10 Cool Tech Companies That Raised Funding In February 2022

Next-generation technology developers in MDR cybersecurity, API security, multifactor authentication, data capture and transformation, and data warehousing and data lakes reported new rounds of funding.

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Startups pushing technology boundaries across the cybersecurity and big data realms dominate the list of companies that attracted significant venture funding in the last month.

Managed detection and response (MDR) tech vendor eSentire tops this month’s list with other cybersecurity developers BlueVoyant, Salt Security and Beyond Identity making the roster.

No. 2 on the list was data analytics platform pioneer Starburst, joined by other data management and analytics startups including dbt Labs, Dremio and Firebolt.

What follows are our picks for 10 cool tech startups that landed new funding in February.

eSentire

Headquarters: Waterloo, Ontario

CEO: Kerry Bailey

Funding: The $325 million funding put eSentire’s valuation above $1 billion.

Investors: The investment came from Georgian and CDPQ, although private equity firm Warburg Pincus remains the majority stakeholder.

What company does: eSentire develops managed detection and response (MDR) cybersecurity technology.

CEO Quote: “We want to not only own this market, we also want to continue to innovate the market. And we now have a great amount of capital and partners to do that. What we’re here to do is build a long term, sustainable business that changes the cybersecurity industry.”

Starburst

Headquarters: Boston

CEO: Justin Borgman

Funding: The $250 million Series D round of funding, which brings Starburst’s total funding to $414 million, nearly triples the company’s valuation to $3.35 billion.

Investors: The round was led by Alkeon Capital with participation from Altimeter and B Capital Group, as well as existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Management, Index Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.

What company does: Starburst’s data analytics platform, built on the Trino parallel processing SQL query engine, analyzes huge volumes of data distributed across multiple locations.

CEO Quote: “Every organization has a top-down mandate to take more data-driven actions. But increases in data volumes have forced organizations to move, misplace and mismanage data, creating blind spots that can negatively impact decision-making. Starburst streamlines data access and analytics across silos, clouds and business lines, enabling organizations to become truly data driven. Today’s financing is a reflection of our continued growth and workhorse mentality, from achieving profitability in our first two years of operation to tripling customer adoption in the past 12 months.”

BlueVoyant

Headquarters: New York

CEO: Jim Rosenthal

Funding: The Series D funding round raised $250 million.

Investors: The round was led by Liberty Strategic Capital, the private equity firm founded and led by former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Steven Mnuchin. Participating new and existing investors included ISTARI (a Temasek company), Eden Global Partners and 8VC, among others.

What company does: BlueVoyant develops an end-to-end, internal and external cyber defense platform, including managed detection and response and third-party risk management capabilities.

CEO Quote: “When we started BlueVoyant, we knew that cybersecurity was quickly becoming one of the most significant threats businesses and government agencies face, and something our team was uniquely prepared to address. In just over four years, we have grown to more than 560 employees, and have earned the trust of more than 700 customers. The market demand we are seeing is tremendous and we see this trend accelerating as security professionals pivot to our outcomes-based cybersecurity solutions.”

dbt Labs

Headquarters: Philadelphia

CEO: Tristan Handy

Funding: The $222 million Series D funding round brought dbt Labs’ valuation to $4.2 billion.

Investors: The round was led by Altimeter with participation from Databricks, Snowflake, Salesforce, Amplify Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Coatue, Tiger Global, ICONIQ Growth, GV and GIC.

What company does: dbt Labs markets a development framework and tools that data engineers and analysts use to transform, test and document data in cloud data warehouse systems.

CEO Quote: “As dbt has become accepted as the industry standard for data transformation, our most forward-thinking community members have begun musing publicly about the future of the modern data stack and about dbt‘s role in it. As a data practitioner, I could not be more excited about our product roadmap: An open layer to define an organization’s single source of truth, accessible via every BI and analytics tool.”

Dremio

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

CEO: Billy Bosworth

Funding: The $160 million funding round put Dremio’s pre-money valuation at $2 billion.

Investors: The funding round was led by new investor Adams Street Partners with participation from new investors StepStone Group and DTCP, along with existing investors Sapphire Ventures, Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Cisco Investments.

What company does: Dremio develops SQL data query software, based on the Apache Arrow open-source technology, that provides a platform for building data lake systems.

CEO Quote: “The market momentum towards cloud data lakes is now irrefutable. The only question left is how quickly customers can take advantage of these modern open data architectures. Our solutions allow you to run lightning-fast queries directly on your data lake. They work whether you have data sources in multiple clouds, on-prem, and/or in other SQL databases, and that is what customers find so compelling – we meet them wherever they are in their journey.”

Scandit

Headquarters: Zurich, Switzerland

CEO: Samuel Mueller

Funding: The $150 million Series D funding round put Scandit’s valuation in excess of $1 billion. Altogether the company has raised almost $300 million.

Investors: The round was led by Warburg Pincus with participation from existing investors Atomico, Forestay Capital, G2VP, GV, Kreos, NGP Capital, Schneider Electric, Sony Innovation Fund by IGV, and Swisscom Ventures.

What company does: Scandit develops smart data capture technology that enables devices such as smartphones, drones, digital eyewear and robots to capture data from barcodes, text, IDs and objects.

CEO Quote: “By following our original vision of using the camera on smart devices to interact with physical items, we are transforming the daily lives of customers, employees and businesses to enable enhanced, personalized experiences and achieve their digital transformation ambitions.”

Salt Security

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.

CEO: Roey Eliyahu

Funding: The $140 million Series D round of funding raised Salt Security’s valuation to $1.4 billion.

Investors: The funding round was led by CapitalG, the independent growth fund of Google parent Alphabet. All existing investors also participated.

What company does: Salt Security offers tools that help businesses and organizations build and release secure APIs.

CEO Quote: “They [CapitalG] have unique and amazing achievements in the security field and have built several companies like CrowdStrike, Zscaler and Cloudflare to the size [valuation] of $30-$60 billion. And as we are looking to grow Salt to the same size, we saw the huge value-add of a partner that’s done it not once, not twice, but three times.”

Beyond Identity

Headquarters: New York

CEO: TJ Jermoluk

Funding: The $100 million Series C funding round put Beyond Identity’s valuation at $1.1 billion.

Investors: Evolution Equity Partners led the round with participation from existing investors New Enterprise Associates and Jim Clark. Potentum Partners, Expanding Capital and HBAM also joined the round.

What company does: Beyond Identity develops a multi-factor authentication platform.

CEO Quote: “We fully intend to have this be an important disruptive company in the industry that we will take public as a standalone entity and continue to grow into a big significant company. We’re going to have a lot of milestones over the next five or 10 years. You have to celebrate each one but not look at it as the end goal. It’s just one step along the way.”

Firebolt

Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Israel

CEO: Eldad Farkash

Funding: The $100 million Series C funding round put Firebolt’s valuation at $1.4 billion.

Investors: The round included new investors Dawn Capital and K5 Global, while all investors from the company’s first round also joined including Zeev Ventures, TLV Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Angular Ventures.

What company does: Firebolt develops a cloud-native data warehouse, specifically targeting developers and data engineers at businesses and organizations who are building data-intensive applications and interactive analytical systems in the cloud that tap into huge volumes of data.

CEO Quote: “Data serving at scale, given what companies are trying to build with data today, requires a whole new way of thinking on the tech, on architecture, the pricing model – almost everything.”

Voltron Data

Headquarters: San Francisco

CEO: Josh Patterson

Funding: The $88 million Series A funding round follows an earlier $22 million seed round, bringing the company’s total funding to $110 million.

Investors: The latest round was led by Walden Catalyst with participation from funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Anthos Capital, Battery, Coatue, GV, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nepenthe Capital, Redline and The Factory.

What company does: Voltran Data develops high-performance data access and in-memory computing tools, based on the open-source Apache Arrow framework, for improving data analytics ecosystems.

CEO Quote: “Voltron Data is focused on making the data science ecosystem more efficient with modular and composable analytics building blocks. Modularity and composability help us build bridges – not walls – across the analytic ecosystem. We couldn’t be more excited to be on this journey with an amazing team, leading investors and proven advisors.”