Follow The Money: 13 Tech Venture Capital Investments In July

Show Me The Money

Our roundup for the month of July has 13 startup companies that collectively raised more than $750 million. While that included a stunning $450 million for high-visibility big data analytics company Palantir, that still left a pretty good chunk of change across the other dozen companies on this month's list.

While the majority of the companies are in security or big data, still seemingly the hottest segments of the IT industry, the July list includes startups with DevOps and development technology, mobility management tools, procurement applications and a company with technology targeting the Internet-of-Things.

Cazena

Headquarters: Waltham, Mass.

CEO: Prat Moghe

New Funding: $20 million

Round: Series B

Backers: Formation 8, Andreessen Horowitz and North Bridge Venture Partners

Startup Cazena exited stealth mode in July and after two years of development launched its Big Data-as-a-Service platform that's designed to securely move and process big data in the cloud.

Many on Cazena's management team previously worked at such business analytics companies as Netezza, Endeca, DataStax, Unica and others.

Cazena's first three managed cloud services are Data Lake-as-a-Service, Data Warehouse-as-a-Service and Sandbox-as-a-Service. The services, which effectively extend an enterprise data center into a secure cloud infrastructure, incorporate multiple data engines, including Hadoop, MPP SQL and Spark.

Continuum Analytics

Headquarters: Austin, Texas

CEO: Travis Oliphant

New Funding: $24 million

Round: Series A

Backers: General Catalyst Partners and BuildGroup

Continuum Analytics develops Anaconda, an open-source analytics platform powered by Python, the object-oriented, high-level programming language. The platform enables organizations to quickly analyze, manage and visualize big data for making critical decisions.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) provided earlier funding for Continuum Analytics, which was founded in 2012.

The company will use the new funding to accelerate product development, expand sales and marketing, and invest in strengthening the Python and Anaconda communities.

CrowdStrike

Headquarters: Irvine, Calif.

CEO: George Kurtz

New Funding: $100 million

Round: Series C

Backers: Google Capital, Rackspace, Accel and Warburg Pincus

CrowdStrike is a fast-rising star in the hot IT security industry, developing its Falcon technology the company calls the first true Software-as-a-Service, next-generation endpoint security platform.

The company has more than tripled its growth in total billings in the last year and recorded a 550 percent CAGR for annual recurring revenue for the past three years. In the last year, it has significantly grown its core customer base and tripled its number of employees.

The new round of funding brings CrowdStrike's total financing to $156 million.

Cylance

Headquarters: Irvine, Calif.

CEO: Stuart McClure

New Funding: $42 million

Round: Series C

Backers: DFJ Growth, KKR, Dell Ventures, CapitalOne Ventures and TenEleven Ventures

Another hot startup in the IT security arena, Cylance develops next-generation antivirus and endpoint-protection software. The technology does away with signature-based approaches used by traditional endpoint security vendors and uses mathematics and algorithms to spot suspect behavior.

The startup, founded in July 2012, has recorded 400 percent year-over-year growth. The company plans to use the additional funding toward its marketing efforts, including building out its channel program.

Mobi

Headquarters: Indianapolis

CEO: Scott Kraege

New Funding: $35 million

Round: Minority Equity Stake

Backers: Bregal Sagemount

Mobi provides cloud-based software and services that help companies manage their mobile-device environments. The company's technology helps overcome the complexities associated with integrating employee mobile devices with wireless carriers, mobile-device-management systems, corporate IT systems and more.

Mobi plans to use the capital infusion to expand its development work, including focusing on building business intelligence into the next evolution of the Mobi technology. The company also will invest in broader go-to-market strategies.

Palantir Technologies

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.

CEO: Alexander Karp

New Funding: $450 million

Round: Private Equity

Backers: Undisclosed

Palantir Technologies develops advanced data-mining software that's used by government intelligence and defense agencies, financial service companies and health-care organizations. The company, founded in 2004, has raised a total of $1.6 billion in financing, giving it a market valuation of $20 billion.

Pneuron Corp.

Headquarters: Nashua, N.H.

CEO: Simon Moss

New Funding: $5 million

Round: Series B

Backers: Safeguard Scientifics, Osage Partners and Scott Group

Pneuron developed the Pneuron Distributed Platform, an integration and development system that connects IT, applications, data sources, analytics and processes throughout a distributed organization. The platform includes elements of service-oriented architecture, distributed computing, business process management and data ETL (extract, transform and load) technologies.

Pneuron has seen revenue growth at a CAGR of 173 percent since its last round of funding in March 2013. The company, founded in 2010, will use the additional financing to hire more personnel in sales, sales engineering and implementation services.

Procurify

Headquarters: Richmond, B.C.

CEO: Aman Mann

New Funding: $4 million

Round: Seed Funding

Backers: Point Nina Capital, Nexus Venture Partners and the Business Development Bank of Canada, plus Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes and chief revenue officer Steve Johnson

Procurify develops cloud-based B2B procurement applications that are designed to help small and midsize companies make their purchasing operations more effective and efficient.

The startup funds will be used to accelerate product development and expand its purchasing platform. The company also plans to hire more sales and marketing staff.

PubNub

Headquarters: San Francisco

CEO: Todd Greene

New Funding: $20 million

Round: Series C

Backers: Sapphire Ventures, Relay Ventures and Scale Venture Partners

PubNub, founded in 2010, provides a secure global data stream network and APIs that businesses use to connect, scale and manage real-time applications and Internet-of-Things devices. In late May, the company announced that it had more than 2,000 customers and partners averaging 20 billion real-time transactions per minute across 200 million devices.

Transifex

Headquarters: Menlo Park, Calif.

CEO: Dimitris Glezos

New Funding: $4 million

Round: Series A

Backers: Toba Capital, NEA, Arafura Ventures and several angel investors, including Parse founder and CEO Ilya Sukhar

Transifex brings localization into the DevOps arena, providing development organizations with a way to scale and accelerate the process of translating and localizing content, including software, into multiple languages. Recent customer wins include Orbitz, Deezer, SoundCloud and Trello.

Founded in Greece, the company has its secondary headquarters in Athens.

Venafi

Headquarters: Salt Lake City

CEO: Jeff Hudson

New Funding: $39 million

Round: Series F

Backers: QuestMark Partners, Intel Capital, Silver Lake Waterman and other existing investors

Venafi calls itself "the immune system for the Internet" with its Venafi Trust Protection Platform, which secures the cryptographic keys and digital certificates that are the foundation for all cybersecurity systems. Venafi targets its products toward Global 5000 businesses.

The company plans to use the investment to accelerate development of the Venafi platform.

VoltDB

Headquarters: Bedford, Mass.

CEO: Bruce Reading

New Funding: $9.8 million

Round: Venture Round

Backers: Undisclosed strategic investors, plus existing investors Kepha Partners and Sigma Prime Ventures

VoltDB develops an in-memory, scale-out SQL database that the company positions as an alternative to mainstream relational databases from competitors such as Oracle and Microsoft. The database is designed to handle huge volumes of data and perform real-time analytics tasks.

VoltDB recently released Version 5.4 of its database. The vendor offers both commercial Enterprise and free Community editions of the software.

WireX Cube Systems

Headquarters: Tal Shahar, Israel

CEO: Tomer Saban

New Funding: $9.3 million

Round: Series A

Backers: Vertex Venture Capital, Magma Venture Capital and Entrée Capital, along with private investors Mickey Boodaei (co-founder of Imperva and Trusteer), Rakesh Loonkar (co-founder of Trusteer) and Idan Plotnik (founder of Aorato)

WireX develops technology in the area of network forensics that IT organizations use to effectively resolve cyberattacks while minimizing the need for expert-level security teams. The system translates network traffic into human-readable intelligence that helps IT managers understand network security incidents.

WireX, founded in 2010, will use the new funding to expand its Israeli-based research and development efforts and to establish a U.S. headquarters.