10 Hot Startups That Raised VC Funding In October
Follow The Money
Big data analytics is only getting bigger as a market, as evidenced by the numerous funding rounds for startups in the space in October. Five of the 10 companies on our list of top VC deals in October are working in the realms of data warehousing, predictive analytics and other solutions revolving around big data. Meanwhile, two companies on our October list focus on offering next-generation storage solutions, while startups working in cybersecurity, hyper-converged infrastructure and contact center applications also raised new rounds during the month.
What follows are our picks for 10 IT startups to watch that landed new funding in October.
Arcadia Data
Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.
CEO: Sushil Thomas
Funding: $15 million, Series B
Investors: Pelion Venture Partners (led the round), Intel Capital, Mayfield Fund, Blumberg Capital
What it does: Offers visual analytics software that leverages big data and is native to Apache Hadoop and cloud systems such as Amazon S3 and Azure Data Lake Storage
CEO Quote: "We recognize the market need for analytics and BI solutions that are native to big data. Our impressive growth is not only a testament to the work we've done, but it is also a sign of growing demand for products like those Arcadia Data offers to bridge the gap between business users getting insights and value from big data."
Arctic Wolf Networks
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.
CEO: Brian NeSmith
Funding: $45 million, Series C
Investors: Future Fund (led the round), Adams Street, Unusual Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Sonae Investment Management, Knollwood Investment Advisory
What it does: Provider of security operations center (SOC)-as-a-service, providing threat detection to organizations that don't have a SOC of their own
CEO Quote: "Our growing team of security engineers is redefining the economics of security to protect companies of all sizes. In addition to supporting continued company growth, the funding will accelerate expansion of our service offering, as we continue to scale and expand to meet our customers’ individualized needs. We look forward to continuing our momentum and building out our internal vulnerability assessment and endpoint detection and response capabilities, in particular."
CNEX Labs
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
CEO: Alan Armstrong
Funding: $23 million, Series D
Investors: Dell Technologies Capital (led the round), Microsoft's M12 venture fund
What it does: Fabless chip designer focused on high-performance SSD controllers targeted at enterprise customers and hyper-scale data center users
CEO Quote: "CNEX Labs technology relieves customers from the mercy of a commoditized market and puts them back in control of their own destinies. We are proud to have achieved such strong backing and validation from industry partners and investors."
Ctera Networks
Headquarters: New York
CEO: Liran Eshel
Funding: $30 million, Series D
Investors: Red Dot Capital Partners (led the round), Singtel Innov8, Benchmark, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco, Venrock, Vintage Investment Partners, Viola Group
What it does: Provider of enterprise-class file systems for enterprises doing multi-cloud and software-defined storage
CEO Quote: "At the core, we provide a new file system that is software-defined and that can run on any cloud, whether it's public or private. Our focus is on object storage and making it highly scalable and cost- efficient. Customers can control where the data sits, in any cloud or on-premises ... Our goal is to accelerate our growth. This could be our last round, but we may need another round if there's an acquisition opportunity."
DataRobot
Headquarters: Boston
CEO: Jeremy Achin
Funding: $100 million, Series D
Investors: Meritech Capital Partners and Sapphire Ventures (led the round), DFJ Growth, NEA, IA Ventures, Intel Capital
What it does: Focuses on bringing machine learning into the enterprise to make it far easier for companies to perform predictive analytics — such as predicting customer churn or how a product change will affect sales
CEO Quote: "Over the past four years, we've worked on thousands of use cases with thousands of companies across every industry and geography, processing over half a billion unique datasets. Armed with this practical experience, we've continuously improved our platform and the overall customer experience, and look forward to leveraging this investment to take our technology to the rest of the companies in the world."
Paperspace
Headquarters: Brooklyn, N.Y.
CEO: Dillon Erb
Funding: $13 million, Series A
Investors: Battery Ventures, SineWave Ventures, Intel Capital, Sorenson Ventures, Initialized Capital
What it does: Provides a GPU provisioning platform (Gradient) for machine learning and deep learning projects, with a software layer that automates provisioning and managing of that infrastructure
CEO Quote: "AI today is too complex, too exclusive and too costly to reach the mainstream. Only large companies have the sufficient resources — infrastructure, tooling and talent — to efficiently develop and deploy models into production. The key to unlocking AI is to give every developer access to these same resources. That's our core mission with Gradient — to provide a powerful, yet intuitive machine learning platform that any developer can leverage, whether you're an individual AI practitioner or a large enterprise."
Scale Computing
Headquarters: Indianapolis
CEO: Jeff Ready
Funding: $34.8 million,
Investors: Lenovo (led the round), Allos Ventures
What it does: Hyper-converged and edge computing specialist with solutions including the HC3 edge platform on Lenovo servers, which aims to replace complex and expensive on-premise infrastructure with a solution optimized for environments in which application uptime is critical and IT resources are limited
CEO Quote: "We have experienced tremendous growth over the past two years, driven by our unique capability to completely automate the administration of a fully converged platform. This round of funding, combined with our new partnership with Lenovo, enables us to instantly reach customers at a global scale."
Snowflake Computing
Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.
CEO: Bob Muglia
Funding: $450 million
Investors: Sequoia Capital (led the round), Altimeter Capital, Capital One Growth Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Wing Ventures
What it does: Provides a cloud data warehouse service that can be implemented more quickly than on-premise systems, and can be scaled up or down as needed
CEO Quote: "Learning to be data-driven is an imperative for every organization today, and a data-driven organization must be in control of its data. Snowflake is the most powerful data warehouse in the world for analytics solutions. That power delivers the security, control and business answers needed to enable data-driven organizations. This is driving spectacular growth for our company, and this latest funding round will provide Snowflake with the resources we need to serve our rapidly growing set of new and existing customers around the world."
Talkdesk
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Tiago Paiva
Funding: $100 million, Series B
Investors: Viking Global (led the round), DFJ
What it does: Provides Contact Center as a Service with its Enterprise Contact Center Platform for customer service representatives and improving customer journeys
CEO Quote: "If you survey our competitive landscape today, most of the products are going on 20 years or more in age. With our modern architecture, we are turning the contact center industry on its head. Today's funding ensures that Talkdesk continues our momentum to lead change in this market and serve our current enterprise customers as well as the rapidly increasing number of global contact centers looking to benefit from a modern cloud platform."
Yellowbrick Data
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
CEO: Neil Carson
Funding: $48 million, Series B
Investors: Next47 (led the round), DFJ, GV, Menlo Ventures, Samsung Ventures, Third Point Ventures
What it does: Offers an all-flash analytics and data warehouse appliance that aims to be magnitudes smaller and faster than current data warehouse systems
CEO Quote: "We are 100 percent-focused on providing a data warehouse to run business-critical workloads ... It has a massive price-performance advantage over anything out there."