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10 Cool Tech Companies That Raised Funding In May 2021
Rick Whiting
Cybersecurity, big data and next-generation cloud storage management technology developers were among the companies that reported new rounds of funding in May.
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Follow The Money
Startup companies pushing the technology envelope in cloud and IoT cybersecurity, big data governance and integration, and cloud data storage were among the big winners in attracting new venture financing in May.
Acronis, a developer of cyber data backup and protection systems, topped this month’s list with a $250 million funding haul. Big data startups Immuta and Airbyte reported impressive funding rounds in May as did cybersecurity startups Wiz and Salt Security.
What follows are our picks for 10 cool tech startups that landed new funding in April in order of the highest funding rounds.
Acronis
Headquarters: Schaffhausen, Switzerland
CEO: Serguei Beloussov
Funding: The $250 million funding round puts the company’s valuation at $2.5 billion.
Investors: The funding round included VC Capital Partners VII and other investors.
What the company does: Acronis develops cyber data backup and protection systems.
CEO Quote: “With this additional funding, we will accelerate the development of our product portfolio and invest more in our partners’ success. Our goal is to develop market-leading technology and help our partners grow their profits, while providing the best protection for their clients.”
Airbyte
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Michel Tricot
Funding: The $26 million raised in the Series A round closely follows a $5.2 million seed round of funding in March.
Investors: The round was led by Benchmark with participation from 8VC, Accel, SV Angel and YCombinator. Also participating were Shay Bannon, co-founder and CEO of Elastic; Auren Hoffman, co-founder of LiveRamp; and Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB.
What the company does: Airbyte develops an open-source data integration platform used to move and consolidate data from different sources to databases, data warehouses and data lakes.
CEO Quote: “Benchmark is known for working with modern, agile and disruptive companies. They are the ideal partner to accompany us on our mission to accelerate the modernization of the data stack with Airbyte’s open-source solution.”
Immuta
Headquarters: Boston
CEO: Matthew Carroll
Funding: The $90 million Series D funding round brings the company’s total financing to $169 million.
Investors: Participants included new investors Greenspring Associates, March Capital, NGP Capital and Wipro Ventures, in addition to participation from existing investors Ten Eleven Ventures, Intel Capital, DFJ Growth, Dell Technologies Capital, Citi Ventures and Okta Ventures.
What the company does: Immuta develops an automated data governance platform used by data engineering and data operations teams to maintain granular, dynamic control over who can access data and for what purposes, ensuring data security and privacy compliance.
CEO Quote: “We’ve entered a new era in data and analytics fueled by ubiquitous cloud storage, new cloud data management tools and the rise of DataOps. In this new environment, data teams are challenged to provide secure, scaled access to thousands of cloud data products while maintaining strong security, privacy protection and auditability. Traditional methods of data access control don’t work, don’t scale across cloud compute platforms, and can limit data utility.”
IntelePeer
Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.
CEO: Frank Fawzi
Funding: The $110 million in new funding included $75 million in convertible notes and debt financing from Sixth Street Growth and $35 million in equity from Savant Growth. The funding brings the company’s total financing over the last 18 months to more than $170 million.
Investors: Sixth Street Growth and Savant Growth
What the company does: IntelePeer develops a Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) to improve customer interactions through omni-channel communications.
CEO Quote: “This is true validation of the long-term strategy we embarked upon four years ago to expand beyond session initiation protocol [SIP] and voice into a full omni-channel communications solutions provider. Thanks to the recent successes of our CPaaS-driven automation, AI-powered customer implementations and the hard work and creativity of our team members over the years, our growth will be both organic by significantly increasing the size of our sales, marketing, product and development teams, as well as inorganic through the acquisition of companies with compelling technology and complementary go-to-market approaches.”
LucidLink
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Peter Thompson
Funding: The $12 million Series A funding round brings LucidLink’s total financing to about $20 million.
Investors: The round was led by global venture capital firm Headline with a strategic investment from Adobe and participation from Baseline Ventures and Bright Cap Ventures.
What the company does: LucidLink creates the Filespaces cloud file technology, a general-purpose NAS system that allows cloud storage to be used with any shared network.
CEO Quote: “Embedded file systems may look simple, but there’s a lot of engineering needed to make it fast and easy to use. Now we’re more focused on the sales and marketing side, as well as on business development. We’re also hiring to get in touch with more ecosystem partners.”
OSF Digital
Headquarters: Quebec City
CEO: Gerry Szatvanyi
Funding: The company raised $43 million, bringing its total funding to $66 million.
Investors: The funding round was led by existing investor Delta-v Capital with participation from Salesforce Ventures and personal investments from board chairman David Northington, board director Jeff Rich and board advisor Gary DiOrio.
What the company does: OSF Digital provides digital transformation services and global commerce solutions.
CEO Quote: “We are winning over customers that are coming from other platforms, and also customers that just start their journey. There are many companies that haven’t gone direct to consumer yet, and they are really investing now in direct to consumer platforms.”
Salt Security
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
CEO: Roey Eliyahu
Funding: The company raised $70 million in a Series C round of funding, bringing its total financing to $131 million.
Investors: The round was led by Advent International through Advent Tech, with participation from Alkeon Capital and DFJ Growth. Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capital, S Capital VC and Y Combinator also participated in the round.
What the company does: Salt Security provides API security technology used to enhance software security earlier in the development cycle.
CEO Quote: “We are not going to allow anyone get near us [in API security]. Our goal is maintaining this leadership in dominating this category.”
SAM Seamless Network
Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Israel
CEO: Sivan Rauscher
Funding: $20 million in Series B funding
Investors: The funding round was led by BlackBerry and Verizon Ventures. Additional participants included Blumberg Capital, Intel Capital, ADT and NightDragon.
What the company does: SAM Seamless Network develops cybersecurity software to protect unmanaged networks, including 5G networks and IoT devices.
CEO Quote: “Since we’re the fastest growing and most widely deployed solution in our space, we’ve been able to improve our behavioral and machine learning techniques to not only detect, but prevent attacks targeting smart devices. Combining our technology with 5G transformation will enable us to more effectively predict unknown attacks.”
Vast Data
Headquarters: New York
CEO: Renen Hallak
Funding: The $83 million Series D round of funding brought the company’s total valuation to $3.7 million—triple its value in April 2020.
Investors: The round was led by Tiger Global Management with participation from Nvidia and other existing investors.
What the company does: Vast data develops exabyte-scale, all-flash file and object storage systems.
CEO Quote: “We’ve been growing 4X year over year into very high numbers, or just around $100 million in terms of the software run rate we closed out last year. And we closed out last year cash-flow-positive, which is usually not the case. You don’t usually grow at 4X year-over-year and stop burning money.”
Wiz
Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Israel
CEO: Assaf Rappaport
Funding: The $120 million funding, a continuation of the company’s Series B round, comes on the heels of $130 million in funding in March that put the company’s valuation at $1.7 billion.
Investors: The funding round, reported by Bloomberg, was led by Salesforce.
What the company does: Startup Wiz develops cloud infrastructure security technology, offering what it describes as the first full-stack, multi-cloud security platform.
Additional Information: Founded in January 2020, Wiz emerged from stealth in December 2020. The company was started by Rappaport and the other founders of cloud access security broker Adallom, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2015 for $320 million.
