With the venture capital sector showing signs of dynamism, investors are looking to fund both early-stage startups and established companies, including Anthropic and Databricks, in cybersecurity, data analytics, and AI in general. is open.
follow the money
The venture capital field is finally starting to show signs of life, with investors pouring money into both early-stage startups and established companies in cybersecurity, data analytics, and AI, especially in areas where these technologies converge. Open your wallet to offer.
Generative AI platform developer Anthropic was a big winner this month, signing a massive multifaceted deal with Amazon that will see the giant invest up to $4 billion in AI startups.
Data lakehouse and AI platform developer Databricks would have gone public by now in better market conditions, but instead raised a Series I funding round to sustain the company’s phenomenal growth. We raised $500 million.
This month’s Follow the Money roundup focuses on funding announcements for companies in the cybersecurity, AIOps, data protection, data analytics, and networking/SASE space, including many early-stage startups. .
We will introduce 10 companies that raised funds in September 2023.
human
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Dario Amodei
Funding: up to $4 billion
Investor: Amazon has invested up to $4 billion in Anthropic, making it a minority shareholder.
What kind of companies do this: Anthropic develops AI systems, including its flagship Claude AI assistant product.
CEO’s words: “We are excited to be able to develop future foundational models using AWS’s Trainium chips. Since announcing support for Amazon Bedrock in April, Claude has seen significant natural adoption from AWS customers. Significantly expanded partnership to unlock new possibilities for organizations of all sizes by deploying Anthropic’s secure, cutting-edge AI systems and AWS’ cutting-edge cloud technology. can do.”
data brick
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Ali Godoshi
Funding: The $500 million Series I funding round brings the company’s total funding to approximately $4 billion and boosts its valuation to $43 billion.
Investor: The round was led by previous investor T. Rowe Price Associates. New investors include Nvidia, Capital One Ventures and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. Previous investors participating in this round include Andreessen Horowitz, Baillie Gifford, ClearBridge Investments, funds and accounts managed by Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), Fidelity Management & Research Company; They included Franklin Templeton, GIC, Octahedron Capital and Tiger Global.
What kind of companies do this: Databricks develops the Databricks Lakehouse platform for a variety of data management, data analysis, and AI tasks.
CEO’s words: “The commitment from our long-term, focused strategic and financial partners supports Databricks’ continued momentum, rapid customer adoption of Databricks Lakehouse, and customer success as we move to a unified data and AI platform. It reflects.”
Kato Networks
Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Israel
CEO: Shlomo Kramer
Funding: The $238 million Series F funding round brings the company’s total funding to $773 million, pushing its valuation to more than $3 billion.
Investor: The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Adams Street Partners, Softbank Vision Fund 2, Sixty Degree Capital, and Singtel Innov8.
What kind of companies do this: Cato Networks, a cloud networking specialist, is developing a single-vendor Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform.
CEO’s words: “This funding round reflects investors’ confidence in Cato’s leadership in the single-vendor SASE market. Cato’s SASE platform enables organizations of all sizes to own and maintain high-volume point solutions. Cato delivers the only SASE platform that creates a seamless customer experience, empowering IT to move at the speed of business. I will make it possible.”
mother duck
Headquarters: Seattle
CEO: Jordan Tigani
Funding: The company raised $52.5 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to $100 million and increasing its valuation to $400 million.
Investor: The funding round was led by Felicis, with participation from new and existing investors a16z, Madrona, Amplify Partners, Altimeter, Redpoint, Zero Prime, and more.
What kind of companies do this: MotherDuck develops a serverless data analytics platform built on the DuckDB OLAP database.
CEO’s words: “We are proud of what we have been able to accomplish with the DuckDB community and the DuckDB Labs team over the past year. With our initial funding, we have grown our engineering team, launched our platform, and added almost 2,000 employees to our team. “We were able to get our analysts to use it,” he said.
Lum
Headquarters: Miami, Florida
CEO: Ricardo Villadiego
Funding: The company raised $30 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to $38 million.
Investor: The round was led by Forgepoint Capital, with participation from existing investors BIP Ventures, Exceptional Capital, and SIMMA Capital.
What kind of companies do this: Lumu develops continuous breach assessment cybersecurity technology that detects incidents, threats, and attacks around the world.
CEO’s words: “SOC analysts face rapidly increasing alert volumes and false positives in high-pressure situations where small mistakes can have major consequences. I am a firm believer that cybersecurity requires a paradigm shift. We founded Lumu and are pleased that the market and investors are recognizing our network-centric approach to threat detection and response and our security analyst-focused experience.”
Alcyon
Headquarters: Santa Clara, California
CEO: Niraj Tolia
Funding: The Series A funding round raised $21 million, bringing the company’s total funding to $29 million.
Investor: The round was led by Veeam, a developer of data backup and replication technology. All previous investors also participated, including Walden International chairman and Intel board member Lip Vu Tan. Devanjan Saha, CEO of DataRobot. Abhinav Asthana, Founder and CEO of Postman. and Amarjit Gill, “serial entrepreneur” and investor at Nepenthe Capital.
What kind of companies do this: Alcyon develops data protection and data backup-as-a-service technologies with data recovery capabilities that protect data from loss and disaster and provide ransomware protection. The Alcion system is built on open source Corso technology.
CEO’s words: “Data protection is more important than ever. Since going out of stealth in May, we have seen a 700% increase in organizations using the platform, and Alcion can now manage petabytes of logical backups. This round of funding will allow us to quickly scale our mission to protect the world’s data from both malicious threats and incidents. Alcion’s customers and fast-growing open source Corso The community will benefit from greater functionality, ease of use, and enhanced ransomware detection.”
sensor
Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Israel
CEO: Amir Clayden
Funding: A $9.5 million seed funding round to help the company come out of stealth.
Investor: The round was led by Eclipse, with participation from Amdocs and other private investors.
What kind of companies do this: Senser bills itself as a pioneer in zero-meter production intelligence, developing an AIOps platform (based on Enhanced Berkeley Packet Filter or “eBPF” technology) that provides observability into complex cloud and IT environments. Masu.
CEO’s words: “Downtime costs businesses an average of $1 million per hour and destroys customer trust over the long term. We built Senser to make it easy. [site reliability engineering] DevOps leaders can ignore alerts and dashboards and resolve issues quickly. The average Sensor customer reduces average time to detection by 83%. This achievement is possible because eBPF allows instant visibility of the entire production system with no overhead, and ML provides answers rather than a flood of alerts. ”
legal security
Headquarters: Palo Alto, California
CEO: Loni Fuchs
Funding: $40 million Series B funding round.
Investor: The round was led by CRV, with participation from existing investors Cyberstarts, Bessemer Venture Partners, and TCV.
What kind of companies do this: Legit Security develops a security posture management platform for enterprise applications.
CEO’s words: “We founded Legit Security with a mission to protect the world’s software with a platform that continuously manages application security from code to cloud. We are proud to work with you, and your insights have helped us develop a holistic approach to modern application security that more closely ties security and development, increasing speed, efficiency, and collaboration. This investment gives our mission even more momentum and speed, including new capabilities that expand visibility, security, and governance for AI-generated code and large-scale language models embedded in applications. .”
net at work
Headquarters: new york
Co-CEO: alex solomon and eddie solomon
Funding: The amount is an undisclosed growth investment.
Investor: Label Minnick Partners
What kind of companies do this: Net at Work is a leading digital operations technology provider offering next-generation solutions, cloud and managed IT services, and fractional CIO and advisory services for small and medium-sized businesses.
Words from the CEO (Solomon): “This investment from Lovell Minnick Partners is an important milestone for Net at Work. It not only allows us to help our customers and partners succeed in today’s digital economy, but also provides career options for employees and talent in the marketplace. We continue to redefine excellence in technology partnerships to lead the industry.”
beza
Headquarters: Palo Alto, California
CEO: Tarun Thakur
Funding: The amount is not disclosed.
Investor: syndicate group
What kind of companies do this: Startup Veza is developing next-generation identity security technology that helps businesses and organizations better visualize identity security risks and protect access to identities.
CEO’s words: “Channel partners quickly realized that traditional identity tools could no longer keep up with the speed of enterprise access processes. Security-focused partners have helped Veza reach new market segments. We are excited to join forces with these partners as identity security becomes a strategic imperative.”
Source link
