Stealth security analytics company Niara announced the finalization of $20M in Series B funding led by Venrock with additional participation from New Enterprise Associates and Index Ventures on Thursday. Niara specializes in analytics for IT security that identify and remediate cyber attacks and their attendant root causes. Niara’s analytics have the ability to bridge siloed datasets in order to obtain a holistic solution to IT security that can identify security breaches, develop solutions tailored to the heterogeneity and evolution of threats and prioritize potential threats for investigation. By performing analytics “across disparate data sources,” Niara delivers a 360 degree view of an infrastructure that recognizes the variety and volume of sources of threats using nuanced analytics against historical data. The Sunnyvale-based company leverages a combination of advanced analytics and forensics to mitigate security-related risks and enhance the productivity of security, compliance and risk mitigation teams. Today’s capital raise brings the total funding raised by Niara to $29.4M. Precise details of the Niara solution remain scant although the cybersecurity space should expect to hear more details of its security solution in forthcoming months, particularly given the $20M Series B infusion of cash that is likely to fuel both product development and sales and marketing operations. The larger point worth noting, however, is that cloud security is a hot space for VCs and investors, particularly as the proliferation of infrastructure platforms, data frameworks and networking infrastructures converges to create increasingly complex IT amalgamations that require correspondingly more sophisticated security solutions to guard against systemic vulnerabilities as well as the diversification of threat sources and types.
Category: Venture Capital
Cloud Security Automation Vendor Palerra Raises $17M In Series B Funding
Palerra today announces the finalization of $17M in Series B funding in a round led by new investor August Capital with additional participation from Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Wing Venture Capital and Engineering Capital. Palerra’s LORIC platform leverages machine learning and advanced analytics to deliver a security solution that can tackle the challenges specific to an ephemeral cloud infrastructure landscape in which infrastructure and attendant applications are rapidly provisioned and de-provisioned. In contrast to basing its security solution around perimeter defense, LORIC focuses on tackling security at its source by collecting data to establish baselines and understand trends within a specific infrastructure environment. Moreover, Palerra’s strong partnerships allow it to deliver native cloud security for vendors such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce. Because Palerra can deliver cloud security automation across a variety of infrastructures and applications from within a unified console, it streamlines the implementation and management of cloud security while enhancing risk and compliance management initiatives. Palerra’s key differentiator hinges on the machine learning-based quality of its LORIC platform that iteratively responds to security threats by analyzing potential threats within the larger context of massive volumes of historical data about the environment in question. Named as a Gartner Cool Vendor for Risk Management in 2015, Palerra can claim significant progress since it emerged from stealth in November 2014 as validated by today’s $17M capital raise. Today’s funding raise brings the total capital raised by Palerra to $25M. With an extra $17M in the bank, expect Palerra to aggressively enhance LORIC with advanced analytics that proactively identify, detect and remediate the increasingly heterogeneous manifestations of security threats within enterprise IT.
Tachyon Nexus Secures $7.5M In Series A Funding From Andreessen Horowitz
As reported in The Wall Street Journal, Tachyon Nexus, the company that aims to commercialize the open source Tachyon in-memory storage system, has raised $7.5M in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz. Tachyon is a memory-centric storage system that epitomizes the contemporary transition away from disk-based storage to in-memory storage. Based on the premise that memory-centric storage is increasingly affordable in comparison with disk-centric storage, Tachyon caches frequently read files in memory to create a “memory-centric, fault-tolerant, distributed storage system” that “enables reliable data sharing at memory-speed across a datacenter” as noted in a blog post by Peter Levine, General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz. Tachyon’s memory-centric storage system improves upon the speed and reliability of file-based storage infrastructures to embrace the requirements of big data applications that require the sharing of massive volumes of data at increasing fast speeds. Tachyon was founded by Haoyuan Li, a U.C. Berkeley doctoral candidate who developed Tachyon at the U.C. Berkeley AMPLab. Tachyon is currently used at over 50 companies and supports Spark and MapReduce as well as data stored in HDFS and NFS formats. Tachyon Nexus, the commercial version of Tachyon, remains in stealth. Meanwhile, Peter Levine joins the board of Tachyon Nexus as a result of the Series A investment to support the development of what Levine envisions “the future of storage” in the form of Tachyon-based storage technology.
Alation Raises $9M In Series A Funding For Stealth Solution To Enhance Big Data Accessibility
Alation today announces the finalization of $9M in Series A funding led by Costanoa Venture Capital and Data Collective Venture Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Bloomberg Beta and General Catalyst Partners. The funding will be used both for product development and the expansion of Alation’s sales and marketing operations. Still in stealth mode, Alation intends to enhance the ability of organizations to access and retrieve data. Based on the premise that organizations continue to struggle with respect to locating data housed within their own infrastructures, Alation intends to improve data accessibility as well as to help customers more effectively understand the quality and significance of their data. Alation CEO Satyen Sangani remarked on Alation’s value proposition as follows:
Organizations still struggle with quickly finding, understanding and using the right data. Data-driven enterprises have voracious appetites for information and continue to make massive investments in data management platforms like Hadoop and business intelligence software like Tableau. While these technologies help with computation, storage, and visualization, ironically they make it harder to navigate the ocean of data. Alation helps people get to key insights faster.
Although business intelligence platforms such as Tableau facilitate data visualization and analysis, Sangani notes, organizations continue to wrestle with the problem of maneuvering within their “ocean of data” and finding the right data for analysis. Led by a team of founders with prior experience at Oracle, Google and Apple, Alation is gearing up for a general availability release of its platform in mid-2015. As told to Cloud Computing Today by CEO Satyen Sangani, the company’s solution focuses on structured and semi-structured data and claims several large, data-driven companies within its roster of customers. Expect more details regarding Alation to emerge within the upcoming months as it comes out of stealth and takes the wraps off its platform for managing big data complexity and increasing data accessibility more generally.
Axcient Raises $25M In Series E Funding And Reveals VAR Program With Innovative Compensation Model
On February 18, Recovery as a Service leader Axcient announced the finalization of $25M in Series E funding in a round led by Industry Ventures with additional participation from existing investors Allegis Capital, Peninsula Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and Thomvest Ventures. The round validates the business model of Axcient’s cloud-based recovery as a service platform as exemplified by 50% year over year growth in customers signed in 2014, Axcient’s acquisition of DirectRestore, more than 30 releases and enhancements to the Axcient business recovery cloud and the release of the second generation of Axcient’s virtual appliance. The $25M in funding will also be used to fund a novel method of compensating channel partners that Axcient will use to enhance distribution of its product. Whereas SaaS solutions have typically struggled to achieve traction in a VAR sales partner model because of low monthly margins for sales professionals, Axcient proposes to offer channel partners up front compensation for the sale of its business recovery cloud solution. Axcient brands the up front compensation model under the acronym SaaS: FLO that stands for SaaS Fully Loaded Option. Axcient’s strategy of expanding its sales pipeline by means of partnerships with VARs under the terms of an innovative compensation model promises to increase its market traction in a landscape that includes the likes of more established cloud-based business continuity brands such as Symantec and EMC. In a phone interview with Cloud Computing Today, Axcient’s Director of Product Marketing Daniel Kuperman noted that although Axcient faces the challenge of educating its VARs about the business and technological benefits of its cloud-based recovery as a service platform, it stands to benefit immensely from the potentialities implicit in introducing the agility and operational simplicity of its platform to a wider range of customers. Assuming Axcient can succeed at training its VAR ecosystem, it stands poised to consolidate on its successes in 2014 and continue to stake out a leadership position in the rapidly growing cloud-based recovery as a service space, particularly because of the richness of its technology for empowering customers to perform granular recoveries of specific files and folders in addition to larger swaths of infrastructure. Wednesday Series E round brings the total capital raised by Axcient to roughly $85M.
Sauce Labs Raises $15M In Series D Funding For Its Cloud-Based Automated Testing Platform
On Thursday, Sauce Labs announced $15M in Series D funding from existing investor Toba Capital, the investor that led its Series C funding round of $5M. The additional funding will be used to enhance the company’s platform for mobile testing as well as continue to support its web-based application testing and support for the open source project Appium. The funding will also help drive an expansion of the company’s development team, infrastructure and international presence. Sauce Labs delivers a cloud-based testing platform that allows customers to automate parallel testing of web and mobile applications across different browsers, operating systems and environments. By automating the testing process and helping customers interpret testing results, Sauce Labs shortens the time to market for applications and dramatically increases application quality as measured by their ability to perform across a variety of end user environments. Thursday’s funding raise follows upon a year in which the company experienced 2014 revenue growth of 145% driven by significantly increased penetration into the enterprise market. Current enterprise customers include Salesforce, Bank of America, Twitter, Workday and Liberty Mutual. With an additional $15M in the bank, customers should expect the introduction of even more richness and sophistication to the Sauce Labs mobile and web application testing platform, and particularly the mobile platform as it responds to the dramatic proliferation of mobile apps across a variety of devices and operating systems.
Cloud Computing Today 
You must be logged in to post a comment.