Follow The Money: 20 VC Investments To Watch In October
Show Me The Money
One of the largest VC deals ever surfaced in October.
A Florida company playing in the virtual reality space did enough to attract the attention of Google and Qualcomm Ventures, among some other heavy-hitters in a half-billion-dollar funding round.
October deals went to startup and late-stage companies alike, operating in spaces such as security, the data warehouse and cognitive computing.
Click through to see what piqued investor interest this month.
Magic Leap
Headquarters: Dania Beach, Fla.
CEO: Rony Abovitz
New Funding: $542 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Google led the round, which also included Qualcomm Ventures, Legendary Entertainment and its CEO Thomas Tull, KKR, Vulcan Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Andreessen Horowitz and Obvious Ventures, among others
Just take a look at the investor players in this Series B round, and it's obvious there's some serious attention being paid to Magic Leap. The company's technology focuses on virtual and augmented reality and is reportedly working on its own virtual reality eyeglass device.
The whopping Series B round followed $50 million in combined Series A and seed rounds for Magic Leap.
SolidFire
Headquarters: Boulder, Colo.
CEO: Dave Wright
New Funding: $82 million
Round: Series D
Backers: Greenspring Associates along with NEA, Nova Biddle, Samsung Ventures and Valhalla Partners, among others
All-flash storage maker SolidFire's latest raise brings its total funding to date to $150 million.
The company this month inked an agreement with Synnex to distribute its portfolio of converged infrastructure products. SolidFire this month expanded to South Korea, where it opened an office in Seoul. It also added to its workforce in Japan, Australia and Singapore.
Phreesia
Headquarters: New York
CEO: Chaim Indig
New Funding: $30 million
Backers: LLR Partners along with HLM Venture Partners and Ascension Ventures
Phreesia's app allows for electronic payments, manages patient consent forms and helps automate workflows for health-care organizations.
The company says its app aims to help its clients reduce time spent on data entry by eliminating redundancies and making the flow of information more efficient.
The new funding, the company said, will be used to continue to expand its presence in the U.S.
Snowflake Computing
Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.
CEO: Bob Muglia
New Funding: $26 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures
Snowflake Computing wants to shake up the data warehouse.
The company provides on-demand data-warehousing services via the cloud, and it's promising greater flexibility than on-premises data warehouses.
The company's Series B round brought it out of stealth as it now looks to grow its customer and partner bases.
Bob Muglia, the former president of Microsoft's Server and Tools business and former executive vice president of software and solutions at Juniper Networks, heads up the company.
Jobvite
Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.
CEO: Dan Finnigan
New Funding: $25 million
Round: Series D
Backers: Catalyst Investors led the round, which also included CMEA, ATA Ventures and Trident Capital
Jobvite aims to be the recruiting solution for the modern world. The company's Software-as-a-Service solution culls information from social media, mobile, video and data analytics to help its clients -- such as Starbucks, Twitter and Farmers Insurance -- recruit employees.
Jobvite counts more than 100 workers and said it has grown its database of prospective job candidates by 400 percent since 2007, when it closed its first fund-raising round, to 33 million profiles.
Digital Reasoning
Headquarters: Nashville, Tenn.
CEO: Tim Estes
New Funding: $24 million
Round: Series C
Backers: Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse NEXT Investors
Digital Reasoning's software gets smarter with age.
The cognitive computing company's software learns as it gathers more data and is aimed at helping identify risks or threats related to national security or for the financial services industry. The software also is used to provide supply-chain and market insights.
Glow
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Mike Huang
New Funding: $17 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Formation 8 along with Founder's Fund and Andreessen Horowitz
Glow's namesake app aims to provide health and fertility information to women at various ends of the spectrum, from trying to conceive to wanting to avoid pregnancy.
"We've seen phenomenal momentum since launching in the summer of 2013, from announcing 25,000 pregnancies at our one-year mark, to rolling out Glow First, Glow for Enterprise and Glow Nurture -- but our ambitions are big,’ CEO and Co-Founder Mike Huang said in a statement. "To name a few, we'd like to double down on the product, on our data and research, and on insurance."
The latest funding round brings Glow's total raised to date to about $23 million.
Moka5
Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.
CEO: Dave Robbins
New Funding: $16 million
Round: Series D
Backers: Khosla Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and NGEN Partners
Moka5 makes an end-user computing solution that helps organizations' IT teams manage data, applications and services using a containerized approach to the computing architecture.
"It's no longer a question of 'if' containerized workspaces will form the new enterprise client computing architecture -- it’s 'when'," CEO Dave Robbins said in a statement.
Moka5 launched its first product for the enterprise roughly four years ago. Users span a number of industries, including legal, finance and manufacturing.
Bitnet Technologies
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: John McDonnell
New Funding: $14.5 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Highland Capital Partners along with Rakuten
Bitnet this month launched its digital platform, which allows businesses to accept bitcoin payments.
With that launch also came news of the close of its Series A round, which will help as the company looks to expand into Europe and Asia. It currently has offices in San Francisco and Northern Ireland.
Rakuten involvement in the Series A round is an interesting one, as the Japan-based e-commerce company looks to expand its own footprint in the U.S.
Frankly
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Steve Chung
New Funding: $12.8 million
Backers: JJR Private Capital, Stanfod-StartX Fund and SK Planet
There's no shortage of apps claiming to be the next generation in messaging, but Frankly's $12.8 million in funding shows investor appetite continues for such technology.
The Frankly app includes features such as un-send (with no time restrictions), disappearing messages to ensure secrecy, and customizable options such as the background color for a message.
Comply365
Headquarters: Beloit, Wis.
CEO: Kerry Frank
New Funding: $12 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Drive Capital
Cloud-based software maker Comply365's products are aimed at the enterprise with an emphasis on airlines and other heavily regulated industries. The company said this month it's now working with Allegiant Air as one of its first partners.
Comply365's ProChat is a secure chat platform that works on any web browser or mobile device.
More products will be in the development pipeline thanks to the latest capital infusion.
Loggly
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Charlie Oppenheimer
New Funding: $15 million
Round: Series C
Backers: Harmony Partners along with Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures, Cisco, Data Collective and True Ventures
Loggly's cloud-based platform takes information from a company's logs and then monitors and integrates it.
The company said it's been growing at a rapid clip in the past year and reported a 450 percent increase in its monthly recurring revenue, and the tripling of paid customers in the past 12 months.
Eversight
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
CEO: Jamie Rapperport
New Funding: $9.7 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Emergence Capital Partners
Eversight came out of stealth at the start of the year with its cloud-based Software-as-a-Service solution that helps manufacturers and retailers work together to make the most of in-store promotions using information gleaned from big data and the cloud.
The Series A money will be used to scale out the company by adding engineering, sales, and marketing and service staff.
Viewics
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.
CEO: Dhiren Bhatia
New Funding: $8 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Canvas Venture Fund
Viewics Software-as-a-Service solution is aimed at the health-care industry.
It takes patient and organizational data to provide organizations with key analytics information to grow revenue. The company said its product is used by more than 100 hospitals and labs.
HangIt
Headquarters: New York
CEO: Steven Gal
New Funding: $6.2 million
Round: Seed
Backers: Vesta Labs
HangIt launched this year and has made several strides.
It established its headquarters in New York and hired CEO Steven Gal.
HangIt's app takes a user's location to help businesses with messaging and marketing.
The company was co-founded by former FBI agent Jason Hogg, who launched and headed up Revolution Money, which American Express bought in 2009.
Azuqua
Headquarters: Seattle
CEO: Nikhil Hasija
New Funding: $5 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Ignition Venture Partners
Azuqua helps businesses with connectivity of their sales, marketing and other processes via its cloud platform.
"The challenge of creating and streamlining business processes grows with every new cloud service," Co-Founder and CEO Nikhil Hasija said in a statement. "The Azuqua platform lets IT, as well as everyday business users, integrate multiple cloud services to implement valuable business processes without the need to write any code."
The idea is to provide businesses with an easy and cost-effective way of creating business processes that are all located in a single cloud.
Insightpool
Headquarters: Atlanta
CEO: Devon Wijesinghe
New Funding: $4 million
Round: Series A
Backers: TDF Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank led the round, which also included angel investors Peter Kight and Chris Walters
Insightpool aims to be the solution in brands' never-ending quest to extract the most information about their customer bases.
The company's software helps its clients -- such as Coca-Cola and General Mills -- identify the right prospective customer targets and actions to take in marketing campaigns.
Expect to see a 2.0 version of the Insightpool platform along with a mobile app in the future, which will be pushed along with the new funding.
Insightpool also plans to make more hires, expanding its footprint in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York with the Series A round.
Zenedge
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
CEO: Yuri Frayman
New Funding: $3.5 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Yehuda Neuberger, Fred Sorkin and Needham & Company Chair Andrew Malik
Zenedge's funding round brought it out of stealth.
The company makes enterprise-grade security, sold on a subscription basis, that it said avoids "touching a customer's existing web application infrastructure."
The company's co-founder knows first-hand the havoc an attack can render on a company. Leon Kuperman, who is currently Zenedge CTO, previously oversaw technology infrastructure at a company called bidz.com a few years ago. Cyberterrorists from Russia attacked the system and it ended up costing the company about $1.2 million in lost revenue. Kuperman and Co-Founder and CEO Frayman hope to help businesses avoid those kinds of mistakes.
Xplenty
Headquarters: Tel Aviv
CEO: Yaniv Mor
New Funding: $3 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Waarde Capital and Magma Venture Partners
Xplenty's Hadoop-powered platform processes big data, and the company just expanded its product offering in the U.S. this month.
The company said its points of differentiation include its cloud-based model, ability to use it in public and private environments and a web interface that doesn't require installations.
The company established U.S. offices in San Francisco.
Perkville
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Sunil Saha
New Funding: $2.4 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Led by Moneta Ventures along with MDO Holdings, Keiretsu Forum, Sand Hill Angels, Xandex Ventures, Fifth Era and members of Berkeley Angel Network
Customer loyalty programs are big for companies ranging from restaurant chains to retailers because they can keep customers coming back and also bring highly valuable consumer data.
Perkville wants to help companies with that via its Software-as-a-Service loyalty and retention programs. The company's technology works with businesses' point-of-sale systems to track visits and help with social media, among other features.