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

January Round Up

January kicked off the year with strong venture capital investments in all areas of technology, from big data to touchscreen development to health-care solutions and more. This month's round up doles out close to $180 million in funds to companies making moves in the marketplace.

Here are 10 companies to keep an eye on that received venture capital investments in the past month.

MemSQL

Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Eric Frenkiel
New Funding: $35 million
Round: B
Backers: Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Data Collective

Jumping on board of the big data market, which is expected to hit $32.4 billion by 2017, MemSQL has created an in-memory, clustered application designed to support high-volume online transaction processing and analytics, led by two former Facebook engineers. The latest round of funding will be used to develop the product, support customers and expand in the marketplace, with the round bringing the company's venture capital total to $45 million.

Voxeet

Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Stephane Giraudie
New Funding: $1.5 million
Round: Seed
Backers: Partech Ventures, Aquiti, Kima Ventures, angel investors

Voxeet is a San Francisco-based startup that delivers high-quality audio conferencing services to business clients in Europe and the U.S. The differentiator for Voxeet from other conferencing services on the market is the high-quality audio and the focus on the SMB marketplace, the company said. The Voxeet app can be downloaded for free from the iTunes or Google Play store, as well as on the Voxeet website for PC use. Voxeet's first round of funding will be used for marketing efforts and product development, the company said.

Intercom

Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Eoghan McCabe
New Funding: $23 million
Round: B
Backers: Bessemer Venture Partners, The Social+Capital Partnership

Intercom has received $23 million, bringing its venture capital total to $30 million, to put toward product development and market base expansion. Even though it only launched from beta a year and a half ago, Intercom's personal messaging service for businesses has been gaining immense traction in the marketplace. It already has more than 2,000 paying businesses, including HootSuite, Yahoo, Rackspace and more. Intercom also brought on former PayPal and Yammer exec Mark Woolway as its COO.

Kareo

Headquarters: Irvine, Calif.
CEO: Dan Rodrigues
New Funding: $29.5 million
Round: Undisclosed
Backers: Greenspring Associates, OpenView Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank

Providing cloud-based medical office software and services for small-size medical clients, Kareo received $29.5 million in growth capital to increase its marketing and sales efforts and grow the platform. The investment comes after an exciting year for Kareo, which rapidly grew its Kareo Practice Management solution to more than 20,000 providers handling more than $6 million in billing. The company also launched its Kareo EHR for medical records last year, and it made big moves with its acquisition of Ecco Health.

Motion Engine Inc.

Headquarters: Montreal, Canada
CEO: Louis Ross
New Funding: $1 million
Round: Seed
Backers: Angel investors

Angel investors from the U.S., Canada and Asia banded together to give $1 million in seed round funding to Motion Engine Inc. (MEI). The new funding round will allow MEI to continue development of the company's next-generation motion sensing-enabled systems technology. MEI's proprietary MEMS technology allows the company to bring down the size and cost of microsystems while boosting performance. The fab-free MEMS device maker is the only company in Canada that makes commercial-grade inertial sensors, according to a company press release.

Confer

Headquarters: Waltham, Mass.
CEO: Mark Quinlivan
New Funding: $8 million
Round: A
Backers: Matrix Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners

With all the buzz around cybersecurity issues since the beginning of the year, it's good timing for cybersecurity software company Confer to raise $8 million in Series A funding. The company's software allows for companies to share information on cybersecurity threats, creating a network of protection against threats.

"We saw that big companies were collaborating on sharing threat information, but they were doing it manually -- emails and calls," Confer CEO Mark Quinlivan said in a statement at the time. "We're giving them threat intelligence, and allowing them to automatically share that with circles of trust."

uTest

Headquarters: Framingham, Mass.
CEO: Doron Reuveni
New Funding: $43 million
Round: E
Backers: Goldman Sachs, QuestMark Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Longworth Venture Partners, Mass Ventures, Egan-Managed Capital, Mesco Ltd.

In advance of its planned IPO, uTest has raised $43 million in Series E funding for its crowd-sourced app-testing service, which tests apps to ensure quality and provides insights into what a consumer likes or dislikes about an app. The company plans to soon rebrand itself in early 2014 from uTest to Applause, the name of the company's flagship product that launched a year ago.

Invoca

Headquarters: Santa Barbara, Calif.
CEO: Jason Spievak
New Funding: $20 million
Round: C
Backers: Accel Partners, Upfront Ventures, Rincon Venture Partners

After four straight years of revenue growths of nearly 200 percent year over year, Invoca has reeled in $20 million in venture capital funding in January. The company is now the largest provider of cloud-based marketing technology for inbound calls, which is becoming a standard for Fortune 1000 companies. The platform helps companies generate marketing leads and analytics as well as raise conversion rates, the company said. The latest round of funding will be used to scale and accelerate revenue growth.

SalesFusion

Headquarters: Atlanta
CEO: Christian Nahas
New Funding: $8.25 million
Round: B
Backers: Noro-Moseley Partners, BLH Venture Partners, Hallett Capital

After launching a channel program and rebranding itself over the past year, marketing automation company SalesFusion has raised $8.25 million in venture capital from cloud investment veterans. The new funding will allow the company to expand organically and through acquisition, which the company has already begun to set in motion. In January, the company acquired marketing automation and social listening company LoopFuse, and it moved into its new, larger headquarters in Atlanta.

FlatFrog

Headquarters: Lund, Sweden
CEO: Dhwani Vyas
New Funding: $10 million
Round: Undisclosed
Backers: Invus, Sunstone Capital and Intel Capital

In-glass multitouch systems provider FlatFrog received $10 million in funds to support the commercialization of its technology and expansion into Asia. FlatFrog's touch technology differentiates itself by providing a lower cost alternative without a sensor grid, which lowers image degradation, maximum transparency and pressure sensing.

"We are seeing very strong reception to our FlatFrog in-glass optical touch product from consumer PC OEMs and other large screen size format players. The fact that our existing investors fully subscribed this round reaffirms the confidence in this technology and progress made by FlatFrog," CEO Dhwani Vyas said.