflection. The company will use the new funding to accelerate product development and to expand its sales and marketing efforts.
ToutApp
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Tawheed Kader
New Funding: $15 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Andreessen Horowitz, Sigma West, Founder Collective, Launch Fund, 500 Startups
As the company closed out a year of astronomical growth, seeing a 300 percent jump in top-line revenue, ToutApp landed $15 million in funding to continue its momentum in sales, marketing and engineering for its CRM and email productivity platform. The funding adds to the $3.35 million raised in 2013. The ultimate goal of the funding, CEO Tawheed Kader said in a blog post about the news, is to establish ToutApp as the "Bloomberg terminal for sales people" by building a platform that understands the salesperson's job and helps enable them to be more effective.
Headquarters: Milpitas, Calif.
CEO: Ajit Gupta
New Funding: $16 million
Round: Series E
Backers: Nexus Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, InterWest Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Presidio Ventures.
Aryaka is a WAN-as-a-Service provider with its Aryaka ONE platform that's able to connect geographically dispersed offices and provide application-delivery and cloud-network services. Aryaka's network and application acceleration services bypass the public Internet, which the company said results in faster, more secure and more stable services.
The company will use the new funding to scale up its global sales infrastructure to meet what it described as the growing demand for its services.
ProsperWorks
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Jon Lee
New Funding: $7.5 million
Round: Series A
Backers: True Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, CrunchFund, angel investors
ProsperWorks has received $7.5 million to put toward continued development of its Simple CRM for Google Apps solution, which aims to improve CRM efficiencies by focusing everything around the Google Apps ecosystem. In particular, it adds Chrome extensions for Gmail, zero-touch data entry, task synchronization with Google Calendar, business intelligence and more. The latest round of funding brings the company's total financing to $10 million.
Headquarters: Atlanta
CEO: Carol O'Kelley
New Funding: $5 million
Round: Undisclosed
Backers: Noro-Moseley
Salesfusion develops a marketing-automation platform for midsize companies conducting B2B sales. The software is integrated with CRM applications from Saleforce.com, Microsoft, Sugar and others. The company will use the funding to accelerate product development and expand its client services organization.
Also in March, Salesfusion named Carol O'Kelley as its new CEO. She was previously executive vice president and chief marketing officer at RedPrairie, and before that served as vice president and chief of staff in Oracle's global retail business unit.
Visually
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Matt Cooper
New Funding: $3.3 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Crosslink Capital, SoftTech VC, Kapor Capital, 500 Startups
Visually develops cloud-based content creation and collaboration tools for developing interactive graphics, video and other visual content. The company will use the financing to expand its creative services offerings.
Agilence
Headquarters: Mt. Laurel, N.J.
CEO: Russ Hawkins
New Funding: $4.3 million
Round: Venture
Backers: Laurel Capital Partners, Drayton Park Capital, Granite Ventures, Next Stage Capital, Aster Capital
Agilence develops the Retail 20/20 Software-as-a-Service applications that provide retailers with visibility into their daily store operations, including reducing fraud and loss, and improving operational efficiencies. The company will use the funding to continue developing Retail 20/20's exception reporting and operational intelligence capabilities. The additional money also will be used to support the vendor's rapid growth, the company said.