Follow The Money: 16 VC Investments To Watch In June
Show Me The Money
June brought a raft of new funding to tech companies that ranged from late-stage investments to first-time capital infusions with a particular rampup of activity later in the month.
Investments in companies aligned with big data or cybersecurity offerings were popular. The growing popularity of wearables technology also broke through with an investment in one of the companies included this month.
Click through to learn more about the companies that saw a nice capital boost this month and how they plan to spend their funds.
Prevalent Networks
Headquarters: Warren, N.J.
CEO: Jonathan Dambrot
New Funding: $4 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Fulcrum Equity Partners
Prevalent Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder Jonathan Dambrot called Atlanta private equity firm Fulcrum Equity Partners' investment in the company "game-changing." Prevalent specializes in developing third-party risk and vendor threat management technologies.
The new funds are expected to help the company grow its sales, marketing and technical divisions to help drive sales. It said it also intends to use the funding for growth of professional service offerings aimed at compliance.
RedOwl Analytics
Headquarters: Baltimore
CEO: Guy Filippelli
New Funding: $4.6 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Salesforce.com Chairman and Chief Executive Marc Benioff, Igor Sill of Geneva Venture Group, Under Armour Chief Executive Kevin Plank/Sagamore Ventures, Conversion Capital's Christian Lawless, Attractor Ventures, Propel Baltimore and TEDCO's Veterans' Opportunity Fund
Startup RedOwl managed to attract the attention of Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff, who was one of several investors in the company's first funding round. RedOwl said it wants to tap more customers in the finance, legal, and investigative and government sectors with the new money, while also focusing on product development. The company's core solution is Reveal, an analytics software that helps companies reduce risk.
Coherent Path
Headquarters: Cambridge, Mass.
CEO: James Glover
New Funding: $6.25 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Sigma Prime Ventures and GrandBanks Capital along with Common Angels, dunnhumby Ventures and BOLDstart Ventures
Coherent Path's platform offers retailers a cloud-based analytics solution to help companies gather information that can be used to make better decisions about promotions and customer loyalty programs.
The company bills itself as the "next evolution of analytics for retailers" with a solution that helps its clients gather information on their individual customers' shopping habits to allow for customized outreach to those shoppers.
Valencell
Headquarters: Raleigh, N.C.
CEO: Michael Dering
New Funding: More than $7 million
Round: Series C
Backers: WSJ Joshua Fund, TDF Ventures, True Ventures and Best Buy Capital
Growing interest in wearable technology has helped companies such as Valencell, which develops performance biometric data sensors that measure wearers' heart rates and other activity. Sports and fitness brands, consumer electronics makers and mobile accessory companies, among others, then license Valencell's technology for use with their own products.
The new funding, which also came with the announcement that Michael Dering would assume the CEO role at Valencell, will be used for research and development along with sales and marketing.
Fortscale Security
Headquarters: San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Israel
CEO: Idan Tendler
New Funding: $10 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Led by Intel Capital and Blumberg Capital in addition to Swarth Group, among existing investors
Fortscale uses big data analytics to help its customers protect themselves from cybersecurity attacks. The company develops enterprise security solutions and was founded in 2012. It touts its Fortscale 1.0 solution's ability to uncover "under the radar" security threats and identify malicious user behavior.
Fortscale said it plans to use its new financing to pad its research and development, engineering and analytics teams in its new San Francisco office. It also said it will expand its R&D and analytics teams in its Tel Aviv location in response to its growing business.
Tasktop Technologies
Headquarters: Vancouver, B.C.
CEO: Mik Kersten
New Funding: $11 million
Round: Series A
Backers: Austin Ventures, Yaletown Venture Partners
Tasktop Technologies makes Application Lifecycle Management technology. The company was co-founded by Gail Murphy and Mik Kersten Jan. 17, 2007. It originally launched with its open source project Eclipse Mylyn that makes it easier for developers to collaborate and move software within a company. The project created the basis for the Tasktop Dev enterprise version.
It plans to put its new capital to work on expansion into new markets and the hiring of more sales reps.
Tasktop partners include HP and IBM, among others, and it works with customers in the finance, insurance, government and manufacturing sectors.
CloudPhysics
Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.
CEO: John Blumenthal
New Funding: $15 million
Round: Series C
Backers: Jafco Ventures along with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Mayfield
CloudPhysics wants to help enterprises' IT departments more effectively manage their data centers. The company, launched in 2011, developed a SaaS solution that uses configuration, performance, failure and event data to offer its customers predictive data-center analytics.
The latest round of funding, which brings the total raised to date to $27.5 million, will go toward sales and marketing to grow its customer base along with product development.
Clari
Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.
CEO: Andy Byrne
New Funding: $20 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Northgate Capital and Sequoia Capital
Clari's selling point is big data for CRM systems and it's that pitch that helped it land its latest funding round.
The company's knowledge graph and machine-learning algorithms help sales teams track and forecast deals and their outcomes. Customers include Cisco, Box, Nimble Storage and Juniper Networks.
Clari's solution leverages "the existing foundation with a next-gen mobile solution rethought from the ground up for field reps," Bain Managing Director Ajay Agarwal said in an announcement on the new financing.
VeloCloud Networks
Headquarters: Los Altos, Calif.
CEO: Sanjay Uppal
New Funding: $21 million
Round: Series B
Backers: New Enterprise Associates, Venrock and The Fabric
VeloCloud sells services from the cloud that it says make it easier for its customers to use their networks from branch offices or mobile devices. The company said its goal is to make it easier and more cost effective to use WANs.
The company was co-founded by Sanjay Uppal, Steve Woo and Ajit Mayya, along with tech incubator The Fabric, with the goal of applying cloud networking to enterprise WAN.
Zerto
Headquarters: Boston, Herzliya, Israel
CEO: Ziv Kedem
New Funding: $26 million
Round: Series D
Backers: Harmony Partners led the round with participation from Battery Ventures, Greylock IL, RTP Ventures and U.S. Venture Partners
The latest funding round for data management software provider Zerto brings its total raised to $60 million since its founding in 2009. The company offers disaster recovery solutions for its clients.
Zerto unveiled its Cloud Fabric infrastructure technology used to aid the movement of workloads in the public, private and hybrid clouds.
The company intends to use its financing for global expansion along with R&D, with a particular focus on Cloud Fabric.
SiSense
Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Israel; New York
CEO: Amit Bendov
New Funding: $30 million
Round: Series C
Backers: DFJ Growth along with Battery Ventures, Genesis Partners and Opus Capital
SiSense, a business analytics software developer, is banking on the channel to fuel its expansion, and a fresh infusion of capital is expected to help fund the formation of a partner program, CEO Amit Bendov told CRN earlier this month. Bendov said in an interview that the company aims to increase investment in the channel, which accounts for about a quarter of the company's overall revenue.
SiSense earlier this year launched its SiSense 5, a dashboard that gives users the ability to analyze data from mobile and other devices.
Krux Digital
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Tom Chavez
New Funding: $35 million
Round: Series B
Backers: Led by SAP Ventures in addition to Time Warner Investments, Visionnaire Ventures and Temasek. Existing investor participation included Accel Partners, IDG Ventures and The Entrepreneurs Fund
Krux's latest fundraising comes on the heels of the April opening of its Singapore office and hiring of Asia-Pacific Managing Director Stu Spiteri. Krux provides cloud-based consumer data solutions aimed at helping marketers and publishers improve the website experiences of their customers.
The new funds are expected to grow research and development, as well as sales and support teams worldwide.
Puppet Labs
Headquarters: Portland, Ore.
CEO: Luke Kanies
New Funding: $40 million
Round: Series E
Backers: Cisco, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Triangle Peak Partners, True Ventures and VMware
IT automation software vendor Puppet Labs' recent close on new funding will be used for product development, global expansion and adding to a workforce that currently totals more than 300.
Puppet Labs recently hired EMEA Vice President of Sales Mukesh Sharma, former CEO of cloud service provider Canopy.
The company also is set to relocate to new headquarters, about double the size of its existing space.
Couchbase
Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.
CEO: Bob Wiederhold
New Funding: $60 million
Round: Series E
Backers: WestSummit and Accel Growth Fund led the round and were joined by Adams Street Partners, Ignition Partners, Mayfield Fund and North Bridge Venture Partners
NoSQL database provider Couchbase raked in $60 million on its latest funding round, bringing its total raised to date to $115 million. The company plans to use the new capital on product development, regional tech support, and sales and marketing.
Couchbase, founded in 2011, said its sales have grown 400 percent over the past year, leading to a double of its workforce and the opening of eight offices. The company's client roster includes Beats Music, Cisco, Disney and Neiman Marcus.
Elasticsearch
Headquarters: Los Altos, Calif., Amsterdam
CEO: Steven Schuurman
New Funding: $70 million
Round: Series C
Backers: New Enterprise Associates along with Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures
The latest close on funding for Elasticsearch brings its total raised to $104 million in less than two years, and it's expected to help fuel sales and product development with an eye on global expansion, the company said.
Elasticsearch's flagship open source solution is the Elasticsearch ELK stack, which helps users with data search and analysis.
"This [funding] speaks to the importance of what we're doing: Businesses are generating more and more data, both user- and machine-generated and it has become a strategic imperative for them to get value out of these assets -- whether they are starting a new data-focused project or trying to leverage their current Hadoop or other big data investments," Schuurman said in a release announcing the funding.
MapR Technologies
Headquarters : San Jose
CEO: John Schroeder
New Funding: $110 million
Round: Series D
Backers: Google Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, NEA and Redpoint Ventures.
Apache Hadoop software distributor MapR Technologies completed $110 million in financing in June, including $80 million in equity financing and a debt facility of $30 million led by Silicon Valley Bank. Google Capital led the equity investors, which also included Qualcomm Ventures (Qualcomm's venture investment group) and several existing investors.
MapR will use the financing to grow its engineering resources, particularly to support open-source projects such as Apache Drill, Apache Spark and Hadoop 2.2 with YARN. The financing will also be used to expand the company's global market programs.
Rick Whiting contributed to this report