Follow The Money: 15 VC Investments To Watch In September

Show Me The Money

September investment activity saw a variety of raises that ranged from seed to late-stage funding for companies representing a mix of industries.

Investor groups also ran the gamut, and included venture capital firms and captive investors but also brought in a number of individual investors, such as celebrity Jared Leto.

Click through to see a sprinkling of some of the deals that hit the investment community this past month.

Docker

Headquarters: San Francisco

CEO: Ben Golub

New Funding: $40 million

Round: Series C

Backers: Sequoia Capital along with Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Insight Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Yahoo Co-Founder Jerry Yang

Open source startup Docker continues to nab big-name brands and get them to move to the company's platform.

Recent additions include Gilt Groupe, which operates the popular e-commerce site Gilt, and software analytics firm New Relic. Docker's latest funding round follows a Series B raise in January and represents a near tripling in round size compared with previous raises.

"Looking forward over the next 18 months, we'll see another Docker-led transformation, this one aimed at the heart of application architecture," CEO Ben Golub said in a blog post the day the funding was announced. "This transformation will be a shift from slow-to-evolve, monolithic applications to dynamic, distributed ones."

Auth0

Headquarters: Seattle

CEO: Jon Gelsey

New Funding: $2.4 million

Round: Seed

Backers: Round led by Bessemer Venture Partners and included K9 Ventures, Portland Seed Fund and NXTP Labs

Auth0's claim is it's a "company founded by developers for developers."

The Identity-as-a-Service solution provider's identity infrastructure allows companies' developers and IT executives to bypass the need to build it themselves.

More than 8,000 professionals in the media, financial and consumer sectors, among others, use the solution, according to Auth0.

The company's seed funding will go toward hiring more developers and making the solution more robust with additional features.

Cloudyn

Headquarters: San Francisco

CEO: Sharon Wagner

New Funding: $4 million

Round: Series A

Backers: Titanium Investments along with RDSeed

Cloudyn is looking to expand the roster of cloud-computing platforms it supports in response to customer demand, and new funding should help with that.

The company, which provides cloud monitoring and optimization services, currently supports Amazon Web Services, Google GCE and OpenStack. It's now in talks to add Microsoft Azure and VMware.

The company said it has doubled its revenue for six straight quarters. CEO Sharon Wagner declined to provide a revenue figure for the company in an interview with CRN earlier this month. Cloudyn's Series A funding brings its total raised to date to $5.5 million.

Apropose

Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.

CEO: Jerry Talton

New Funding: $1.88 million

Round: Seed

Backers: New Enterprise Associates and Andreessen Horowitz along with Tableau Founder Pat Hanrahan and Nicira Founder Nick McKeown

Apropose was born out of research in Stanford University's computer science department.

The software maker aims to provide a web analytics platform that makes site design easier. It achieves this by combing the web and aggregating site information from throughout the Internet to help compare the efficacy of certain site designs or track popular ones, among other functions.

The company expects to launch its first product this year.

LightCyber

Headquarters: U.S. office in New York

CEO: Gonen Fink

New Funding: $10 million

Round: Series A

Backers: Battery Ventures along with Glilot Capital and Check Point Software founder Marius Nacht

Investments in cybersecurity companies are hot, and LightCyber is one of several to benefit from the trend.

The company's solutions help automate breach detections. Its LightCyber Magna looks at network traffic and endpoint information to analyze if a breach has occurred.

The funding will be funneled to U.S. sales and marketing efforts aimed at the enterprise.

Delta ID

Headquarters: Newark, Calif.

CEO: Salil Prabhakar

New Funding: $5 million

Round: Series A

Backers: Intel Capital, among other investors

Delta ID's iris-recognition technology turned the head of Intel Capital.

Intel was part of a group of investors that participated in Delta ID's Series A round.

The company's biometric authentication technology, called Active IRIS, is aimed at various computing devices with a goal of reaching the broader consumer market for use with transactions, such as electronic payments.

Black Duck Software

Headquarters: Burlington, Mass.

CEO: Lou Shipley

New Funding: $20 million

Round: Series F

Backers: Led by General Catalyst Venture Partners and included existing investors

Open-source software provider Black Duck has global growth on its mind.

That's where capital raised from its latest funding round will go toward, along with pushing the company's presence in the OSS logistics segment.

Black Duck also named Stephen Gregorio chief financial officer and executive vice president with the latest funding disclosure.

"Over the next 18 months, we will release powerful, new solutions aimed at solving critical supply-chain and software development challenges that have resulted from the explosive growth of OSS in enterprises worldwide," Shipley said in a statement.

LiveAction

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.

CEO: Darren Kimura

New Funding: $5.35 million

Round: Series A

Backers: Led by AITV along with Cisco Investments and Enerdigm Ventures

LiveAction's enterprise software helps companies manage their networks.

The company originally started out developing its software for the U.S. Department of Defense and has since broadened its user base.

"Our investment in LiveAction underscores the market interest in bringing software-defined networking to the Wide Area Network in large-scale environments, Cisco Vice President of Network Transformation for Enterprise Networks Jeff Reed said in a statement.

The funding will go toward sales and marketing growth and will be particularly useful as LiveAction makes its move to the cloud.

Symphony Commerce

Headquarters: San Francisco

CEO: Harish Abbott

New Funding: $21.5 million

Round: Series B

Backers: Led by CRV along with Bain Capital Ventures and FirstMark Capital

Symphony operates in the Commerce-as-a-Service space.

Its solutions help companies -- at the retail and wholesale levels -- with their web or mobile storefronts, marketing, fulfillment and logistics.

That means helping a company upsell, for example, by analyzing what a customer has searched for or viewed on a web page to send a customized invoice that might pitch related projects or coupons.

Adjust

Headquarters: U.S. office in San Francisco

CEO: Christian Henschel

New Funding: $7.6 million

Round: Series C

Backers: ACTIVE Venture Partners along with Target Partners, Iris Capital and Capnamic Ventures

Adjust is targeting the U.S. and Asian markets for its expansion. Its Series C funding will be used to boost the company's presence and business in those regions, which account for about 40 percent of its overall revenue. And that's growing. New client signups are coming at a rapid clip, with about 100 signed on weekly.

Adjust's technology is used to provide app analytics to marketers.

The company named Shawn Bonham to managing director of Japan and Southeast Asia, a new position at Adjust, effective Oct. 1.

EdCast

Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.

CEO: Karl Mehta

New Funding: $6 million

Round: Series A

Backers: SoftBank Capital along with Mitch Kapor of Kapor Capital, Menlo Ventures, Novel TMT Ventures and the Stanford StartX Fund, among others

The idea behind EdCast is to create what founder and CEO Karl Mehta calls a "multiversity." EdCast's cloud-based learning network, called EdCast Knowledge Cloud, supports educational portals for universities, educators, enterprises and governments to work together.

The company landed work with the United Nations for the organization's Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which is expected to help connect more than 200 institutions throughout the world.

EdCast is a participant of Stanford University's StartX accelerator program.

Radius

Headquarters: San Francisco

CEO: Darian Shirazi

New Funding: $54.7 million

Round: Series C

Backers: BlueRun Ventures, Formation 8 Partners, Founders Fund, former Microsoft Corporate Vice President Charles Songhurst and celebrity Jared Leto, among others

Participants in Radius' latest funding round included an assortment of characters.

There were the more traditional venture capital firms mixed in with actor and musician Jared Leto, former Morgan Stanley Chair John Mack and former Microsoft Corporate Vice President Charles Songhurst.

The enterprise software maker's technology helps companies analyze customer data via realtime analytics and measures the efficacy of campaigns.

Taulia

Headquarters: San Francisco

CEO: Bertram Meyer

New Funding: $40 million

Round: Series D

Backers: BBVA Ventures and EDBI, among others

Taulia tacked on another $13 million to its Series D round, which now totals $40 million.

The round's initial $27 million was raised in July and now brings the company's total capital raised to $70 million.

Taulia provides a Software-as-a-Service platform that's used for supplier financing and portals.

The company's growth trajectory has seen it expand into new industries, such as health care, and food and beverage. That growth has supported new office openings in the U.S. and Europe, with the company on track to grow revenue this year.

Jiff

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.

CEO: Derek Newell

New Funding: $18 million

Round: Series B

Backers: Venrock

Jiff hopes to ride on the popularity of health consciousness and wearables for its own growth.

The company's latest funding round will go toward sales and marketing, and growing its roster of sales and distribution partners.

"Just as iTunes provided a platform for digital music, Jiff is the platform for digital health programs and wearables, offering employees choice and smart recommendations," Jiff CEO Derek Newell said in a release.

The platform is aimed at self-insured employers.

Agari

Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.

CEO: Patrick Peterson

New Funding: $15 million

Round: Series C

Backers: Led by Scale Venture Partners along with Alloy Ventures, Battery Ventures and First Round Capital, among others

Security solutions provider Agari has notched growth gains.

It has doubled its client count and tripled revenue, according to the company. Its customer base includes the financial services, e-commerce and health-care sectors.

Agari's latest funding round brings its total raised to $22.7 million.

The company's cloud-based solution focuses on helping users identify and prevent email attacks.