10 Top Startups That Raised Funding In January 2020

Hybrid cloud and DevOps technology companies were among the startups that hauled in funding rounds in January.

Follow The Money

The move to a hybrid and multi-cloud world is well under way, and a new crop of startups is seeking to accelerate the shift with technologies to ease the deployment of workloads across multiple providers. In January, two of the startups on our list of top funding deals are focused on the hybrid and multi-cloud opportunity. Meanwhile, two other companies on our list specialize in solutions for another ongoing trend in the IT world—DevOps—while additional startups offer products in sectors including data protection, IoT analytics, enterprise video security and robotics.

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

AvePoint

Headquarters: Jersey City, N.J.

Co-CEOs: Kai Gong (left) and Tianyi Jiang

Funding: $200 million, Series C

Investors: TPG Sixth Street Partners (led the round), Goldman Sachs

What it does: Offers data governance, protection and migration technologies for Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint environments

CEO Quote (Jiang): "A huge driver of our growth has been our own digital transformation into a majority SaaS solution company. We have invested in our cloud platform to ensure that we have the scale, pace of innovation, API extensibility and security to meet our customer’s demands. This strategic focus has played a large role in delivering four consecutive quarters of record revenue growth in 2019."

CloudKnox Security

Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.

CEO: Balaji Parimi

Funding: $12 million

Investors: Sorenson Ventures (led the round), ClearSky Security, Dell Technologies Capital, Foundation Capital

What it does: Provides identity authorization for hybrid and multi-cloud environments

CEO Quote: "We’ve seen exceptional growth from customers and prospects looking to address the number one risk in their cloud infrastructure. This positioned us to pre-emptively secure another round of funding to leverage strong market adoption and accelerate our customer expansion."

Intezer

Headquarters: New York

CEO: Itai Tevet

Funding: $15 million, Series B

Investors: OpenView (led the round), Intel Capital, Magma, Samsung NEXT, Alon Cohen

What it does: Offers "Genetic Malware Analysis" technology, which allows for detection and classification of cyberattacks through identifying the software origins of the threats

CEO Quote: "Given the tremendous success we've had in applying our technology to incident response use cases, we will use the funding to accelerate our sales growth and expand the technology into the larger threat protection market."

OpsRamp

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.

CEO: Varma Kunaparaju

Funding: $37.5 million

Investors: Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital (led the round), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Sapphire Ventures

What it does: Provides an AIOps platform for hybrid enterprise IT operations, enabling discovery, monitoring and automation of hybrid and multi-cloud environments

CEO Quote: "The business opportunity for OpsRamp is tremendous. Modernizing legacy IT operations management, technology debt, and supporting digital transformation is where our platform drives value to the enterprise. Point tools aren’t enough to support the monitoring and management of today’s hybrid, multi-cloud environments. This funding will drive the growth and scale we need to deliver on this vision.”

SeaLights

Headquarters: Arlington, Va.

CEO: Eran Sher

Funding: $8.6 million

Investors: Cisco (led the round), Wipro Ventures

What it does: Offers an AI-driven platform for DevOps teams that provides analytics to improve software testing and quality

CEO Quote: "Over the past few years, IT enterprises have invested heavily in Digital Transformation and Cloud initiatives to support increased release velocity. Yet, the challenge of balancing release speed and completing long testing processes remains a bottleneck. We are very excited about Cisco's investment and we are positive our solution will add significant value to IT enterprises."

Seeq

Headquarters: Seattle

CEO: Steve Sliwa

Funding: $24 million

Investors: Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures (led the round), Altira Group, Chevron Technology Ventures, Second Avenue Partners

What it does: Provides industrial IoT analytics software used to diagnose problems, monitor systems in real time and predict when systems will fail or require maintenance.

CEO Quote: "With the backing of SAEV and our existing investors, Seeq is positioned to continue its rapid growth by addressing market demand for advanced analytics innovation. Through our direct sales personnel and more than 50 channel partners, our customer base has expanded to more than 40 countries with deployments as large at 5,000 users within one company."

Snyk

Headquarters: London

CEO: Peter McKay

Funding: $150 million

Investors: Stripes

What it does: Security application development specialist; helps businesses to quickly develop, scale and secure applications

CEO Quote: "This investment accelerates Snyk's significant momentum in transforming the way application security is approached and delivered in software-driven enterprise organizations. With rapid 2019 revenue and customer growth from both individual users and scaling development teams, we are seeing the market embrace developer-first application security to help tackle the increasing cybersecurity concerns that come with digital transformation."

Soft Robotics

Headquarters: Bedford, Mass.

CEO: Carl Vause

Funding: $23 million, Series B

Investors: Calibrate Ventures and Material Impact (co-led the round), Honeywell, Hyperplane, Scale, Tekfen Ventures, Yamaha

What it does: Creator of robotics that mimic the human hand for grasping and manipulating item; aimed at industries including food and beverage, consumer goods manufacturing and e-commerce supply chains

CEO Quote: "This new funding will allow us to power the next phase of our growth strategy and continue to provide solutions to our customers’ greatest challenges. Variability is the kryptonite of the robotics industry. By offering a system that is able to grasp and manipulate items that vary in size, shape, and weight, we are able to solve the problem of high variability in both products and processes."

Sysdig

Headquarters: San Francisco

CEO: Suresh Vasudevan

Funding: $70 million, Series E

Investors: Insight Partners (led the round), Bain Capital Ventures, Accel

What it does: Offers the Sysdig Secure DevOps Platform, which enables Kubernetes security in order to run cloud-native workloads in production

CEO Quote: "Containers and Kubernetes will take over the world. Over the last year, we have seen competitors partner in an attempt to deliver capabilities similar to ours, but the reality is, these approaches cannot provide the level of visibility and security that we can, even when they use multiple tools. As Kubernetes adoption increases, CISOs will continue to recognize that their IT teams and security tools need to adapt. In 2020, we look forward to partnering with more Global 2000 organizations in their cloud-native journeys."

Verkada

Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.

CEO: Filip Kaliszan

Funding: $80 million, Series C

Investors: Next47, Sequoia Capital, Meritech Capital, Felicis Ventures

What it does: Provides enterprise security camera systems combined with cloud-based software, with the aim of offering greater visibility

CEO Quote: "Despite the critical nature of enterprise video security, most companies still rely on antiquated systems that don't offer the benefits that a software-first solution can provide. Verkada's onsite security products and cloud-based software give security and IT professionals more visibility into potential security risks within their organizations, whether they have a single building or thousands of globally distributed locations. Visibility enables them to do what they're best at - taking action."