10 Cool Tech Companies That Raised Funding In August 2023

Network-as-a-service provider Nile, cybersecurity risk platform developer Resilience, DevSecOps platform provider Endor Labs, search and analytics database developer Rockset, and data stack management technology provider Trace are among the companies that raised new financing in August, a list led by AI development tool company Hugging Face.

Follow The Money

The venture capital funding drought has lasted more than a year and funding rounds of $100 million or more, common before 2022, remain something of a rarity amidst economic uncertainty and low company valuations.

But there are early signs that funding for startups at all stages is beginning to flow again. A report from Bain & Co. on Aug. 11 says global venture capital activity is “stabilizing” with interest in AI startups “inspiring a surge of investments.”

This month’s Follow the Money roundup includes early- and late-stage startups focused on AI development, network-as-a-service, DevSecOps, cybersecurity (including cloud security and identity management), big data analytics and data stack management.

Here’s a look at 10 companies that raised funding in August 2023.

Hugging Face

Headquarters: New York

CEO: Clement Delangue

Funding: The Series D funding round of $235 million brought the company’s total funding to more than $395 million and boosted its valuation to $4.5 billion.

Investors: Investors in the round included Google, Amazon, Qualcomm, IBM, AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Salesforce and Sound Ventures.

What company does: Hugging Face develops an open-source AI platform for developing and implementing machine learning and natural language processing models.

CEO Quote: “AI is the new way of building all software. It’s the most important paradigm shift of the decade and, compared to the software shift, it’s going to be bigger because of new capabilities and faster because software paved the way. Hugging Face intends to be the open platform that empowers this paradigm shift.”

Nile

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.

CEO: Pankaj Patel

Funding: The $175 million Series C funding round brought Nile’s total funding to $300 million.

Investors: The funding round was co-led by March Capital and Sanabil Investments with “strategic participation” from Solutions by stc, Prosperity7, Liberty Global Ventures and stc CIF (Corporate Investment Fund); and contribution from 8VC, Geodesic Capital, U First Capital and Valor Equity Partners.

What company does: Nile develops technology for building and maintaining enterprise wired and wireless networks-as-a-service systems.

CEO Quote: “Nile is in a strong position to take advantage of several paradigm shifts occurring across the technology ecosystem. Cloud-born edge infrastructure solutions are altering the way we engage with each other and interact with physical spaces in offices, schools, and venues. AI is enabling data-driven decision-making to be adopted at a rapid pace. Cloud migration strategies for anywhere access to enterprise apps is top of mind for all IT executives, creating a tremendous opportunity for Nile. These trends present unique challenges in the way enterprise infrastructure is consumed, and Nile is committed to addressing them head-on, making our service as agile and innovative as the technology solutions it enables.”

Resilience

Headquarters: San Francisco

CEO: Vishaal Hariprasad

Funding: The $100 million Series D equity financing round brought the company’s total funding to more than $225 million.

Investors: The round was led by Intact Ventures, an affiliate of Resilience’s primary capacity provider, Intact Insurance’s underwriting companies, with participation by Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst and Founders Fund.

What company does: The Resilience Solution cyber risk platform helps clients assess, measure and manage their cyber risk.

CEO Quote: “The increase in ransomware attacks proves that there are longstanding gaps in today’s cybersecurity and cyber insurance practices. Instead, enterprises need a way to look at their cyber risk in an integrated, economically efficient, and predictable manner. This funding will accelerate our mission to make this a reality for more companies around the world.”

Endor Labs

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.

CEO: Varun Badhwar

Funding: $70 million in a Series A funding round. (The round included $22 million that converted to equity from a previous seed round.)

Investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, Dell Technologies Capital, Section 32, and more than 30 CEO, CTO and CISO individuals.

What company does: Endor Labs provides a DevSecOps platform that development teams use to secure, monitor and maintain open-source software.

CEO Quote: “Application security is fundamentally broken today – engineering teams are constantly being asked to deploy dozens of AppSec tools in the CI/CD pipeline, which creates significant work for developers, slows down feature delivery, and increases friction between the engineering and security teams. The path forward lies in consolidating the DevSecOps toolchain, simplifying tool deployments, and prioritizing the handful of risks that actually matter. This is the future we envision, and our team is working closely with our customers and partners to reach that goal.”

Rockset

Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.

CEO: Venkat Venkataramani

Funding: The $44 million Series B extension funding round brought Rockset’s total funding to $105 million.

Investors: The round was led by Icon Ventures with participation from new investors Glynn Capital, Four Rivers and K5 Global, along with existing investors Sequoia and Greylock.

What company does: Rockset says its search and analytics database provides real-time indexing, full-featured SQL and cloud-native efficiency.

CEO Quote: “We are on a mission to make it easy for customers to build fast search and AI applications at scale. With compute-compute separation, we’ve redefined the data cloud architecture for speed, efficiency and simplicity, and that, combined with advancements in AI, is creating a new wave of applications that turn data into action. This funding round will allow us to innovate in real-time AI and invest in more go-to-market initiatives that accelerate adoption.”

ProjectDiscovery

Headquarters: San Francisco

CEO: Rishiraj Sharma

Funding: A $25 million Series A funding round.

Investors: The round was led by CRV with participation from Point72 Ventures, SignalFire, Rain Capital, Mango Capital, Accel and Lightspeed, along with individuals Guillermo Rauch, Caleb Sima and Talha Tariq, among others.

What company does: ProjectDiscovery’s technology portfolio includes its open-source tools for detecting exploitable vulnerabilities and the new ProjectDiscovery Cloud Platform, a fully managed SaaS system for discovering and remediating vulnerabilities at scale.

CEO Quote: “Today’s announcement of our $25 million Series A from visionary venture firm CRV and our existing investors, along with the launch of our ProjectDiscovery Cloud Platform, makes us better positioned than ever to advance our mission of democratizing cybersecurity by leveraging the power and speed of our talented and enthusiastic open-source community.”

Tracer

Headquarters: New York

CEO: Jeff Nicholson

Funding: The Series A funding round raised $18.1 million.

Investors: The round was co-led by NewRoad Capital Partners, Progress Ventures and BDMI (part of Bertelsmann’s corporate venture arm Bertelsmann Investments). Also participating were S4S Ventures and Arbour Way Investors.

What company does: Tracer develops a data intelligence platform for modern data stack management. The system eliminates technical complexity, consolidates data sources and provides “a centralized source of truth.”

CEO Quote: “Tracer is at a significant inflection point in solving one of the media and marketing industries’ biggest problems: turning data into informed decisions. In a challenging funding and growth landscape, we are humbled by the confidence our investors have in our potential.”

Veza

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.

CEO: Tarun Thakur

Funding: A $15 million strategic investment that brings Veza’s total funding to $125 million.

Investors: Capital One Ventures and ServiceNow Ventures.

What company does: Veza develops identity security technology used to secure identities across SaaS and on-premise applications, data systems and cloud infrastructure.

CEO Quote: “ CIOs and CISOs are struggling with traditional and legacy tools like IAM, IGA and PAM that have not kept pace with the modern era of multi-identity, multi-cloud, and hybrid cloud. This investment validates Veza’s approach of understanding system-specific permissions across hundreds of systems and interconnecting with identities providing access visibility, access monitoring, access lifecycle management, and access request – all at scale.”

Kivera

Headquarters: New York

CEO: Joe Lea

Funding: $3.5 million in seed funding.

Investors: General Advance and Round 13 Capital along with a number of angel investors including Srinath Kuruvadi, managing director and head of cloud security, JP Morgan & Chase; Ely Kahn, vice president of product for cloud security and AI/ML at SentinelOne; Dimitri Sirota, founder and CEO of BigID; and other senior executives from Amazon, Google, Shift5, ServiceNow and Zscaler.

What company does: Kivera’s cloud security offerings enable organizations to enforce security policies across the major cloud service providers.

Co-founder and operations VP Neil Brown quote: “Cloud security teams are swamped in a backlog of alerts, and they deserve to get out of triage mode and take control of their cloud security by preventing risk up front. When dealing with sensitive workloads, the consequences of a single mistake, such as accidentally exposing a resource to the internet, can be considerable. Our recent funding is an endorsement that Kivera is tapping into specific customer pain. We’re eager to change the way that cybersecurity teams think about cloud security beginning at the configuration level.”

Middleware

Headquarters: San Francisco

CEO: Laduram Vishnoi

Funding: $6.5 million in seed funding.

Investors: The funding round was led by 8VC with participation from Fin Capital, Vercel CEO and founder Guillermo Rauch, and Tokyo Black. Also contributing were a number of angel investors and other funds including Decent Capital, Begin Capital, Beat Venture and Gokul Rajaram.

What company does: Middleware develops an AI-enabled cloud observability platform.

CEO Quote: “We are excited to have the support of all the investors as we continue to build out our platform and help our customers achieve greater visibility and control over their systems. Our AI-based approach provides better insight into applications and infrastructure, making it easy for customers to debug issues faster and minimize downtime.”