Follow The Money: 18 Tech Venture Capital Investments In June
Show Me The Money
IT security and big data analytics are the hot spots in the IT industry, judging by the amount of venture capital flowing to startups in those two industry segments. Of the 18 companies that made our venture capital financing roundup for June, eight are in the security technology segment and seven are in big data.
Tools for managing corporate networks and data center storage also received infusions of venture funding last month, as did a developer of cloud business applications. Take a look at who was "in the money" in June.
Arcadia Data
Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.
CEO: Sushil Thomas
New Funding: $11.5 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Mayfield, Blumberg Capital and Intel Capital
Arcadia Data is a big data analytics startup that emerged from stealth mode in June and debuted the first release of its visual analytics software that can directly access data stored in Hadoop clusters.
Arcadia Data plans to use the new funding to further its product development efforts and double the size of its sales and marketing teams by the end of this year.
Barkly
Headquarters: Boston
CEO: Mike Duffy
New Funding: $12.5 million
Round: Series A
Backers: New Enterprise Associates and Sigma Prime Ventures
In June Barkly launched its endpoint security technology the startup company said brings enterprise-level security to midsize companies and protects against sophisticated zero day and polymorphic attacks.
Barkly has now raised a total of $17 million and the company plans to use the additional financing to expedite its employee recruitment, product development and go-to-market initiatives.
BitSight Technologies
Headquarters: Cambridge, Mass.
CEO: Shaun McConnon
New Funding: $23 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Comcast Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Globespan Venture Partners, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners and CEO Shaun McConnon
BitSight Technologies develops a security ratings system that provides a way for businesses, including cyberinsurers and private equity firms, to rate the security performance of their own IT systems, as well as those of their peers, competitors and possible acquisition targets. The system taps into publicly accessible information, such as threat intelligence and publicly disclosed breaches, to compile billions of records from a variety of sources.
The company plans to double the size of its channel team over the next few months and add a dedicated marketing component to its channel program, which already includes market development funds and partner training.
Checkmarx
Headquarters: Greenwood Village, Colo.
CEO: Emmanuel Benzaquen
New Funding: $84 million
Round: Series D
Backers: Insight Ventures
Solid security practices begin with ensuring that newly developed applications don't contain bugs or vulnerabilities. Checkmarx has developed tools that help software developers check their code to make sure it is clean of vulnerabilities before launching on a PC or mobile device. The solution uses artificial intelligence replication of the code to scan the application for vulnerabilities and unknown back doors.
Some of the new funding will be used to provide liquidity to early investors. But most will be devoted to sustaining the company's rapid growth, hiring more sales and technical staff, and expanding its operations globally.
Chrome River Technologies
Headquarters: Los Angeles
CEO: Alan Rich
New Funding: $100 million
Round: Series D
Backers: Great Hill Partners
Chrome River Technologies develops online expense reporting and automated invoice processing applications targeted toward large businesses. Founded in 2007, the company competes with Oracle's expense management applications and Concur, the online travel and expense management application vendor that SAP acquired last year for $8.3 million.
Chrome River will use the new funds to accelerate its growth globally and support continued product development. The company expects to generate revenue of $25 million this year, up about 50 percent from 2014.
Cohesity
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
CEO: Mohit Aron
New Funding: $55 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Artis Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, Google Ventures and Trinity Ventures
Cohesity develops a high-density storage array system designed to handle the full range of secondary storage requirements including data protection, DevOps and business analytics.
Cohesity exited stealth in June and disclosed that it had received $55 million in venture financing in May. The startup previously raised $15 million in late 2013, bringing its total funding to $70 million.
CounterTack
Headquarters: Waltham, Mass.
CEO: Neal Creighton
New Funding: $15 million
Round: Series C
Backers: TenEleven Ventures, EDBI (the corporate investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board) and Mitsui
CounterTack develops the Sentinel real-time endpoint detection and response (EDR) cybersecurity technology that uses big data analysis to provide visibility and context around endpoint device behavior to improve threat detection, forensic analysis and incident response.
CounterTack will use the additional funding to accelerate its go-to-market strategy, further its global expansion efforts and continue developing its EDR technology.
Cryptzone
Headquarters: Waltham, Mass.
CEO: Kurt Mueffelmann
New Funding: $15 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Kayne Partners, Medina Capital and other limited partners
Cryptzone develops dynamic, context-aware network, application and content security technology. The software helps organizations avert cyberattacks via privileged account and third-party users, and prevents the exposure of sensitive and confidential information to unauthorized users.
The company plans to use the new financing to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and fuel its global expansion efforts.
Enigma
Headquarters: New York
CEO: Hicham Oudghiri
New Funding: $28.2 million
Round: Series B
Backers: New Enterprise Associates, Two Sigma Ventures, New York City Investment Fund, American Express Ventures, Comcast Ventures and The New York Times Company
Enigma develops data discovery and analysis tools, as well as builds an expansive collection of public data produced by governments, universities, businesses and other organizations that customers can tap into.
The vendor's technology offerings include the Abstract replication technology for bringing together data from across an organization, and the Signals business analytics applications for tapping into data for decision-making tasks.
JethroData
Headquarters: New York
CEO: Eli Singer
New Funding: $8.1 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Square Peg Capital and Pitango Venture Capital
JethroData develops what it calls the fastest SQL-on-Hadoop solution in the industry. Its index-based SQL engine enables business analytics on Hadoop systems including ad hoc queries, live dashboards and interactive business intelligence. The public beta of the technology was released in late 2014 and the 1.0 release of the software debuted in April.
The company plans to use the new funding to continue development of the JethroData technology and grow its sales and marketing resources.
Kentik
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Avi Freedman
New Funding: $12.1 million
Round: Series A
Backers: August Capital, First Round Capital and Data Collective (DCVC)
Kentik develops cloud-based network monitoring software that's designed to help managed service providers, Web companies and other businesses manage increasingly huge volumes of network data in real time. The Kentik Detect network visibility and analytics service is capable of processing trillions of network records per day and providing network system intelligence.
Founded in 2014 as CloudHelix, Kentik just emerged from stealth in June and launched its network monitoring service. The company previously raised $3.1 million in seed funding last fall.
Menlo Security
Headquarters: Menlo Park, Calif.
CEO: Amir Ben-Efraim
New Funding: $25 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Sutter Hill Ventures, General Catalyst, Osage University Partners and Engineering Capital
Menlo Security promises a new way for organizations to counter malware threats. The startup's Isolation Platform software isolates all Web and email content in the cloud before it reaches the endpoint and delivers a mirror image of the content minus any attached threats.
Menlo Security emerged from stealth in June and plans to use the additional financing to continue developing its technology.
Redis Labs
Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.
CEO: Ofer Bengal
New Funding: $15 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Bain Capital Ventures, Carmel Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank
Redis Labs is a developer of a high-performance, in-memory NoSQL database system that's designed for fast transactions, real-time analytics and caching. The vendor's Redis Cloud database service has grown 116 percent in the last year with more than 4,000 new paying customers.
Redis Labs said the new financing, which brings its total funding to $28 million, will be used to market and sell the company's cloud services and Redis Labs Enterprise Cluster software.
Saama Technologies
Headquarters: Campbell, Calif.
CEO: Suresh Katta
New Funding: $35 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Carrick Capital Partners
Saama Technologies is a big data solutions and services provider, offering a range of packaged analytical solutions for health care, marketing and revenue optimization, customer behavior, fraud detection, sentiment analysis and other tasks.
Many of the company's solutions are built on its Fluid Analytics Engine platform. The company also works with a number of IT vendors including Hortonworks, MapR Technologies, Informatica, Google and SAP.
Skykick
Headquarters: Seattle
Co-CEO: Todd Schwartz
New Funding: $10 million
Round: Undisclosed
Backers: Qwiki COO Navin Thukkaram, Top 20 Angel Investor Tim Ferriss, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (former German federal minister of defense and former minister of economics and technology), as well as several strategic private equity investors
Skykick develops cloud management and backup tools for solution providers, as well as the company's popular Skykick Migration Suite that solution providers use to move customers to Microsoft Office 365.
The additional funding brings Skykick's total financing to $17.2 million. The company will utilize the additional capital to accelerate product development and expand its sales and marketing operations to meet the global demand for its products.
Snowflake
Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.
CEO: Bob Muglia
New Funding: $45 million
Round: Series C
Backers: Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures
Startup Snowflake Computing announced the general availability of its cloud-based Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse service in June, offering it as an alternative to on-premise data warehouse systems that are expensive and time-consuming to assemble.
Snowflake will use the new financing to continue developing its technology and expand its sales and marketing efforts, including setting up a channel program and recruiting solution providers to work with the data warehouse service.
Tamr
Headquarters: Cambridge, Mass.
CEO: Andy Palmer
New Funding: $25.2 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Hewlett-Packard Ventures, Thomson Reuters, MassMutual Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Google Ventures and others
Tamr, co-founded in 2013 by database software luminary Michael Stonebraker, develops software that catalogs, connects and publishes underutilized internal and external data using a combination of machine learning and human guidance with the goal of helping businesses use all available data for analytical tasks.
Tamr has now raised $42.4 million in total financing. The company plans to use the additional funding to accelerate product engineering for the Tamr scalable data unification platform, as well as to expand its sales efforts.
Venafi
Headquarters: Salt Lake City
CEO: Jeff Hudson
New Funding: $39 million
Round: Series C
Backers: QuestMark Partners, Intel Capital, Silver Lake Waterman and existing investors
Cybersecurity startup Venafi develops what it calls an "immune system for the Internet," software that's used to secure and protect cryptographic keys and digital certificates, preventing them from being misused in cyberattacks.
The company will use the new funding to continue development of its flagship product, the Venafi Trust Protection Platform, and expand support services for customers.