Category Archives: Funding

AWS, developer, DigitalOcean, Funding, Khosla Ventures, News & Analysis, Nitin Gupta

Koding bags $10m to boost cloud-native IDE

Koding secured $10m in series B this week

Koding secured $10m in series B this week

Independent development environment provider Koding closed $10m in series B funding this week in a round led by Khosla Ventures.

Koding offers a platform that aims to bridge user-friendly collaboration features with a robust, device-agnostic development platform, and the service is hosted directly on AWS and DigitalOcean infrastructure.

500 Startups and existing investors Matrix Partners and RTP Ventures also participated in the funding round, which brings the total amount secured by the company since its founding to just under $30m.

As part of the most recent round, Ari Zilka, a partner at Khosla Ventures and formerly chief technology officer at big data specialist Hortonworks, will join the company’s board.

“The cloud-based development environment has dramatically shifted how software engineers write code and collaborate. The cloud provides an immersive environment that increases productivity without requiring any installation,” explained Nitin Gupta, Koding’s chief business officer in a recent blog post.

“Already, we have over a million software developers using Koding who, in aggregate, have written over a billion lines of code, spun up millions of virtual machines and consumed over eight petabytes of storage. Our recently forged partnerships with developer focused companies like DigitalOcean and Amazon Web Services (AWS) help get Koding into the hands of even more developers worldwide.”

The company said it plans to use the funding to double down on developing its Koding for Teams offering, which brings new capabilities that allow developers to more easily on-board team members and build internal development communities across heterogeneous developer organisations.

Africa, Funding, IBM, Kenya, Kenya Education Network, Meoli Kashorda, Naguib Attia, News & Analysis, public private partnership

IBM to invest $60m in Africa to expand cloud, analytics skills

IBM is investing $60m in Africa over three years to train students in cloud, big data and analytics

IBM is investing $60m in Africa over three years to train students in cloud, big data and analytics

IBM will invest $60m in Africa over three years to expand its technical academy and educational initiatives in the region. The company said it wants to bolster its investment in developing stronger regional capabilities in cloud services, big data and analytics.

In Kenya, where IBM’s Africa Research lab and Innovation Centres are based, the company is partnering with the Kenya Education Network (KENET) to deliver advanced certification courses in cloud and data sciences to faculty and students of 50 Kenyan universities linked by KENET’s broadband network.

The courses will be administered by IBM technical experts along with key faculty from participating universities.

“With a research laboratory, innovation centers, offices and other advanced facilities in more than 24 African countries, IBM has the highest concentration of technical talent on the African continent,” said Naguib Attia, IBM chief technology officer & vice president of technical leadership, MEA.

“As the leader in science and technology in Africa, we see it as IBM’s responsibility to make a strategic investment in skills development helping to lay the foundations of the Africa of tomorrow,” he said.

Attia said partners hope to reach up to 35,000 students by 2017.

Meoli Kashorda, executive director of Kenya Education Network said the certification program will provide university graduates with critical entry-level job skills in high demand by employers in Kenya and Africa more broadly.

“Both the African universities and leading private sector companies that are investing on the continent stand to benefit from this program,” he said.

The move comes just a few days after IBM unveiled a tech collaboration space in Nairobi, where the company hopes to facilitate tech partnerships between startups in the region. The space, which will make a range of IBM services like Bluemix and various cloud applications available to developers by offering credits, will open in August this year.

Crowdstrike, Funding, Google, News & Analysis, Rackspace

Security as a service firm Crowdstrike bags $100 from Google, Rackspace

CrowdStrike secured $100m in funding this week from Rackspace, Google among others

CrowdStrike secured $100m in funding this week from Rackspace, Google among others

Security SaaS provider CrowdStrike completed a $100m round of funding led by Google and Rackspace this week, which the company said would be used to bolster its international expansion.

The funding round, in which Accel and Warburg Pincus also participated, brings the total investment secured by the firm to $156m.

CrowdStrike offers a range of threat intelligence, endpoint protections and cybersecurity services including a cloud-based software offering and a security operations centre -as-a-service.

The company, of which Rackspace is a customer, claims to have trebled billings revenue and employees year on year.

“It’s extremely gratifying to bring in a high-caliber investor like Google Capital which shares our passion for innovation and sees the opportunity to completely transform the security industry,” said George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s co-founder and chief executive officer.

“As we continue to experience hyper-growth, this capital injection will help us firmly establish our SaaS-based endpoint protection platform as the leading solution to address today’s sophisticated attacks and will allow CrowdStrike to further accelerate our domestic and international expansion.”

The cloud-based security services market is growing along with enterprise adoption of cloud services in part because they can be deployed more quickly and flexibly than on-premise solutions, and because the architectures tend to be quite complimentary. Large cloud providers also see value in funding them because security services are quite capitally and operationally expensive – they require huge investments in code, infrastructure, monitoring and support staff – which means it’s challenging for these large IaaS providers to offer these services themselves. According to MarketsandMarkets the cloud security market is forecast to grow nearly 16 per cent CAGR from $4.2bn in 2014 to $8.7bn in 2019.

Big Data, Database, Delphix, Funding, News & Analysis, NewSQL, SQL

Data-as-a-service specialist Delphix scores $75m in latest round

Delphix secured $75m in its latest funding round this week

Delphix secured $75m in its latest funding round this week

Data-as-a-service specialist Delphix announced this week that the company has concluded a $75m funding round that will be used by the company to bolster its cloud and security capabilities.

The funding round, led by Fidelity Management and Research Company, brings the total amount secured by the company to just over $119m since its 2008 founding.

Delphix offers what is increasingly referred to as data-as-a-service, though a more accurate way of describing it does is offer data compression and replication-as-a-service, or the ability to virtualise, secure, optimise and move large databases – whether from an application like an ERP or a data warehouse – from on-premise to the cloud and back again.

It offers broad support for most database technologies including Oracle, Oracle RAC, Oracle Exadata, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, SAP ASE, PostgreSQL, and a range of other SQL and NewSQL technologies.

The company said the additional funding will be used to expand its marketing activities and “aggressively invest” in cloud, analytics and data security technologies in a bid to expand its service capabilities.

“Applications have become a highly contested battleground for businesses across all industries,” said Jedidiah Yueh, Delphix founder and chief executive.

“Data as a Service helps our customers complete application releases and cloud migrations in half the time, by making data fast, light, and unbreakable—a huge competitive advantage,” he said.

Access Industries, Andreessen Horowitz, Ben Uretsky, DigitalOcean, Funding, IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service, Mitch Wainer, News & Analysis

Dev-focused DigitalOcean raises $83m from Access Industries, Andreessen Horowitz

DigitalOcean raised $83m this week, which it will use to add features to its IaaS platform

DigitalOcean raised $83m this week, which it will use to add features to its IaaS platform

DigitalOcean this week announced it has raised $83m in a series B funding round the cloud provider said would help it ramp up global expansion and portfolio development.

The round was led by Access Industries with participation from seasoned tech investment firm Andreessen Horowitz.

DigitalOcean offers infrastructure as a service in a variety of Linux flavours and and aims its services primarily at developers, though the company said the latest round of funding, which brings the total amount it has secured since its founding in 2012 to $173m, will be used to aggressively expand its feature set.

“We are laser­-focused on empowering the developer community,” said Mitch Wainer, co-founder and chief marketing officer at DigitalOcean. “This capital infusion enables us to expand our world­-class engineering team so we can continue to offer the best infrastructure experience in the industry.”

Although the company is fairly young, and with just ten datacentres globally it claims to serve roughly 500,000 (individual) developers deploying cloud services on its IaaS platform, a respectable size by any measure. It also recently added another European datacentre in Frankfurt back in April, the company’s third on the continent.

But with bare bones IaaS competition getting more intense it will be interesting to see how DigitalOcean evolves; given its emphasis on developers it is possible the company’s platform could evolve into something more PaaS-like.

“We began with a vision to simplify infrastructure that will change how millions of developers build, deploy and scale web applications,” said Ben Uretsky, chief exec and co-­founder of DigitalOcean. “Our investors share our vision, and they’ll be essential partners in our continued growth.”

Actility, Foxconn, Funding, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, Olivier Hersent, Orange

Orange, Foxconn among LoRa IoT startup Actility backers

IoT partnerships are in full swing this month

IoT partnerships are in full swing this month

A group of tech companies including operators Orange, KPN and Swisscom and manufacturing giant Foxconn have put $25 million into Actility, an IoT startup focused on the LoRaWAN standard, reports Telecoms.com.

With the IoT land grab fully underway there are already calls for standardisation and collaboration as everyone looks to get an early piece of the action. The LoRa Alliance was unveiled at CES at the start of this year to support LoRaWAN low-power WAN technology. Minimising the amount of power required by IoT modules is considered critical if they’re to have the multi-year battery life required for embedded applications.

This $25 million round of funding was led by Ginko Ventures, which is a consortium consisting of the above tech companies and some VC players. The stated aim of the investment is to accelerate the go-to-market strategy for Actility’s ThingPark open standard IoT network solution.

“I decided to create Actility in 2010 based on the intuition that M2M would become much bigger and the need for carrier grade M2M infrastructure,” Actility founder and chief exec Olivier Hersent told Telecoms.com. “In terms of technology we have worked a lot with a technology call LoRa, which is one of the fastest growing alliances, on the LoRaWAN standard.

“ThingPark provides the technology to connect both long range and low power sensors over unlicensed ISM band spectrum, allowing low cost and fast roll-out of IoT networks for a wide range of IoT applications. We are delighted to have secured the backing of such prominent communications industry leaders.”

“Foxconn Group is transforming to be a high technology solution provider, including hardware and software value creation. Through this strategic investment, we will expand our current collaboration with Actility to bring its LoRaWAN technology and IoT Platform and Solutions to Taiwan, China, and the rest of Asia,” said Fang Ming Lu, executive vice president of Foxconn.

“This is a technology that comes at the right time for operators to accelerate the connection of objects,” Jean-Paul de Weck, CEO Swisscom Broadcast. “There is set to be a huge increase in the demand for IoT and we see Actility as a key partner as we expand our activities in this market.”

The feeling among Actility and its investors is that LoRa could well become the default IoT technology worldwide, and that it will only become so if it is open to all players. The commercial applications of IoT at this early stage tend to be more industrial, such as smart metering, remote monitoring and logistics applications. By seeding the market the aim is to prove the commercial viability of such IoT implementations and build momentum.

The announcement coincides with a flood of other IoT collaborations. Vodafone is partnering with EMC to develop an IoT testing platform, while Samsung yesterday announced a partnership and investment in Sigfox, which seems to be competitive with LoRa and already has some commercial networks, with a new one being rolled out by Engie in Belgium. Finally the Weightless SIG, yet another prospective IoT wireless standard, also picked this week to announce the deployment of a Weightless-N Smart City network in London. It seems unlikely that all these announcements are a coincidence and the IoT land grab is definitely gathering intensity.

Docker, Funding, Linux containers, News & Analysis, Rancher Labs, Shannon Williams, Sheng Liang

Docker startup Rancher Labs secures $10m for container-based IaaS software

Rancher is developing container-based IaaS software

Rancher is developing container-based IaaS software

Rancher Labs, a startup developing Linux container-based infrastructure-as-a-service software, has secured $10m in a series A round of funding, which it said would be used to bolster its engineering and development efforts.

Rancher Labs, which was started by CloudStack founder Sheng Liang and Cloud.com (which was acquired by Citrix in 2011) founder Shannon Williams, offers infrastructure services purpose-built for containers.It also developed a lightweight Linux OS called RacherOS. “We wanted to run Docker directly on top of the Linux Kernel, and have all user-space Linux services be distributed as Docker containers. By doing this, there would be no need to use a separate software package distribution mechanism for RancherOS itself,” the company explained.

The company said that as technologies like Docker become more popular in production mode so do other requirements around things like networking (i.e. load balancing), monitoring, storage management, and other infrastructure requirements needed to stand up a reliable cloud workload.

“Containers are quickly becoming the de-facto large-scale production platform for application deployment,” Liang said.

“Our goal is to provide organizations with the tools needed to take full advantage of container technology. By developing storage and networking software purpose-built for containers, we are providing organizations with the best possible experience for running Docker in production.”

The company’s goal is to develop all of the infrastructure services necessary to give enterprises confidence in deploying containers in production at scale, and it plans to use the funding to accelerate its development and engineering efforts.

Jishnu Bhattacharjee, managing director at Nexus Venture Partners, one of the company’s investors said: “Software containers have dramatically changed the way DevOps teams work, becoming an essential piece of today’s IT infrastructure. The team at Rancher Labs recognized the technology’s potential early on, along with the pain points associated with it.”

While the technologies and tools to support Linux containers are still young there seems to be growing volume around using them for production deployments; one of the things that makes them so attractive in the cloud world is their scalability, and the ability to drop them in almost any environment – whether bare metal or on a hypervisor.

call centre, Funding, Josh Stein, News & Analysis, Software as a service, Talkdesk

Talkdesk scores $15m in cloud contact centre push

Talkdesk has raised $15m to take call centre software into the cloud

Talkdesk has raised $15m to take call centre software into the cloud

Cloud-based contact centre software provider Talkdesk has secured $15m in a series A round of funding led by DFJ with participation from existing investor, Storm Ventures, which the company said would be used to fuel its international expansion.

The latest round of funding brings the total amount raised by the firm since its founding to over $33m.

Talkdesk, which was founded in 2011, said its web-based contact centre solution integrates with Zendesk, Desk.com, Salesforce, Zoho, SugarCRM and Help Scout among other cloud services.

“Today’s consumers are used to instant app-driven communications, but most cloud-based call center solutions do not provide the functionality necessary for companies to meet their rising expectations for service. As such, companies are looking for a more progressive call center technology that provides relevant real-time customer information so they can deliver an exceptionally personalized experience,” said Tiago Paiva, Founder and chief executive of Talkdesk.

“We developed Talkdesk to address the needs of this $20B market1. We accomplished this by making it simple for companies to deploy a robust cloud-based call center software solution that provides contextual information about their customers, without the complexity or high cost associated with implementation,” Paiva said.

Call centres are becoming increasingly dispersed and as a result the software they use needs to be more nimble, slimmed down and flexible to deploy than when these were operating as large, centralised departments. The trend has contributed to the rise of a wide range of cloud-based contact centre solutions delivering omni-channel support.

Talkdesk said it’s one of the companies capitalising on this rise, and at more than 70 employees said it has experienced 1,000 per cent year on year revenue growth since its founding.

“This is the classic cloud-software eats the world storyline that we have seen before,” said Josh Stein, partner at DFJ. “We are seeing a massive evolution in the call center technology space that, until now, has been dominated by antiquated solutions.”

Amazon, Avinash Lakshman, Cassandra, Facebook, Funding, Hedvig, News & Analysis, software defined storage

Hedvig bags $18m for software-defined storage

Hedvig secured $18m this week which will help fuel expansion of its software-defined storage offering

Hedvig secured $18m this week which will help fuel expansion of its software-defined storage offering

Distributed storage platform provider Hedvig has secured $18m in a round of funding the company said will be used to double down on development and expansion.

In the cloud space storage heterogeneity can cause big performance bottlenecks – particularly in tightly integrated systems, which many applications and services are quite clearly becoming – and legacy datacentres are struggling to keep pace.

Hedvig, which came out of stealth earlier this year and was founded by former Facebook and Amazon NoSQL and storage specialist Avinash Lakshman (also the brains behind Cassandra), offers a highly scalable storage platform (block, file and object) that the company says provides fully programmable, highly granular storage provisioning – software-defined storage in other words.

The platform supports pretty much every hypervisor or Linux container service above it, and uses REST-based APIs so cloud users can tap into the platform in a fairly straightforward way.

The investment round, which brings the total amount raised by the firm to just over $30m, was led by Vertex Ventures with participation from existing investors True Ventures and Atlantic Bridge. As part of the deal Vertex Ventures General Partner In Sik Rhee will be joining Hedvig’s board of directors.

“We’ve identified the potential in a broken and fragmented storage market, and are not only looking to bring software-defined storage mainstream, but fundamentally change how companies store and manage data,” Lakshman said.

“Riding the wave of momentum from our recent company launch, this new investment round further validates our technology and approach, and will fuel our unwavering commitment to be the leading force of innovation in software-defined storage.”

Hedvig’s success comes at a time of rising popularity of the concept of the software-defined datacentre, which sees the orchestration of almost everything – storage, compute, networking – through software.

Coupa, Financials, Funding, News & Analysis, Rob Bernshteyn, Spend management

Coupa closes $80m funding to bolster financials in the cloud

Coupa secured $80m in its latest funding round

Coupa secured $80m in its latest funding round

Cloud-based provider Coupa has secured $80m in a funding round led by T. Rowe Price Associates and Iconiq Capital, bringing total investment raised by the startup to $165m.

Premji Invest, Crosslink Capital, Battery Ventures, El Dorado Ventures and Rally Ventures also participated with the latest funding round.

“This financing allows Coupa to continue investing in our go-to-market capacity and further expand our market-leading product portfolio and cloud innovations,” said Rob Bernshteyn, chef executive of Coupa.

“With our cloud spend management solutions we are redefining the value software should deliver to businesses and changing how customers define success from enterprise software solutions. We’re thrilled to have this roster of investors backing us as we grow our leadership and continue bringing our unique Savings-as-a-Service offering to the world’s most successful companies,” Bernshteyn added.

The spend-management provider said it plans to use the capital to bolster its global operations including sales, support and marketing.

Coupa said it wants to help “consumerise B2B commerce” for firms and their suppliers and make spend management simple, and the company seems to be enjoying a reasonable amount of success at convincing some of the largest firms – some of its customers include Salesforce, one of the largest Coca Cola bottlers in America, Royal Bank of Canada and BNP Paribas North America. It also claims more than $120bn in spend has passed through its platform to date.

Over the past year the company has focused on building out integrations and partnerships with ERP providers, announcing a deal with NetSuite in October 2014 for instance. Spend management software has long been high on the priority list of larger legacy incumbents. In 2012 for instance SAP bought cloud-based cash flow and expense management provider Ariba for $4.3bn, the same year Oracle introduced its own cloud-based expense management offering.