10 Cool Startups That Raised Venture Capital In May 2019

Security and cloud technology companies were among the startups that hauled in venture capital rounds in May.

Follow The Money

Investor appetite for innovative startups in the security and cloud arenas continues to be strong, judging by the venture capital funding environment last month. Several large funding rounds on our May VC list went to security companies, including $103 million for identity security company Auth0 and $75 million for SIEM vendor Exabeam. In the cloud space, AWS managed service provider Mission raised $15 million, while several vendors with solutions tailored to multi-cloud deployments also pulled in new funding during the month. Meanwhile, the largest round overall went to Sumo Logic, which raised $110 million for its cloud-native machine data analytics platform.

What follows are our picks for 10 IT startups to watch that landed new funding in May.

Aryaka

Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.
CEO: Matt Carter
Funding: $50 million, Series F

Investors: Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing (led the round), Trinity Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Presidio Ventures, Third Point Ventures, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners
What It Does: Provides an SD-WAN offering that is tied to Aryaka's underlying global network, making it easier to scale and guarantee performance
CEO Quote: “This new investment allows us to further accelerate our business momentum and endorses our growth strategy. We are extremely well positioned to help our customers drive WAN transformation and their multi-cloud and application performance initiatives; all while being delivered ‘as-a-service.’”

Auth0

Headquarters: Bellevue, Wash.
CEO: Eugenio Pace
Funding: $103 million, Series E
Investors: Sapphire Ventures (led the round), Bessemer Venture Partners, K9 Ventures, Trinity Ventures, Meritech Capital, World Innovation Lab
What It Does: Offers an Identity-as-a-Service platform for authenticating logins to web, mobile, IoT and internal applications
CEO Quote: "This Series E funding is validation that what we are doing and the platform we are providing are imperative for the success of our customers. Businesses cannot afford a data breach, and this investment is a key indicator that identity management is an industry worth investing in. We are truly grateful for the continued support from our investors for Auth0."

CloudBees
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
CEO: Sacha Labourey
Funding: $10 million
Investors: HSBC
What It Does: Offers an "end-to-end" continuous software delivery management system, which includes continuous integration, continuous delivery and application release orchestration
CEO Quote: "This investment is indicative of the importance leading companies, such as HSBC, are placing on DevOps. DevOps is the new way to deliver software, enabling organizations to deliver software at the speed of ideas, and allowing organizations to respond more quickly to customer needs and market demands.”

Exabeam

Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.
CEO: Nir Polak
Funding: $75 million, Series E
Investors: Sapphire Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners (led the round), Aspect Ventures, Cisco Investments, Icon Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Shlomo Kramer
What It Does: Offers SIEM (security information and event management) technology that features streamlined threat detection and machine learning-powered behavioral analytics, and is available via a flat, user-based pricing model
CEO Quote: “Over the last year, we’ve seen our strategic value increase, and our average deal size has grown by 100 percent from just two years ago. This is because we’re listening to our customers and delivering the innovative technologies they need, including, most recently, the ability to detect threats in the cloud. With the win rates we’re seeing and market opportunity in replacement business, we’re raising money to accelerate our go-to-market and enhance our products to bring additional innovation to modern SOC environments.”

Guardicore

Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Israel
CEO: Pavel Gurvich
Funding: $60 million, Series C
Investors: Qumra Capital (led the round), Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, Partech, ClalTech, Battery Ventures, 83North, TPG Growth, Greenfield Partners
What It Does: Offers data center and cloud security using micro-segmentation controls that the company says are flexible, quickly deployed and easy to understand
CEO Quote: “Any organization has critical IT assets that need to be secured. Our distributed, software-defined segmentation solution is the simplest way to secure these assets whether they reside in the cloud or on premises. The days of being chained to legacy firewalls are over."

Mission

Headquarters: Los Angeles
CEO: Simon Anderson
Funding: $15 million
Investors: Great Hill Partners
What It Does: Managed services provider and consulting partner for businesses using or migrating to the Amazon Web Services cloud
CEO Quote: “Right now, we cover 16 out of 22 sales regions in U.S. as defined by AWS. We want to expand that to full coverage by early next year. That basically means adding account executives and solutions architects and customer success managers to our teams. We also want to strengthen our technical teams for the ongoing anticipated addition of customers … We are now the No. 1 partner to AWS in their territory segments -- which is effectively small to medium-sized businesses -- in terms of jointly creating new opportunities with customers for new workloads and migrations of existing workloads to AWS."

OwnBackup

Headquarters: Fort Lee, N.J.
CEO: Sam Gutmann
Funding: $23.25 million, Series C
Investors: Insight Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures (co-led the round), Innovation Endeavors, Oryzn Capital, Salesforce Ventures
What It Does: Developer of data protection software focused on customers who have implemented Salesforce-based applications
CEO Quote: "Thanks to the unwavering support of our committed investment partners, we will be able to continue to scale to meet escalating market demand for our solutions as companies realize the need to claim ownership of cloud data security concerns and proactively ensure their data is protected and accessible at all times. As we set the bar for cloud data protection, our focus continues to be growing the team and leading the pack in cloud data protection innovation.”

Sumo Logic

Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.
CEO: Ramin Sayar
Funding: $110 million
Investors: Battery Ventures (led the round), Tiger Global Management, Franklin Templeton
What It Does: Offers a machine data analytics platform that is cloud-native and delivers real-time intelligence from structured, semi-structured and unstructured data
CEO Quote: “Sumo Logic’s growth is driven by the shift to digital business and cloud adoption across all industries and companies of all sizes. We have proven that we are the platform of choice for not only cloud-native companies, but also enterprise companies and their cloud migration initiatives. It's great to have such a powerful set of leading investors and ecosystem partners as we accelerate our category leadership.”

Webscale

Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.
CEO: Sonal Puri
Funding: $14 million, Series B
Investors: Mohr Davidow Ventures (led the round), Benhamou Global Ventures, Grotech Ventures
What It Does: Provides converged software for hyperscale cloud automation—including capabilities for maximizing scalability, performance and security as well as offering load balancing, outage prevention and simplified management in multi-cloud environments
CEO Quote: "Webscale continues to claim market share from legacy incumbents in the hosting, web application delivery, and security markets. Innovation and a relentless focus on customer success are responsible for our impressive revenue growth, coupled with a product offering that encompasses all the key capabilities needed to execute on the promise of the cloud."

WekaIO

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
CEO: Liran Zvibel
Funding: $31.7 million, Series C
Investors: Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Mellanox Technologies, Nvidia, Seagate, Western Digital Capital, Qualcomm
What It Does: Developer of high-performance, scalable file systems; company says that its parallel file system offers performance of up to 7X that of all-flash NAS
CEO Quote: “This latest round of financing sets the stage for substantial growth and allows us to continue our mission to deliver an enterprise grade HPC storage solution at cloud scale economics. Modern workloads need a modern file system and legacy solutions just can’t keep pace. In under two years since our launch from stealth, we’ve been lauded with industry awards and accolades, been validated in production environments with leading enterprise organizations, and broken records on industry leading benchmark tests beating out some of the world’s largest supercomputers."