Follow The Money: 10 Recent VC Tech Investments To Watch In February 2013

Big Money

Tech startups are once again pounding the pavement for backers with deep pockets, and for some -- particularly in the cloud, networking, storage, analytics and mobility segments -- there have been some handsome paydays in recent weeks.

Every month here on CRN, we'll track some tech company funding rounds from the past six weeks worthy of industry attention. Here's a look at the latest notable infusions -- and the companies that drove them.

AppGratis

HQ: Paris
CEO: Simon Dawlat
New Funding: $13.5 million
Round: A
Backers: Iris Capital, Orange Publicis Fund, others


Managing mobile apps has become big, billion-dollar business, and a number of startups are rolling up their sleeves to be part of it. One is AppGratis, which closed a Series A round in mid-January and claims upwards of $1 million in monthly revenue. Its hook is a simple one: help users find mobile applications they want and need more easily in an increasingly crowded field of apps and app stores. The company works with more than 6,000 developers.

AppNexus

HQ: New York
CEO: Brian O'Kelley
New Funding: $75 million
Round: D
Backers: Technology Crossover Ventures, Venrock, Tribeca Venture Partners, others


AppNexus' rapid growth has been in the online advertising marketplace, where its customers include everyone from Microsoft Advertising Exchange to Technorati Media. It's now a key company with TCV, one of the country's most powerful tech-focused private equity firms and whose investments also include Facebook, Netflix and Exact Target.

Axcient

HQ: Mountain View, Calif.
CEO: Justin Moore
New Funding: $20 million
Round: D
Backers: Scale Venture Partners, Thomvest Ventures, Peninsula Ventures, Allegis Capital, others


Cloud storage specialist Axcient has sure been busy. Not only did it hire a bevy of veteran executives from Cisco, HP and Dell KACE late last year, it also locked up another $20 million in venture funding to continue its rapid expansion.

"We want to double revenue again in 2013," CEO Justin Moore told CRN in December. "The numbers are getting large now, which points to the caliber of people we are able to attract."

Cellrox

HQ: Tel Aviv, Israel
CEO: Omer Eiferman
New Funding: $4.7 million
Round: A
Backers: Runa Capital, Previz Venture Partners, Columbia Technology Ventures, others


Cellrox positions itself as a "leader in BYOD Multi-persona solutions for mobile devices," and it's getting plenty of attention for its technology, which splits an employee's personal applications and his or her company's data and applications on a mobile device. The company, which was founded in 2011, has a number of OEM and operator partners around the world already.

Curalate

HQ: Philadelphia
CEO: Apu Gupta
New Funding: $3 million
Round: A
Backers: NEA, First Round Capital, MentorTech Ventures, others


Social media analytics are hot, hot, hot, and Curalate is squarely in that market, offering tools for measuring, monitoring and growing branding engagement on visual social media sites such as Pinterest, The Fancy and Instagram. The key word there is "visual"; Curalate says it uses advanced image recognition algorithms at the heart of its products.

DataGravity

HQ: Nashua, N.H.
CEO: Paula Long
New Funding: $30 million
Round: B
Backers: Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, others


DataGravity still isn't saying much about its products or road map, but it sounds an awful lot like a big data startup. John Joseph, the company's president and a former vice president of marketing for EqualLogic, told CRN in late January that "it's safe to say we are going after midsize companies and the data they store and extract information for that data."

SevOne

HQ: Wilmington, Del.
CEO: Mike Phelan
New Funding: $150 million
Round: undesignated
Backers: Bain Capital, others


SevOne makes IT infrastructure management software, and after announcing it had closed 2012 as its sixth consecutive year of growth, also disclosed a whopping $150 million infusion from Bain Capital. The company, which takes its name from what in network manager parlance is a "severity one" performance level, offers virtual and physical appliances for monitoring between 5,000 and 60,000 network elements.

"We were attracted by the incredibly high satisfaction levels of SevOne's customers, the unique differentiation of their technology, and the talented management team," Ben Holzman, partner, Bain Capital Ventures, said in a statement in January.

Symform

HQ: Seattle
CEO: Mark Ashida
New Funding: $11 million
Round: B
Backers: Second Century Ventures, Longworth Venture Partners, OVP Venture Partners, WestRiver Capital, others


Fast-rising cloud storage and backup provider Symform's been on the move big time lately, including with the recent appointment of a new CEO, Mark Ashida. About $8 million of its Series B round was first disclosed back in April 2012, but in mid-January, Symform said it had added an additional investor to the round: Second Century Vendors, the venture capital arm of the National Association of Realtors.

vArmour

HQ: Santa Clara, Calif.
CEO: Roger Lian
New Funding: $6 million
Round: A
Backers: Highland Capital Partners, others


The industrywide hype around software-defined networking (SDN) has naturally created interest in other software-centric technologies germane to the network, including storage and security. In the latter category sits vArmour, which promises state-of-the-art network security for virtualized networking environments. VArmour hasn't yet emerged from stealth mode but its "SDSec" products are in beta evaluation with large enterprise and service provider customers.

Zettaset

HQ: Mountain View, Calif.
CEO: Jim Vogt
New Funding: $10 million
Round: B
Backers: HighBar Partners, Brocade, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Epic Ventures, others


Zettaset covers big data management and security, and its Zettaset Orchestrator, a so-called "distribution-agnostic" management platform, is intended to automate, secure and accelerate Hadoop deployments. Founded in 2009 under the name GOTO Metrics, Zettaset's charging into a space researcher Gartner predicts will hit $34 billion this year.