Follow The Money: 10 VC Investments To Watch In May

Show Me The Money

May brought tech venture capital investments in security, data and analytics, cloud, Software-as-a-Service solutions and more. Take a look at 10 companies, plus a bonus, that brought in big-bucks venture capital investments over the past month, and their plans for investing in and expanding their businesses going forward.

Netskope

Headquarters: Los Altos, Calif.
CEO: Sanjay Beri
New Funding: $35 million
Round: C
Backers: Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, The Social+Capital Partnership

Cloud app analytics and policy enforcement company Netskope has raised $35 million to put towards growing its business, including R&D, sales, marketing and more. The Netskope Active Platform helps companies keep an eye on and optimize enterprise cloud usage. Making fast moves in the market, Netskope has hired more than 100 employees, worked with more than 100 companies, launched a channel program and raised a total of $56.4 million in venture capital funding since its October 2013 launch.

TeleSign

Headquarters: Los Angeles
CEO: Steve Jillings
New Funding: $40 million
Round: B
Backers: Adams Street Partners, March Capital Partners, Summit Partners

As mobile security becomes more and more important, TeleSign is helping protect mobile users by establishing and verifying them through its Mobile Identity platform. The platform already works to protect 3.5 billion accounts, with the company planning to use the new funding to continue growth, innovation and move toward an IPO.

Pepperdata

Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.
CEO: Sean Suchter
New Funding: $5 million
Round: A
Backers: Signia Venture Partners, Webb Investment Network, Jerry Yang (founding partner of AME Cloud Ventures and co-founder of Yahoo), Ed Zander (former CEO and Chairman of Motorola), Andy Ludwick (founding CEO of Bay Networks)

Founded by Yahoo and Microsoft vets, Pepperdata brings predictability, capacity and visibility to Hadoop. "We operate in a world where thousand-node Hadoop clusters are becoming commonplace," said Sean Suchter, co-founder and CEO. "We want to make running multiple big data applications on a single cluster as easy as running [them] on your laptop."

Igneous Systems

Headquarters: Seattle
CEO: Kiran Bhageshpur
New Funding: $23.6 million
Round: A
Backers: New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Isilon Systems (co-founder, Sujal Patel)

With cloud technologies changing the landscape of enterprises, Igneous Systems is working to change the way enterprises are building and scaling data centers using the cloud. With a team of executives and engineers from tech giants such as Amazon Web Services, NetApp, EMC and Microsoft Azure, Igneous had already raised $3 million in its seed round. The latest round of funding will help accelerate product development, CEO Kiran Bhageshpur said.

Metacloud

Headquarters: Pasadena, Calif.
CEO: Sean Lynch
New Funding: $15 million
Round: B
Backers: Pelion Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, UMC Capital, AME Cloud Ventures, Canaan Partners, Storm Ventures

After growing rapidly over the past year, including more than doubling its installed base over a single quarter and posting 10 percent customer growth every month, Metacloud has raised an additional $15 million in funding for its As-a-Service OpenStack cloud offering. The vendor offers both on-premise and hosted private cloud solutions, giving customers the benefit of both public and private cloud through OpenStack solutions. The company will use the new funding to grow R&D and expand head count.

Edgewater Networks

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
CEO: Dave Norman
New Funding: $5 million
Round: Debt Financing
Backers: Eastward Capital

Edgewater Networks has generated $5 million in additional funding for its networking products that help promote secure and reliable unified communications for enterprises and solution providers, bringing the company's total debt and equity funding to $36 million. The new funding will help the company push forward into managed services and develop new technologies around Software Defined Networking and Network Functions Virtualization.

Attensity

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
CEO: Howard Lau
New Funding: $90 million
Round: Equity
Backers: Undisclosed

In a two-part announcement, Attensity has raised $90 million for its analytics technology and expanded Howard Lau's role to CEO. The technology provides analytics into multichannel data on customer sentiments to help clients better serve customer needs and market more effectively. Attensity will use the round of funding from an undisclosed international private equity fund and financial adviser company to develop its products, grow its market reach and boost head count in marketing, sales and engineering.

Infrascale

Headquarters: El Segundo, Calif.
CEO: Ken Shaw Jr.
New Funding: $16.3 million
Round: B
Backers: Undisclosed

To take advantage of a $2 billion market for backup and recovery, Infrascale has raised $16.3 million for its software defined infrastructure business. It will use the funding to acquire Eversync Solutions, a Salt Lake City-based company, offering an all-in-one hybrid cloud backup solution for backup, archiving, replication and disaster recovery. The acquisition will allow Infrascale to bolster its channel partner support for data protection services, the company said.

SalesPredict

Headquarters: Netanya, Israel
CEO: Yaron Zakai-Or
New Funding: $4.1 million
Round: A
Backers: Yandex, KGC Capital and existing investors

With its SaaS-based solution to help B2B companies grow their sales revenues, SalesPredict has raised $4.1 million in Series A funding, bringing its total raised so far to $5.3 million. The solution uses data and analytics from CRM systems, social media, proprietary data and the Internet to help determine the best sales prospects and find new leads. The company will use the new funding to expand sales and marketing efforts.

EVRYTHING

Headquarters: London, New York
CEO: Niall Murphy
New Funding: $7 million
Round: A
Backers: Cisco, Atomico, BHLP LLC, Dawn Capital

With a corporate investment from Cisco and others, EVRYTHING has raised $7 million for its managed SaaS applications for devices connecting into the Internet of Things (IoT). The investment will push the company forward in the growing global market for IoT, especially with new investor Cisco, the company said. "The investment allows us to accelerate our mission to connect every individual product to the web with its own intelligent online identity, working with global product manufacturer and retail brands," CEO Niall Murphy said.

OpenDNS

Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: David Ulevitch
New Funding: $35 million
Round: Undisclosed
Backers: Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures, Glynn Capital, Cisco, Evolution Equity, Lumia Capital, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Northgate Capital

OpenDNS has raised $35 million to continue its cloud-based security operations, including Umbrella, a global security delivery mechanism, and Security Graph, a predictive threat intelligence platform. With 50 million daily active users and 10,000 enterprise customers, OpenDNS already has taken a strong market position in security, establishing itself as one of the leading providers of cloud-based security solutions.