Category: Venture Capital

Datera Emerges From Stealth With Cloud Storage Solution For Private Clouds And Service Providers

Mountain View, CA-based Datera emerged from stealth today with the launch of the Datera Elastic Data Fabric platform, a scale-out storage software solution that delivers block storage provisioning and management capability for commodity hardware. Datera Elastic Data Fabric brings the operational agility and economics of public-cloud based block storage solutions such as the Amazon Web Services Elastic Block Storage platform to enterprises and service providers by empowering them to use code to deploy and manage storage solutions. Customers use the Data Elastic Data Fabric to create storage infrastructures for private clouds, or in the case of service providers, large-scale storage infrastructures. As told to Cloud Computing Today in a phone interview with Datera CEO Marc Fleischmann, the platform boasts self-optimizing and infrastructure aware functionality that delivers an intelligent data fabric capable of responding to the unique requirements of individual applications as illustrated below:

The graphic illustrates how the convergence of self-optimizing functionality and infrastructure awareness facilitate intelligent automation that allows for the creation of a storage platform capable of responding to dramatic variations in application performance and the attendant volume, velocity and variety of incoming data. Zachary Smith, CEO of Packet, a cloud infrastructure company, elaborated on the uniqueness of Datera as follows:

Datera has enabled Packet to deliver a high performance, consistent and profitable elastic block storage service to our customers. What makes Datera so unique is its software DNA. With Datera, we can use a true API-driven storage platform that can keep pace with our dynamic workload requirements and demanding automation needs. Datera Elastic Data Fabric self-describes and self-optimizes so we can easily and economically scale our storage service.

Here, Smith remarks on Datera’s ability to deliver a software-based, high performance, low latency storage solution that reflexively optimizes itself in ways that can embrace the company’s “dynamic workload requirements and demanding automation needs.” Datera’s ability to bring the economics, agility and operational efficiency of infrastructure as code-based storage to the enterprise means that enterprises now have access to a storage infrastructure that maintains parity with the revolution in contemporary IT specific to the cloud revolution and the DevOps movement. The company’s software transforms commodity hardware into an API-driven, scale-out storage infrastructure for block storage that can be accessed either via an appliance or software-only modality. Today, the company also announced $40M in funding from Khosla Ventures, Samsung Ventures and Andy Bechtolsheim and Pradeep Sindhu. Compatible with OpenStack, CloudStack and VMware vSphere, the platform aims to bring block storage into the cloud era in conjunction with an impressive array of analytic and intelligent automation functionalities.

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Influitive Acquires Triggerfox To Build On Recent Momentum Regarding its AdvocateHub B2B Marketing Platform

On Tuesday, advocate marketing vendor Influitive announced the acquisition of Triggerfox, a mobile relationship management startup. Triggerfox delivers CRM functionality at the level of individual users, allowing users to receive notifications about birthdays, job changes and life events with respect to the people in their network. Influitive’s acquisition of Triggerfox promises to augment its B2B advocate marketing platform while expanding its team and expertise in mobile applications. Influitive delivers a platform that allows companies to leverage relationships with their own customers to further promote their products and build their brand. The Influitive AdvocateHub allows customers to seek referrals and recommendations from customers in exchange for points or awards that variously reward customers for promoting their products. The acquisition of Triggerfox by Influitive represents its second acquisition in less than a month, building upon its purchase of Ironark Software in early March. The purchase of Triggerfox also comes soon after news of an additional $8.2M in Series B funding that brings its total Series B funding to $38M and constitutes continued validation of the meteoric growth and success of Influitive’s innovative AdvocateHub platform.

JFrog Raises $50M In Funding For Universal Artifact Repository Technologies

JFrog today announces the finalization of $50M in investment capital from new investors Scale Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Battery Ventures, Vintage Investment Partners and Qumra Capital in addition to existing investors. The funding raise validates JFrog’s business model as a leader in the artifact repository, distribution and management space. Unlike other artifact repositories that exclusively support formats such as Docker, NPM, Maven and Vagrant, JFrog embraces binary artifacts of all kinds, thereby allowing organizations to create hybrid artifact repositories featuring a multitude of artifacts from a variety of sources. As such, JFrog’s universal artifact repository gives developers the ability to create metadata for binary objects in conjunction with a system of record for polyglot application development. The company’s three pronged product line features JFrog Artifactory, JFrog Bintray and JFrog Mission Control. While JFrog Artifactory constitutes the industry’s only universal artifact repository, JFrog Bintray takes responsibility for the distribution of software and binary artifacts to end users. Meanwhile, JFrog Mission Control empowers customers to manage multiple instances of JFrog Artifactory spanning different servers. JFrog CEO Shlomi Ben Haim remarked on the innovation of JFrog for DevOps and contemporary development practices as follows:

The software world is tired of domain dictators and demands a universal powerful solution that supports all technologies and software packages. DevOps and developer teams deserve more – they demand a multi-package, highly available and secured end-to-end solution. JFrog Artifactory and JFrog Bintray are not just a Docker registry, or a npm or Maven repository; it’s how the world’s biggest organizations choose to host, manage and distribute their software.

Here, Shlomi Ben Haim underscore’s JFrog’s ability to store, distribute and manage binary artifacts from a heterogeneous assemblage of sources and technologies. As a one stop resource for artifact storage, distribution and management, JFrog now boasts over 1500 paying customers including Google, Amazon, VMware, EMC, Cisco, Oracle and Netflix. The $50M in funding will be used to scale its products and services to match the demands of JFrog’s customers by expanding its product and sales operations teams and positioning the company to more expeditiously realize its mission by means of strategic acquisitions. JFrog Bintray specializes in the automation of the distribution of binary artifacts and software packages to repositories all over the world, and now claims over 700,000 downloads a month. With an extra $50M in its coffers, expect JFrog to continue leap frogging the rest of the competition with embellishments to its product suite and a visionary, disruptive approach to DevOps that positions it squarely in competition with Docker, even as it embraces artifacts from Docker’s Trusted Registry. JFrog’s Artifactory platform is available on premise or via a cloud-based deployment. Today’s funding raise adds to previous funding of $12M, bringing the total funding raised by JFrog to approximately $62M.

Datadog Finalizes $94.5M In Series D Funding For Its Cloud Monitoring Platform

New York-based Datadog recently announced the finalization of $94.5M in Series D for its SaaS cloud monitoring products and services. Led by ICONIQ Capital, the funding will be used to accelerate product development as well as expand the company’s global operations. Since its launch in 2010, Datadog has garnered significant traction in the cloud monitoring space by notching up the likes of Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb and Twilio within its roster of customers. The Series D funding raise builds upon Datadog’s December announcement of its integration with OpenStack. Datadog’s integration with OpenStack allows customers to leverage its SaaS application to understand the health of OpenStack deployments, with a focus on monitoring the compute and networking components of an OpenStack deployment. Existing investors Index Ventures, OpenView Ventures, Amplify Partners and Contour Ventures also participated in the funding raise, alongside other investors. The Series D funding raise brings the total capital raised by Datadog to roughly $148M.

Numerify Raises $37.5M In Series C Funding For Cloud-Based Analytics For IT Management

On October 22, cloud-based analytics vendor Numerify announced the finalization of $37.5M in Series C funding led by Tenaya Capital. The funding raise was completed with additional participation from Sequioa Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners and new investors in the form of the Silicon Valley Bank and Four Rivers Group. The capital raise represents powerful validation of Numerify’s business model based on a cloud-based analytics platform that delivers actionable business intelligence regarding areas such as IT infrastructures, business units and business processes. In contrast to cloud-based analytic solutions that focus on delivering data in formats that enable reporting and analytics, Numerify differentiates by using its analytics platform to identify opportunities to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, increase revenue and enhance analytics related to risk, fraud, and threat intelligence. Gaurav Rewari, CEO and Founder of Numerify, remarked on the significance of the capital raise as follows:

As one of the first IT business analytics providers on the market, we are delighted that this space is growing so quickly. With our pre-built analytic applications in the cloud that combine domain best practices with hundreds of metrics, reports, dashboards and a unified analytical data model embracing the full sweep of IT business operations, this new investment will support us through our next phases of exponential growth.

Here, Rewari highlights the platform’s “pre-built analytic applications” that use industry-specific best practices to deliver reports and dashboards featuring metrics, KPIs and analytic insights that help optimize IT business operations. The product spans the gamut of IT operations by including processes such as HR, call center operations, finance, assets, infrastructure and project management within its analytical purview. The funding will be used to accelerate product development and expand sales and marketing operations. Thursday’s funding raise brings the total capital raised by Numerify to $60M.

Teridion Announces $15M In Series B Funding And GA Of Platform For Bi-Directional Content Acceleration

Israel-based Teridion today announces the general availability of its Global Cloud Network for bi-directional content acceleration. Teridion’s Global Cloud Network delivers performance improvements of a factor of 20 with a focus on improving bi-directional, personal internet experiences for content providers and their consumers. Teridion’s cloud-based platform delivers intelligent routing to cloud applications based on considerations related to bandwidth, latency and geography. The Teridion Global Cloud Network allows customers to pay for utilization and integrates with well known cloud providers, thereby allowing customers who host their applications on large public clouds to retain the infrastructure used for their application deployments. Teridion also announces $15M in Series B funding led by Singtel, Innov8, JPVC and Magma. The Series B round brings the total capital raised by Teridion to date to $20M and empowers the company to expand sales operations and aggressively accelerate its go to market strategy.