Category: Venture Capital

CipherCloud Announces AES 256-bit Encryption Solution For Box

Today, cloud security vendor CipherCloud announced an enhancement to its relationship with Box whereby Box customers can now take advantage of CipherCloud’s AES 256-bit encryption functionality. The announcement means that customers can now enjoy military-grade encryption that renders their data practically inaccessible to the prying eyes of unauthorized users of any kind. CipherCloud’s solution uses Box APIs to track and encrypt data as it enters the CipherCloud platform in conjunction with customer-based rules that determine which data is deemed sensitive and requires encryption. Moreover, CipherCloud’s encryption solution for Box allows users to configure a range of automated settings for sensitive data that include sharing restrictions, alerts, data quarantine and automated encryption, all of which are configured through the Box interface itself. In contrast to offerings whereby the cloud vendor retains access to the encryption keys, CipherCloud allows customers to retain the encryption keys. Because customers retain control of the encryption keys for data stored in Box, authorized users can access the encrypted data at any time, giving customers greater control with respect to data access. CipherCloud’s encryption solution for Box supports mobile devices and additionally boasts configurable notifications for instances of potential security breaches.

CipherCloud claims an impressive array of data loss protection (DLP) services for a range of cloud platforms that include Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, Gmail and Office 365. Today’s Box announcement builds upon its existing DLP solution for Box and claims a competitive edge over CipherCloud’s competitors by virtue of its streamlined integration with the Box platform. The company currently claims over 2 million users in 14 countries and 10 industries. CipherCloud is backed by venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and T-Venture and has raised $31.4 million in capital to date. As concerns about cloud data security proliferate given recent disclosures of government agency surveillance alongside internal and external breaches of enterprise data, CipherCloud should be expected to consolidate its position in the cloud data security space, particularly in light of its recent AES 256-bit encryption offering.

Loggly Raises $10.5M And Releases Second Generation Log Management Platform

Loggly, a cloud based, log data analytics platform, today announced the finalization of $10.5M in funding from Cisco and Data Collective with additional participation from existing investors Trinity Ventures, True Ventures and Matrix Partners. Loggly performs analytics on machine data from applications and platforms and transforms that data into ways that IT administrators and business stakeholders can consume. The principal use case for the company’s log management platform concerns the analysis of log data generated by cloud-based applications that generate massive amounts of log data on a daily basis in verticals such as ecommerce, gaming and social media. Today, Loggly also announced the release of its second generation log management platform which it expects will drive growth at multiples that exceed the five fold increase in growth that it experienced in comparison to last year. Loggly differentiates itself from competitors such as Splunk by way of its SaaS infrastructure, and focus on solutions targeted towards web-based traffic in addition to its enhanced data visualization functionality. According to VentureBeat, Loggly was instrumental in helping President Obama earn re-election by providing his campaign staff with insight into web traffic specific to its cloud based election software applications. Current customers of San Francisco-based Loggly include Intuit, PGI, Salesforce, Samsung and Uber.

Couchbase Finalizes $25M In Series D Funding For Its Distributed NoSQL Document-Oriented Database

NoSQL vendor Couchbase today announced the finalization of $25 million in Series D funding in a round led be Adams Street Partners with additional participation from existing investors Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Ignition Partners. The funding will be used to support strategic product initiatives and the expansion of the company’s sales and marketing team. With regard to its international growth, Couchbase has specific plans to open new offices in Brazil, Argentina, India and China and grow its existing operations in North America, Europe, Japan, Korea and Israel. The funding raise comes soon after the release of Couchbase 2.0 and skyrocketing 2013 sales on the order of 400%, including the closure of deals with several prized enterprise customers, according to the company’s press release. Couchbase is the company behind the Couchbase Open Source Project marked by its trademark product Couchbase Server, a distributed NoSQL document-oriented database used by the likes of AOL, LinkedIn, Orbitz, Salesforce.com and Zynga. The capital raise and Couchbase’s impressive growth point underscore the industry’s increasing acceptance of NoSQL as the proliferation of semi-structured data renders non-relational databases increasingly critical to the Big Data revolution.

Morphlabs Finalizes $10M In Series D Funding To Promote Expansion In Asia

OpenStack solutions provider Morphlabs today announced the finalization of $10 million in Series D funding to expand its market share in Asia by means of an OpenStack training program and a partnership with NEC. Led by Tallwood Management, Entropy Research Lab and existing investor G2iG, the round brings the total capital raised by Morphlabs to $22.5 million. Morphlabs delivers an OpenStack-based mCloud solution for enterprise and cloud service providers. According to a report in Data Center Knowledge, Morphlabs is targeting telcos in Asian countries that need assistance setting up an OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure based on its mCloud solution. The Morphlabs training sessions will be held in Manila, Jakarta, Singapore, Cebu and Hong Kong over the next three months. The first training session in Manila on September 17 will be followed by an OpenStack hackathon wherein the winning team will receive an invitation to the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong through the sponsorship of Morphlabs and NEC. The training sessions in Asia are suggestive of significant interest in OpenStack amongst the Asian enterprise community. Last month, for example, NEC announced a partnership with Morphlabs to power mCloud using NEC Express 5800 servers.

Despite all of the interest in OpenStack in Asia, the Morphlabs training sessions also underscore the way in which vendors are dealing with challenges faced by customers in using OpenStack solutions. Piston Cloud, for example, recently announced OpenStack 101 to introduce interested parties to the core components of OpenStack within a 3 hour training session. Word amongst OpenStack users is that the platform’s deployment and operation has yet to be sufficiently simplified such that it can be easily managed by IT administrators, particularly at an enterprise-level, and hence the need for specialized training and customer support at this stage of the product’s evolution.

Clustrix Announces $10M In Series D Funding For Distributed, Scale-Out SQL Database

Today, Clustrix, maker of the scalable SQL database designed for cloud deployments, announces the finalization of $10 million in Series D funding in a round led by HighBar Partners. The round brings the total capital raised by Clustrix to $56.5 million as a result of investments by HighBar Partners, Sequoia Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, ATA Ventures and Don Listwin. Clustrix belongs to the “NewSQL” class of platforms defined by the conjunction of relational database technology with the scale-out performance characteristic of NoSQL. The term “NewSQL” was coined by Forrester Analyst Matthew Aslett in a paper that analyzed prospective responses from SQL vendors to the challenge posed by the scalability, performance and real-time capabilities of NoSQL.

Real-time analytics are critical for transactional data in verticals such as e-commerce and social media as noted by Clustrix CEO Robin Purohit:

The need for operational databases that can analyze data in real-time has never been greater with the rapid growth of new hyperscale applications in business segments such as e-commerce, online gaming and advertisement. The additional funding will allow Clustrix to aggressively pursue the rapidly growing MySQL/NewSQL market with our proven scale-out database technology.

A distributed, SQL relational database, Clustrix’s customers include AOL and Symantec. The company competes in the rapidly growing NewSQL space with vendors such as FoundationDB (who recently acquired Akiban), ScaleBase, ScaleDB, GenieDB and NuoDB. Clustrix is available on “Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, GoGrid, Equinix and BlueBoxGroup,” according to a report in GigaOM.

HootSuite Raises $165M In Series B Funding

Social media management startup HootSuite recently announced the finalization of a whopping $165 million in Series B funding in a round led by Insight Venture Partners with additional participation from Accel Partners and OMERS Ventures. HootSuite is one of the five vendors initially selected by Twitter as Ads API Partners to enable customers to manage advertising campaigns from within the HootSuite platform instead of logging into Twitter. Additionally, HootSuite uses its dashboards and analytics to enable brand management across other social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Foursquare. The company recently announced revenue growth of 300% for Q2 of 2013 in comparison with Q2 of 2012, over 7 million users worldwide and integration with 56 applications.

As a result of the investment, Jeff Lieberman, Managing Director of Insight Venture Partners, Ryan Sweeney, Managing Partner at Accel and John Ruffolo, CEO of OMERS, will join HootSuite’s board of directors. HootSuite’s finalization of Series B funding builds upon previous funding rounds of $1.9M and $20M that brings the total funding raised by HootSuite to $187M. The funding will be used for global expansion that includes hiring resources in Latin America and Europe. The investment may also be used to finance strategic acquisitions in the social media management, dashboards and analytics space. In an interview with TechCrunch, HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes noted that the funding round takes the pressure off the company to prematurely evolve into an IPO or an acquisition.

HootSuite is currently “cash flow neutral” and, according to Ad Age, charges “enterprise clients anywhere from five figures annually up to the high six figures.” A recent article in Business Insider by Jim Edwards estimated that HootSuite’s revenue is anywhere between $50 million and $200 million based on some back of the envelope calculations that include the data point that the company has 246 Fortune 500 customers as noted by CEO Holmes in an interview with Bloomberg. Since HootSuite’s revenue is a fraction of Twitter’s advertising revenue, Edwards intuited that it would not be unreasonable to conclude that Twitter’s advertising revenue is on the order of $1 billion. As rumors of Twitter’s IPO proliferate and Facebook’s share price passes its initial IPO price, the industry should expect HootSuite to consolidate its early traction in the Twitter and Facebook advertising space. The company’s roster of customers includes PepsiCo, Fox, Sony Music, the National Hockey League (NHL) and Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.