From time to time the HostingJournalist.com editorial staff publishes a special selection of editorial pieces on a certain topic or trend. The HostingJournalist.com editor’s picks are being marked as #HJpicks on our social media channels.
Today, our editors provide you with a Top-12 list of the most interesting news items on Funding rounds in 2020 and 2021 within the global cloud, hosting and data center market.
Cloud Network Platform Aviatrix Raises $75M in Series D Funding
“Every day we’re seeing more enterprises transforming their business and shifting their center of gravity for their IT infrastructure to cloud, and most of that is of course leveraging multiple cloud service providers (CSPs),” said Steve Mullaney, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Aviatrix.
Aviatrix, a cloud network platform provider delivering automated and agile networking, security and operational visibility and control, has raised $75 million in Series D funding.
The funding round was led by General Catalyst and includes new investors Greenspring Associates, Meritech Capital, and TrueBridge Capital Partners. Existing investors CRV, Formation 8, Ignition, and Liberty Global Ventures also participated in this round.
This brings Aviatrix’s total financing to $151 million. Quentin Clark from General Catalyst will be joining the company’s Board of Directors.
Read the full story on Aviatrix.
Data Storage Company LyteLoop Completes $40M Funding Round
“This round of funding will allow us to quadruple the size of our team and attract highly-capable engineers and scientists to achieve our goal of launching our six-satellite proof of concept within three years,” said Ohad Harlev, CEO of LyteLoop.
LyteLoop, an emerging data storage company developing a revolutionary method to utilize the power of ultra-high bandwidth lasers to store massive amounts of data in space, has announced the successful closing of a $40M private, follow-on financing round.
The new capital will be used primarily to expand the LyteLoop team. The company is developing an advanced data storage network to address the inefficiencies of existing land-based data storage – namely security, privacy, environmental and scalability issues.
Read the full story on LyteLoop.
Cloud Governance Platform Stacklet Secures $18M in Series A Funding
“I joined Stacklet because of the tremendous market opportunity they have to become the de facto standard for cloud governance,” said Liam Randall, the individual investor who has joined the Stacklet leadership team as VP of business development.
Stacklet, developer of a cloud governance platform based on Cloud Custodian, has closed $18 million in Series A funding. The funds are earmarked for continuing the support and growth of the Cloud Custodian community, advancing the Stacklet platform, and hiring in engineering, marketing, sales and customer success.
Stacklet exited stealth in August 2020. The company has developed a real-time cloud asset database, added hundreds of policies to its ‘Policy Packs’ and signed multiple design partners for its cloud governance platform. Cloud Custodian has been downloaded more than 2 million times since August 2020, is part of the CNCF Sandbox, and has almost 300 active contributors including Amazon, Microsoft and Capital One.
Read the full story on Stacklet.
Cloud Compliance Management Firm Caveonix Secures Over $7M in Funding
“Our goal at Caveonix is to accelerate digital transformation for our customers by providing them the continuous monitoring and compliance they need in hybrid and multi-cloud environments,” said Tim Sullivan, Co-CEO, Caveonix.
Caveonix, a company automating compliance and cybersecurity posture management for the hybrid and multi-cloud, has raised $7.3 million in Series A funding. The round was led by First In Capital, as well as other early investors in the company.
Founded in October 2017 and funded since inception by cybersecurity veterans Tim Sullivan and Kaus Phaltankar, Caveonix provides digital risk and compliance management solutions for enterprises undergoing digital transformation.This funding would continue to support the flourishing partnerships Caveonix has with AWS, IBM, VMWare and Dell, and help reach more customers in the federal and enterprise markets.
Read the full story on Caveonix.
Isovalent Emerges from Stealth, Raises $29M in Series A Funding
“Cilium is cloud-native networking without the compromise: platforms teams get a developer-friendly, scalable and multi-cloud platform while giving SecOps teams the efficient and powerful security visibility and controls they need,” said Dan Wendlandt, co-founder and CEO of Isovalent.
Cloud-native networking startup Isovalent has emerged from stealth by the recent launch of Cilium product. At the same time, the company has announced a funding round with participation from Google and Cisco. Cilium is aimed at helping enterprises connect, observe and secure modern applications with a new approach that frees modern cloud-native applications from outdated, legacy techniques.
As enterprises are adopting Kubernetes and other cloud-native technologies, systems constantly change in response to changing demands. At cloud scale, thousands of systems are starting, working or closing down, all the time. Services appear, connect and disappear in seconds.
Read the full story on Isovalent.
CloudBolt Raises $35 Million Series B Funding
“As enterprises accelerate their investments in hybrid cloud, they face growing challenges around shadow IT, lack of visibility, and complex integrations across their IT and DevOps toolsets,” said Jeff Kukowski, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of CloudBolt Software.
Cloud management software provider CloudBolt has received $35 million in series B funding, consisting of both equity and venture debt. The equity was led by Insight Partners, a global venture capital and private equity firm.
The venture debt is issued by Hercules Capital (NYSE: HTGC), a large non-bank source of venture lending financing for technology, life sciences, and renewable energy companies. As well as by Bridge Bank, a lender to industry-leading SMBs and emerging technology-focused ventures.
“As enterprises accelerate their investments in hybrid cloud, they face growing challenges around shadow IT, lack of visibility, and complex integrations across their IT and DevOps toolsets,” said Jeff Kukowski, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of CloudBolt Software.
Read the full story on CloudBolt.
Website Security Company BitNinja Raises $2.5M in Series A Funding
BitNinja Team
After last year’s €500,000 seed investment, BitNinja has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding, led by Lead Ventures. The website security company will use the fund to further improve its existing ServerProtection SaaS tool and by developing new products.
BitNinja aims to give ultimate protection against WordPress, Joomla and Drupal infections for hosted websites. They provide an all-in-one SaaS cybersecurity tool, which protects more than 20,000 servers worldwide and defends against 10+ million attacks on a daily basis.
Founded in 2014, BitNinja became already profitable by the following year. In December 2015, they were one of the eight selected start-ups in Cyber London’s second accelerator program.
Read the full story on BitNinja.
NS1 Raises $40M in Series D Funding from Energy Impact Partners
“This additional investment at a time of rapid growth at NS1 helps us capitalize on the market opportunity to meet the escalating demand for these modern foundational technologies,” said Kris Beevers, co-founder and CEO of NS1.
NS1, a global company with a software-defined application networking stack modernizing DNS, DHCP, and IPAM, has raised a $40 million Series D venture round led by Energy Impact Partners (EIP) with participation from existing investors. This brings NS1’s total funding to $125 million.
The new funding for NS1 would support the company’s continued innovation and development of modern foundational technologies.
“There is heightened urgency to expedite IT modernization. Five-year projects are being condensed to one year, and the only way to deliver on these aggressive timelines is by unlocking leverage in foundational application and networking infrastructure,” said Kris Beevers, co-founder and CEO of NS1.
Read the full story on NS1.
Network Intelligence Platform Kentik Raises $23.5M in Growth Funding
“With recent traffic growth, we now have real-time visibility into over 1 trillion traffic measurements per day across billions of users, and see every network connected to the Internet, and every cloud and SaaS provider,” said Avi Freedman, co-founder and CEO of Kentik.
Kentik, a network intelligence platform provider delivering its services to digital enterprises and service providers, has announced $23.5 million in growth funding led by Vistara Capital Partners. Existing investors August Capital, Third Point Ventures, DCVC, and Tahoma Ventures also participated in the round, which combines equity and growth debt.
With Kentik, businesses would eliminate the visibility and intelligence gaps associated with running dynamic and complex networks, and achieve greater network performance, reliability and security.
Companies like IBM, Zoom, Dropbox, eBay, Cisco, and GoDaddy turn to the Kentik Network Intelligence Platform for instant analytics and insights across cloud and hybrid environments to make informed network and business decisions. To date, Kentik has raised $61.7 million in total funding.
Read the full story on Kentik.
VAST Data Raises $100 Million in Funding At $1.2 Billion Valuation
“We started VAST Data with a single mission, to simplify the data center and to enable insights that were never before possible,” said Renen Hallak, Founder & CEO of VAST Data.
Storage firm VAST Data, a company launched in February 2019 and headquartered in New York City, has raised $100 million in Series C funding, led by Next47, at a valuation of $1.2 billion. This round brings the company’s total funding to $180 million.
VAST Data is a storage company bringing an end to complex storage tiering and HDD usage in the enterprise. VAST consolidates applications onto a highly scalable all-flash storage system to meet the performance needs of the most demanding workloads, while also “redefining” the economics of flash infrastructure to finally make it affordable enough to store all data on flash.
Since its launch in February 2019, VAST Data has established itself as one of the fastest selling storage startups in history.
Read the full story on VAST Data.
TierPoint Raises $320M in Funding from Consortium of Investors
“This investment agreement was reached in what we all know is a very challenging environment. That’s a testament to the strong performance TierPoint has already achieved and our prospects for continued growth,” said Jerry Kent, Chairman and CEO of Tierpoint.
TierPoint, a provider of connected data center and cloud solutions at “the edge” of the Internet, has reached an agreement that will result in new, preferred equity investments totaling $320 million, which the company expects to be closed and funded by mid-April.
The investment is meant to provide growth capital to fuel TierPoint’s “continued momentum.” Net proceeds, after transaction fees and expenses, will also be used to repay TierPoint’s second lien credit facility in full and reduce the balance outstanding under the company’s revolving credit facility.
The $320 million of preferred equity is led by a consortium of new investors: Argo Infrastructure Partners, Wafra, and Macquarie Capital Principal Finance.
Read the full story on TierPoint.
cPacket Networks Completes $15 Million Funding Round
“cPacket Networks’ focus on enabling hybrid/multi-cloud visibility for the most demanding computing environments comes just as cPacket’s customers look to leverage AI driven IT operations (AIOps) for their mission critical applications,” said Pete Chung, head of Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital.
cPacket Networks, a provider of network-aware application and security assurance solutions, has completed a $15 million round of funding by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital. The investment will be used to accelerate cPacket’s focus on product innovation and deployment of its broad range of “high-performance” network visibility products for the cloud, data center, and branch offices.
“Digital transformation is driving enterprises and service providers to cloud-smart strategies,” said Pete Chung, head of Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital. “cPacket Networks’ focus on enabling hybrid/multi-cloud visibility for the most demanding computing environments comes just as cPacket’s customers look to leverage AI driven IT operations (AIOps) for their mission critical applications. We are excited to partner with cPacket on its continued success.”
Read the full story on cPacket Networks.
