10 Hot Startups That Raised VC Funding In May
Follow The Money
Venture capital firms are continuing to place bets on the enterprise move to the cloud. Increasingly, though, these investments are around a hybrid cloud model bringing together on-premises environments and public cloud. Our May VC deal list included fundings for three startups with cloud-focused products -- including Skykick, a provider of cloud migration and backup solutions, and Upbound, which offers a way to run services across multiple private and public cloud environments. Other segments that garnered venture rounds during the month included cybersecurity and data analytics, while an AI chip startup, Syntiant, also made our list with funding from Intel Capital.
What follows are our picks for 10 IT startups to watch that landed new funding in May.
Ecobee
Headquarters: Toronto
CEO: Stuart Lombard
Funding: $36 million
Investors: Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, AGL Energy Ltd., Business Development Bank of Canada
What It Does: Maker of smart devices that feature Amazon Alexa voice control, including a smart thermostat and smart light switch
Platform.sh
Headquarters: Paris
CEO: Fred Plais
Funding: $34 million, Series C
Investors: Partech (led the round), Idinvest Partners, Benhamou Global Ventures, SNCF Digital Ventures, Hi Inov
What It Does: Developer of a continuous deployment cloud hosting solution
Reltio
Headquarters: Redwood Shores, Calif.
CEO: Manish Sood
Funding: $45 million, Series D
Investors: New Enterprise Associates (led the round), Crosslink Capital, .406 Ventures, Sapphire Ventures
What It Does: Provider of the Reltio Cloud Self-Learning Data Platform, a platform-as-a-service system for master data management as well as predictive analytics and machine learning
SafeBreach
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.
CEO: Guy Bejerano
Funding: $15 million, Series B
Investors: Draper Nexus (led the round), PayPal, Sequoia Capital, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, HPE Pathfinder
What It Does: Offers a platform for breach and attack simulation, which helps to predict attacks by providing a "hacker's view" of security systems at an organization
SkyKick
Headquarters: Seattle
Co-CEOs: Todd Schwartz and Evan Richman
Funding: $40 million
Investors: Navin Thukkaram, Tim Ferriss, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Craig Nerenberg
What It Does: Developer of cloud migration and backup solutions for products such as Microsoft Office 365
Syntiant
Headquarters: Irvine, Calif.
CEO: Kurt Busch
Funding: Undisclosed amount, Series A
Investors: Intel Capital
What It Does: Developer of a low-power semiconductor aimed at bringing machine learning to edge devices
Tanium
Headquarters: Emeryville, Calif.
CEO: Orion Hindawi
Funding: $175 million
Investors: TPG Growth
What It Does: Provides technology for continuously scanning all endpoints in a network, in order to detect vulnerabilities and unmanaged devices
ThoughtSpot
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
CEO: Ajeet Singh
Funding: $145 million, Series D
Investors: Lightspeed Ventures, Future Fund, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Sapphire Ventures
What It Does: Offers an analytics platform for using "Google-like" search in order to analyze enterprise data and generate business insights
Virtru
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
CEO: John Ackerly
Funding: $37.5 million, Series B
Investors: Iconiq Capital (led the round), Bessemer Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Samsung NEXT, Blue Delta Capital, Thyra Global, Soros Capital
What It Does: Provides data protection and data privacy solutions, for more easily controlling sensitive data wherever it's located
Upbound
Headquarters: Seattle
CEO: Bassam Tabbara
Funding: $9 million, Series A
Investors: GV
What It Does: Offers solutions for running, scaling and optimizing an organization's services across multiple public and private cloud environments