Follow The Money: 21 Recent Tech VC Investments
Getting Warmer
Spring's in full swing and temperatures are rising. While venture funding for IT startups never seems to go cold, things have been heating up lately on the VC financing front.
Here are 21 startups whose funding wins in April caught our attention. Companies developing leading-edge big data management and cybersecurity software are the most prevalent funding recipients on our list. Companies building state-of-the-art software in cloud management, customer service and 4G networking also made the list.
Docker, the rapidly growing developer of container technology for DevOps, is perhaps the best-known company here. But its $95 million round of funding was beaten by the $150 million raised by Infinidat, a startup in the storage system arena, and the stunning $200 million raised by Domo, a developer of business intelligence and data visualization software for executives.
Adallom
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
CEO: Assaf Rappaport
New Funding: $30 million
Round: Series C
Backers: Hewlett-Packard Ventures, Rembrandt Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures
Adallom is a cloud access security broker that provides visibility, governance and protection for cloud applications, such as Salesforce.com, Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365. The company's service is based on its SmartEngine advanced heuristics technology.
The company plans to use the new financing to grow its sales and marketing operations, build a global network of channel partners, expand the capacity and capabilities of Adallom Labs, and support ongoing product research and development.
Ayasdi
Headquarters: Menlo Park, Calif.
CEO: Gurjeet Singh
New Funding: $55 million
Round: Series C
Backers: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Institutional Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Floodgate, Citi Ventures, Centerview Capital Technology and Draper Nexus
Ayasdi is a leading developer of machine intelligence software, based on topological data analysis technology, which automates the process of deriving insights from large, complex data sets.
The company reported more than 400 percent bookings growth in its fiscal year ended Jan. 30, during which it debuted new applications for the financial services, health-care, life sciences and government sectors.
Bedrock Data
Headquarters: Boston
CEO: John Marcus
New Funding: $3.11 million
Round: Series A
Backers: 406 Ventures, Boston Syndicates and Maiden Lane
In April, Bedrock Data launched its cloud-based data integration platform for disparate data sets after more than a year of development, testing and working with early-adopter customers. The Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) automatically reviews, updates and synchronizes information in marketing, sales, email, ticketing, CRM and other system silos.
Bedrock Data plans to use the new financing for continued product development and expanding the company's employee ranks.
Birst
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Jay Larson
New Funding: $65 million
Round: Series F
Backers: Wellington Management Company LLP, Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad, DAG Ventures and Northgate Capital
Birst is a leading company in cloud business intelligence and analytics software. In April, the company announced an alliance with Tableau Software through which Tableau's data visualization software can work with Birst's Cloud BI data platform.
The company plans on using the new funding to continue expanding its international presence, drive its sales and marketing efforts, and continue enhancing its products' capabilities.
Cliqr
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
CEO: Gaurav Manglik
New Funding: $20 million
Round: Series C
Backers: Polaris Partners, Foundation Capital, Google Ventures and TransLink Capital
Cliqr, founded by a pair of VMware veterans, develops tools for managing cloud systems and migrating workloads between them. The company has been experiencing rapid growth, driven by the accelerating pace of hybrid cloud adoption in the past year.
The company intends to apply the additional funding to further expanding its global distribution and support operations.
Cradlepoint
Headquarters: Boise, Idaho
CEO: George Mulhern
New Funding: $48 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Sorenson Capital, Delta-v Capital and the Caprock Group
Cradlepoint provides cloud-managed 4G LTE networking services for distributed enterprises. The company, which relies on the channel for almost 100 percent of its sales, has quadrupled its revenue over the last three years.
The new funding will be used to accelerate the company's international expansion, as well as fuel ongoing development of its cloud-managed wireless wide-area network and security offerings. The company also will invest in developing resources for its channel community, and possibly make acquisitions.
DataTorrent
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
CEO: Phu Hoang
New Funding: $15 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Singtel Innov8, GE Ventures, August Capital, Morado Venture Partners and AME Cloud Ventures
DataTorrent develops its DataTorrent RTS realtime stream processing system, based on Hadoop 2.0, which businesses use to process, monitor, analyze and act on big data instantly.
The new funding, which brings DataTorrent's total financing to $23.8 million, caps a year that includes two releases of the RTS platform.
Docker
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Ben Golub
New Funding: $95 million
Round: Series D
Backers: Insight Venture Partners, Coatue, Goldman Sachs, Northern Trust, Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Trinity Ventures and AME Cloud Ventures
Few companies have been hotter in the past year than Docker. The company's open-source "container" technology has redrawn the DevOps landscape and it is now estimated to have a market valuation of around $1 billion.
The new round of funding is believed to be one of the largest ever for an open-source startup. Growth as rapid as Docker's can strain a company's resources, so you can bet the $95 million will be put to immediate use.
Domo
Headquarters: American Fork, Utah
CEO: Josh James
New Funding: $200 million
Round: Series D
Backers: BlackRock, Capital Group, Glynn Capital Management and GGV Capital
Domo has officially been in stealth mode since its 2010 start. But in April, the company debuted its cloud-based executive management system, which provides business managers with access to information scattered across many disparate sources through a single dashboard.
The new eye-popping round of funding brings the company's total financing to around $450 million and puts its valuation at approximately $2 billion.
Freshdesk
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Girish Mathrubootham
New Funding: $50 million
Round: Series E
Backers: Tiger Global, Accel Partners and Google Capital
Freshdesk develops Software-as-a-Service applications for customer service and IT helpdesk tasks. In the past year, the company doubled its customer base to 40,000 and launched its Freshservice, a SaaS IT service desk offering.
Freshdesk will use the additional capital to further its product development efforts and scale its operations to meet demand for both the Freshdesk and Freshservice support platforms.
Infinidat
Headquarters: Needham, Mass., and Herzliya, Israel
CEO: Moshe Yanai
New Funding: $150 million
Round: Series B
Backer: TPG Growth
Infinidat is a startup storage technology company founded by people who developed EMC's Symmetrix and IBM's XIV enterprise storage systems.
On the same day the new funding was announced, Infinidat unveiled its InfiniBox storage system, which the company called the first to offer unified block file object and mainframe storage capabilities. The company said the high-density, high-performance, low-power-consumption storage system costs less on a per-gigabyte basis than competing enterprise-class products.
New Signature
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
CEO: Jeff Tench
New Funding: $35 million
Round: First Round
Backer: Columbia Capital
New Signature is a fast-growing systems integrator that was named Microsoft Partner of the Year in 2014.
The company will use the financial infusion to expand its footprint outside the Northeast, and grow its technical capabilities around Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online.
The company looks to triple the size of its business in the next two years and possibly hit $500 million in annual revenue in five years.
Niara
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.
CEO: Sriram Ramachandran
New Funding: $20 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Venrock, New Enterprise Associates and Index Ventures
Niara is currently in stealth mode as it continues to develop its big data security analytics technology. The startup says its technology will provide "contextually relevant security analytics by fusing data from disparate sources to discover compromised users."
The company previously raised $9.4 million in its first round of financing.
NSS Labs
Headquarters: Austin, Texas
CEO: Vikram Phatak
New Funding: $7 million
Round: Series B
Backers: LiveOak Venture Partners and Chevron Technology Ventures
NSS Labs is a leading information security and advisory company. In March, the company launched the NSS Cyber Advanced Warning System, a realtime situational awareness system that provides businesses with critical information to warn when they are at risk for cyberattacks.
The company will use the funding to continue development of the NSS Cyber Advanced Warning System.
Palerra
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
CEO: Rohit Gupta
New Funding: $17 million
Round: Series B
Backers: August Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Wing Venture Capital and Engineering Capital
Palerra develops a cloud security platform that helps businesses automate the process of threat detection, incident response and analytics around cloud and Software-as-a-Service systems like Amazon Web Services, Salesforce.com and Office 365.
The company plans to use the additional funding to expand sales and marketing, add customer support tools and processes, accelerate product development and build out its budding channel program.
Pepperdata
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.
CEO: Sean Suchter
New Funding: $15 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Wing Venture Capital, Signia Venture Partners, Citi Ventures, Silicon Valley Data Capital and Yahoo Chairman Maynard Webb
Pepperdata develops software tools for optimizing the performance of Hadoop clusters, helping businesses that rely on the big data technology for their production environments. Specifically, the software dynamically adjusts cluster utilization based on processing priorities so that jobs run faster, more efficiently and more reliably.
The company will use the new financing to expand its global sales and marketing efforts and to accelerate product development to support applications beyond traditional Hadoop.
Procore Technologies
Headquarters: Carpenteria, Calif.
CEO: Craig Courtemanche
New Funding: $30 million
Round: Series E
Backers: Iconiq Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners
Procore develops cloud-based construction management applications. The software helps construction professionals access construction project documents, such as contracts, schedules, requests for information and drawings via the cloud.
In the past year, Procore has doubled both its user base and employee head count, and the company plans on using the additional funds to accelerate that growth.
Rocana
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Omer Trajman
New Funding: $15 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Google Ventures, General Catalyst, Toba Capital and former Akamai Technologies chairman Paul Sagan
Rocana, previously known as ScalingData, develops next-generation root cause analysis software that IT managers use to monitor and manage shared services infrastructure in data centers.
As businesses expand IT operations into the cloud and mobile computing, and adopt such technologies as OpenStack, Hadoop and Docker, their IT environments are becoming increasingly complex. That makes tracking and fixing problems all the more difficult.
Rocana's software uses domain-specific machine learning and analytics technology, and purpose-built visualizations, to identify the cause of IT problems.
Soha Systems
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.
CEO: Haseeb Budhani
New Funding: $9.7 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Moment Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Cervin Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz
Cloud security startup Soha Systems emerged from stealth mode with this funding announcement. The company's security services are designed to prevent infiltration of customer-facing applications deployed in cloud computing environments.
The company continues to build up its sales and marketing operations. While its sales, so far, have primarily been direct, and will likely continue that way for the next six months or so, the company plans to build a channel program that will eventually account for up to 80 percent of product sales.
TaaSera
Headquarters: Cupertino, Calif.
CEO: C. Scott Hartz
New Funding: $14.5 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Undisclosed
TaaSera develops preemptive breach cybersecurity systems based on its AWARE (Attack Warning and Response Engine) platform. The company's flagship NetTrust system provides security for insider threats and cloud, mobile and endpoint breach detection capabilities.
The company will use the additional funding to accelerate sales, marketing and ongoing development of the AWARE technology.
Tanium
Headquarters: Emeryville, Calif.
CEO: David Hindawi
New Funding: $52 million
Round: Undisclosed
Backer: Andreessen Horowitz
This round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz for Tanium is in addition to the $90 million the venture capital company invested in the endpoint management and security technology startup in 2014.
Tanium is largely squirreling away its funding, as the company remains largely self-funded -- that, despite the fact the company experienced strong growth last year, including a quadrupling of total billings and 8 times growth in the number of sales deals worth more than $1 million.
The company does roughly 90 percent of its sales through the channel, including what it described as two multimillion-dollar deals through partners.