10 Cool Tech Companies That Raised Funding In May 2020

Cloud and big-data innovators were among the companies that hauled in funding rounds in May.

Follow The Money

Despite the continuing economic and health crisis, May was a good month for innovative tech companies in categories including cloud and big data. Funding rounds that made our May list included major deals for two enterprise database platform developers, Couchbase ($105 million) and Cockroach Labs ($86.6 million). Investment in cloud technologies developers--including fundings for Wasabi, BetterCloud and DigitalOcean--was another top theme of the month, as the COVID-19 pandemic has put the spotlight on cloud benefits such as agility and flexibility.

What follows are our picks for 10 cool tech companies that landed new funding in May.

BetterCloud

Headquarters: New York
CEO: David Politis
Funding: $75 million
Investors: Warburg Pincus (led the round), Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, New Amsterdam Growth Capital, Greycroft, e.ventures
What it does: Provides a platform for SaaSOps, or Software-as-a-Service operations, with management capabilities that cover SaaS ecosystems including Google, Microsoft and Salesforce
CEO Quote: "In the last decade, we've experienced major inflection points in the transition to SaaS, from the rise of cloud office suites like Salesforce, Google Apps, and O365, to what we today call the digital workplace with a best-in-breed application for virtually every function. But the forced move to remote work in the last two months has accelerated this shift — and there's no turning back."

Cockroach Labs

Headquarters: New York
CEO: Spencer Kimball
Funding: $86.6 million, Series D
Investors: Altimeter Capital and Bond Capital (led the round), Benchmark, GV, Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Capital
What it does: Developer of enterprise-class distributed SQL database software
CEO Quote: "What cannot be taken for granted in the rush to the cloud is resiliency and scalability, which is near impossible to do without a distributed database that is elastic and self-healing … CockroachDB was purpose-built for mission-critical, data-intensive, cloud-deployed applications, and as a result, we are seeing a tremendous increase in demand for our services from companies small and large looking for bulletproof resiliency, effortless scalability and an overall more cost-effective platform."

Contentsquare

Headquarters: New York
CEO: Jonathan Cherki
Funding: $190 million, Series D
Investors: BlackRock’s Private Equity Partners (led the round), Bpifrance, Eurazeo Growth, Canaan, Hermes GPE, Highland Europe, H14, KKR
What it does: Developer of customer behavior analysis software
CEO Quote: "This investment during these uncertain times is a proof of the fantastic job our teams have done. It validates the strength of our vision for the next five years and extends our global leadership in experience analytics at a time when these capabilities are critical to all businesses. We have the ambition to accelerate the world’s digital transformation, by unlocking a full understanding of online behaviors."

Couchbase

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
CEO: Matt Cain
Funding: $105 million
Investors: GPI Capital (led the round), Accel, Sorenson Capital, North Bridge Venture Partners, Glynn Capital, Adams Street Partners, Mayfield
What it does: Provider of an enterprise NoSQL server and mobile database platform, along with a fully managed Database-as-a-Service offering
CEO Quote: "More and more, the largest companies in the world truly run their businesses on Couchbase, architecting their most business-critical applications on our platform. This has become even more pronounced today as all companies are closely evaluating their digital strategies while carefully managing their capital allocation plans. Completing this funding round in the current climate is a testament to the importance of modern databases and the relevance of Couchbase as we continue our path to becoming a large, public company."

DigitalOcean

Headquarters: New York
CEO: Yancey Spruill
Funding: $50 million, Series C
Investors: Access Industries (led the round), Andreessen Horowitz
What it does: Offers infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service solutions that aim to simplify app creation for developers
CEO Quote: "We are delighted to extend our partnership with Access and a16z and see this capital as adding strength to our balance sheet enabling us to better serve our customers’ demand for our platform, especially during COVID-19 where we are seeing an acceleration of businesses transitioning to the cloud. We are now freed up to focus on accelerating revenue growth, transitioning to free cash flow profitability in 2020 and positioning our company ultimately to be a public company."

GigaSpaces

Headquarters: New York
CEO: Adi Paz
Funding: $12 million
Investors: Fortissimo Capital (led the round), Claridge Israel, BRM Group
What it does: Developer of in-memory data analytics and processing software
CEO Quote: "Data is a critical strategic asset that must be managed and leveraged correctly to provide insights, intelligence and actions for modern services and applications such as real-time fraud detection, risk analysis, instant payments, personalized offers, customer 360, dynamic pricing and more. This funding will help us drive accelerated growth to help more customers deliver on their data-driven promise."

Liongard

Headquarters: Houston
CEO: Joe Alapat
Funding: $17 million, Series B
Investors: Updata Partners (led the round), TDF Ventures, Integr8d Capital
What it does: Liongard's flagship product, Roar, gives MSPs visibility into on-premise apps, network devices and cloud services
CEO Quote: "Since the launch of Liongard, the platform’s adoption and popularity with MSPs has grown rapidly, transforming Liongard into a highly recognized brand in the MSP ecosystem. This new investment and the continued confidence of our investors will fuel our growth by giving us the means to further advance our solution’s capabilities and serve our customers at an even better level."

Orca Security

Headquarters: Los Angeles
CEO: Avi Shua
Funding: $20 million, Series A
Investors: GGV Capital (led the round), YL Ventures, Silicon Valley CISO Investments
What it does: Provides a cloud security solution that aims to quickly analyze all cloud assets and find risks including vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations and password issues--without per-asset integrations or agents
CEO Quote: "You can’t continue to iterate on tools designed for on-prem environments and expect to win the coverage game in the cloud. You lose both agility and security. Orca Security has developed an entirely new way of helping organizations identify, understand, and prioritize cloud security issues—without slowing their innovation or worrying about the thoroughness of their coverage."

Virtana

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
CEO: Ron Sege
Funding: $15 million
Investors: HighBar Partners, Benhamou Global Ventures
What it does: Offers a platform for enterprise hybrid cloud migration and optimization
CEO Quote: "We are seeing unprecedented demand from our customers to deliver scalable, high performance, and resilient infrastructure with a low total cost of ownership – especially in the current climate. Businesses need to know how their hybrid infrastructure is performing and map, plan, and validate optimization and migration. With this new financing, Virtana will leverage its deep domain expertise in both private and public cloud and facilitate the deployment of a multi-cloud infrastructure for enterprise users."

Wasabi

Headquarters: Boston
CEO: David Friend
Funding: $30 million
Investors: Forestay Capital
What it does: Provides hot cloud storage for businesses
CEO Quote: "In an extremely difficult funding market, we’ve been able to raise money at a significant uptick in valuation. We focus 100% of our attention on doing one thing really, really well: storing data in the cloud. Our investors recognize the power of our business model and the virtually limitless market opportunity that we are addressing."