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.