10 Cool Startups That Raised Venture Capital In September 2019

Cybersecurity and IoT technology companies were among the startups that hauled in venture capital rounds in September.

Follow The Money

Venture capital investors continued to heavily invest in hot areas such as cybersecurity in September, while investor attention was also strong when it came to startups with innovations in IoT and AI. Security and privacy startups that hauled in new funding this month included Shape Security ($51 milion) and BigID ($50 million). In IoT, Litmus Automation and Sight Machine announced funding rounds. Meanwhile, the largest round in our September funding list went to DataRobot, an enterprise AI technology up-and-comer that raised $206 million.

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

BigID

Headquarters: New York and Tel Aviv
CEO: Dimitri Sirota
Funding: $50 million, Series C
Investors: Bessemer Venture Partners (led the round), SAP.io Fund, Comcast Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, ClearSky, Salesforce Ventures
What it does: Offers a "data intelligence platform" providing organizations with insights on the data they collect and process; enterprises can find, classify, inventory and map all their sensitive data while automating data privacy, protection and governance tasks
CEO Quote: "Privacy and governance of personal data is a defining 21st-century problem as commerce and communication shift online. However, ensuring the integrity and protection of personal data requires companies go beyond privacy policy and process and deliver customers true data-level accountability and transparency. BigID is quickly establishing itself as a leader here."

DataRobot

Headquarters: Boston
CEO: Jeremy Achin

Funding: $206 million, Series E
Investors: Sapphire Ventures (led the round), Tiger Global Management, World Innovation Lab, Alliance Bernstein PCI, EDBI, DFJ Growth, Geodesic Capital, Intel Capital, Sands Capital, NEA, Meritech
What it does: Offers a platform for enterprises to rapidly build and deploy machine-learning models and create advanced AI applications
CEO Quote: “We are humbled by the confidence our investors have in our unprecedented vision and ability to execute. We’re proud of our entire organization for their work in building a game-changing product and bringing transformational success to our customers.”

Lacework

Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.
CEO: Dan Hubbard
Funding: $42 million
Investors: Sutter Hill Ventures, Liberty Global Ventures
What it does: Offers a lightweight agent that provides visibility to all processes and applications within an organization's cloud and container environments
CEO Quote: "Lacework and our growing list of customers agree that there is a need for a new generation of security companies that are purpose-fit to secure today's modern infrastructure."

Litmus Automation

Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
CEO: Vatsal Shah
Funding: $7 million, Series A
Investors: Mitsubishi Corporation
What it does: Provides an edge computing platform, LoopEdge, that helps companies fetch data from a variety of industrial assets--which is then normalized for running analytics, event processing, machine-learning algorithms and 45 applications on its marketplace
CEO Quote: “We already have key customers and channels scaling up nicely but we are seeing the market expand and adopt Industry 4.0 at a more rapid pace – the funding will allow us to capture this opportunity. Manufacturing customers know they want to collect valuable data from their existing and new industrial systems and use it to make business decisions in real time. Our Edge Computing platform will allow them to take advantage of intelligence at the edge quickly and with an eye on future service such as predictive maintenance and artificial intelligence.”

PerimeterX

Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.
CEO: Omri Iluz
Funding: $14 million, Series C extension
Investors: Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, Salesforce Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Adam Street Partners, Canaan Partners, Vertex Ventures, Data Collective
What it does: Offers application security solutions that detect risks to web applications and proactively manages them
CEO Quote: “This additional funding, and the relationship with these strategic investors, gives us the power to speed up the expansion of our product portfolio to stop the Magecart and digital skimming attacks we’ve read so much about. We remain dedicated to helping our customers focus on growing their digital business, knowing their consumers and brand are secure.”

Red Sift

Headquarters: London
CEO: Rahul Powar
Funding: $8.8 million, Series A
Investors: MMC Ventures, In-Q-Tel
What it does: Provides email security solutions that leverage machine-learning technology, including a dashboard of tools such as network monitoring, email analysis and authentication
CEO Quote: “It’s through our serverless data platform, Red Sift, that we are able to offer intelligent and accessible SaaS solutions that combine modern security standards with the latest machine learning techniques to make it easier for organisations to reduce the threats their users face every day. This funding round will help us to continue developing transformational cybersecurity solutions essential for everyday cybersecurity for all types of organisations."

Shape Security

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
CEO: Derek Smith
Funding: $51 million
Investors: C5 Capital (led the round), Kleiner Perkins, HPE Growth, Norwest Ventures Partners, Focus Ventures, JetBlue Technology Ventures, Top Tier Capital Partners, EPIC Ventures
What it does: Provides a platform for bot and online fraud mitigation used by large enterprises
CEO Quote: “This investment will help us scale our international operations and fuel our AI development. Our new and returning investors, coupled with our continued track record of growth, underscore our vision to protect all enterprises from fraudulent Internet transactions.”

Sight Machine

Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Jon Sobel
Funding: Undisclosed amount
Investors: Sony Innovation Fund
What it does: Offers a digital manufacturing platform that combines IoT and AI technologies; platform can contextualize and model manufacturing data from a variety of sources into digital twins for real-time analysis and visualization
CEO Quote: “Japanese manufacturers have long led the way in continuous improvement of manufacturing. But many companies have squeezed all they can out of visible information and methodologies focused on single machines or processes. The next generation of continuous improvement will be led by using digital production data to understand and control manufacturing faster, better and at the system level, with the help of funding from investors like SIF.”

Skout Cybersecurity

Headquarters: New York
CEO: Aidan Kehoe
Funding: $25 million, Series B
Investors: ClearSky (led the round), RSE Ventures
What it does: Offers a cloud-native, streaming data analytics platform focused on protecting SMBs from security threats; products include security monitoring, email protection and endpoint protection
CEO Quote: "Cybersecurity is a requirement for all companies, but not all companies have the resources or ability to build their own security team and infrastructure. We are proud and excited to be working alongside a team that has seen great success in the cybersecurity industry and are confident that our focus on MSP partners will fuel this next phase of growth."

Trifacta

Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Adam Wilson
Funding: $100 million
Investors: Telstra Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, BMW iVentures, ABN AMRO Digital Impact Fund, Accel Partners, Cathay Innovation, Google, Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, Infosys
What it does: Provides “data wrangling” software featuring automated data engineering and data quality capabilities, enabling business users to perform more data refining tasks themselves
CEO Quote: “For the last decade, companies have been trying to become more data driven, but most organizations have done little to enable people to get past all of the data friction that prevents them from asking and answering the most interesting questions. By automating complex data engineering tasks and enabling increased levels of self-service, Trifacta ensures organizations can harness the collective intelligence of their teams and make everyone a data hero.”