Follow The Money: 10 Recent Tech VC Investments In March

Show Me The Money

March brought in venture capital to companies developing offerings in big data, networking, conference calls, Bitcoin, Platform-as-a-Service and more. Take a look at CRN's roundup of 10 companies that took home big investments for their platforms and services.

Lotame

Headquarters: New York
CEO: Andy Monfried
New Funding: $15 million
Round: D
Backers: Sozo Ventures, TrueBridge Capital Partners, Battery Ventures, Emergence Capital Partners, RJ Finlay & Co.

Lotame's independent data management platform (DMP) has attracted quite a lot of interest from investors, bringing in an additional $15 million in venture capital funding early in March, which brings the company's total capital raised to $44 million. Over the past year, Lotame has worked to expand globally and enhance the platform in multiple languages. The company said it will use the latest round of funding to accelerate its platform development and extend its market position.

Polarion Software

Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Frank Schroeder
New Funding: $10 million
Round: A
Backers: Siemens Venture Capital

In its first round of outside funding for the company, Polarion has raised $10 million in Series A funding to help the company expand its product development for its enterprise-scale browser-based Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution. Polarion said its technology allows for traceability and transparency for essential software and process activities. It provides a "360-degree view" of the history, trends and challenges around a project, Polarion CEO Frank Schroeder said in a statement. The company will use its first round of funding to build out its product and expand its user base.

Emotient

Headquarters: San Diego
CEO: Ken Denman
New Funding: $6 million
Round: B
Backers: Handbag, LLC, Intel Capital

Emotient creates technology that allows facial expression recognition automation. The software recognizes emotions such as joy, surprise, anger, contempt and more, which helps companies to build technologies and deepen customer engagement, research and analysis, the company said.

"All good business leaders know 'you get what you measure,' and being able to objectively and accurately monitor customer sentiment allows retail teams to build plans and tactics to win," Emotient CEO Ken Denman said in a prepared statement. The new funding will be used to commercialize the technology and continue the product development for the retail and health-care markets.

vIPtela

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
CEO: Amir Khan
New Funding: $33.5 million
Round: Undisclosed
Backers: Sequoia Capital

Even though the company has yet to emerge from stealth mode, vIPtela has received $33.5 million in venture capital funding for what it said is a software solution for corporate IP networks. The company said when its solution is released it will increase "security, agility and control" of corporate networks at the Fortune 500 level.

DataRPM

Headquarters: Fairfax, Va.
CEO: Sundeep Sanghavi
New Funding: $5.1 million
Round: A
Backers: InterWest Partners, CIT GAP Funds

DataRPM is working to break down the barriers to data analytics, which it says are data modeling and usability. Even just the data modeling portion of analysis is a significant cost to companies, DataRPM said, taking up as much as 80 percent of the total time for analytics. The new platform aims to solve that problem with a business intelligence platform that lowers the cost of and improves ease of analysis with an automated data modeling process and using a natural language interface. DataRPM said it will use the Series A funds to push forward its go-to-market strategy.

Wise.io

Headquarters: Berkeley, Calif.
CEO: Jeff Erhardt
New Funding: $2.5 million
Round: A
Backers: Voyager Capital

To take advantage of a customer experience market Gartner predicts to reach $36 billion by 2017, Wise.io has built out machine-learning technology that is accessible even to non-xpert users. Every service company should have advanced analytics, the company said, but not all of them can afford it. However, the Wise.io machine learning technology might make those types of solutions finally available to customer support businesses, the company said. In conjunction with the funding announcement, Wise.io named Jeff Erhardt as CEO.

Saffron Technology

Headquarters: Cary, N.C.
CEO: Gayle Sheppard
New Funding: $7 million
Round: B
Backers: Undisclosed

Saffron Technology provides a solution to Fortune 1000 businesses looking to turn data into action. Saffron's Natural Intelligence Platform takes hybrid and existing data and analyzes it to identify trends and anomalies. The company said it will use the $7 million in Series B venture capital funding to build out its business with service teams, brand presence, scalability and opening a new headquarters in Silicon Valley this spring.

Circle

Headquarters: Boston
CEO: Jeremy Allaire
New Funding: $17 million
Round: B
Backers: Breyer Capital, Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, Oak Investment Partners, Pantera Capital, Bitcoin Opportunity Fund of Barry Silbert, Leonard H. Schrank, M. Michele Burns, Fenway Summer

With all of the hype around Bitcoin, Circle's solutions help make it easier for customers and businesses to use Bitcoin with better privacy and security and lower costs. Circle also announced a limited release of its consumer product before a full rollout later this year.

"With accelerating consumer and business interest in digital currency all around the world, it’s critical that we have the capital and leadership team to execute on our vision for consumer finance and global payments built on Bitcoin," CEO Jeremy Allaire said.

Speek

Headquarters: Dulles, Va.
CEO: John Bracken
New Funding: $5.1 million
Round: A
Backers: 500 Startups, Edward Norton, CNF Investments, Middleland Capital, other investors, Michael Chasen of Blackboard, Timothy Chi and Sonny Ganguly of WeddingWire, Jeffrey Wolfe and Robert Wolfe of CrowdRise, Haroon Mokhtarzada and Zeki Mokhtarzada of Webs

Free conferencing call service Speek lets users access a conference call from a personal or business link instead of tuning in with a traditional dial and PIN. That system makes conference calls much easier, especially for mobile and Web users, according to Speek. The company will use the new funds to continue feature development on its product, including security and collaboration.

CloudBees

Headquarters: Woburn, Mass.
CEO: Sacha Labourey
New Funding: $11.2 million
Round: C
Backers: Verizon Ventures, Matrix Partners, LightSpeed Venture Partners

Enterprise Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) company CloudBees has brought in $11.2 million in venture capital funding to drive revenue and sales growth and develop its product and brand. The CloudBees Platform lets developers build and integrate applications with no overhead and helps IT businesses in particular adapt faster to the changing market, the company said. The latest round of venture capital brings the company's total funding to $25.7 million.