Follow The Money
The pool of available venture capital and other funding sources remains relatively shallow after nearly drying up completely last year amid the stock market’s decline. Where funding rounds of $100 million or more were once common before 2022, most funding rounds being trumpeted today – with one notable exception on the June Follow the Money list – are around or below $50 million.
It’s encouraging, nevertheless, to see an increasing number of technology startups scoring Seed and Series A funding rounds across a broad range of technologies. This month’s roundup includes startups focused on iPaaS, workflow automation, database technology, machine learning, data observability, API development and application consolidation.
CoreWeave
Headquarters: Roseland, N.J.
CEO and Co-Founder: Michael Intrator
Funding: The $200 million Series B extension, coming just one month after $221 million in Series B funding, brought the total round to $421 million.
Investors: The latest funding was provided by Magnetar Capital, which also led the earlier Series B funding.
What company does: CoreWeave is a specialized cloud service provider for large-scale, GPU-accelerated workloads.
CEO Quote: “In my 25-year career, I’ve never been a part of a company that’s growing like this. It’s an incredible moment in time. From a demand standpoint, revenue and client scale, the rise has been exponential, and Magnetar has been an amazing partner from the beginning.”
Digibee
Headquarters: Weston, Fla.
CEO: Rodrigo Bernardinelli
Funding: The $60 million Series A funding round follows a $25 million Series round in February 2022 and a $6 million seed round in February 2019.
Investors: The round was led by the Growth Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Other investors included Leadwind, a growth fund at K Fund (a leading venture capital firm in Southern Europe), Vivo Ventures (the corporate venture capital arm of Brazilian telecommunications company Vivo), and Kinea and G2D (two of Latin America’s largest private equity firms).
What company does: Digibee’s integration platform as-a-service (iPaaS) helps organizations build flexible, highly scalable integration architecture for connecting applications and business processes.
CEO Quote: “Digibee is delighted to receive this investment to help expand our steady growth and market share in the United States, and to help all of our global customers accelerate business outcomes by reducing technical debt and showstoppers associated with integration requirements. The funds will help Digibee and our growing customer base redefine integration as a task that many can perform rather than a job that requires advanced and highly limited skills to perform. The benefit for our customers will be ever-increasing ability and agility to support innovation and digital transformation with rapid and facile integration.”
Unaric
Headquarters: London
Co-Founder and CEO: James Gasteen
Funding: The company exited stealth with $35 million in seed funding including $25 million in debt and $10 million in equity.
Investors: Investors included LocalGlobe, Concentric, FJ Labs and Atempo Growth.
What company does: The company plans to assemble the world’s largest Salesforce product suite by acquiring, scaling and consolidating Salesforce-focused ISVs.
Company Statement: “The Salesforce ISV ecosystem is one of the world’s largest and represents a huge opportunity for motivated entrepreneurs. Yet for many founders, scaling is a significant challenge that takes a specific set of skills, knowledge and experience in order to unlock the ecosystem’s full potential. By acquiring different players and bringing them together, we can supercharge their expansion, helping them build teams, reach more customers and share costs.”
Strivework s
Headquarters: Austin, Texas
CEO: Jim Rebesco
Funding: The company raised $33 million in an all-equity funding round, the company’s first institutional fundraising.
Investors: The round was led by Centana Growth Partners, a growth equity firm that invests in financial technology and related enterprise software. Other existing investors also participated in the round.
What company does: Striveworks develops a machine learning operations (MLOps) platform for enterprise data science and data analytics teams.
CEO Quote: “At the end of the day, decision makers need to make timely, data-driven decisions. Analytics, sitting under the hood, make that possible, but those decisions and the analytics they draw from need to be measurable, observable, and ethical. At Striveworks, we strongly believe these MLOps processes that keep those analytics performant can and should be done at high speed, behind the scenes and with the lowest user impact possible. This new funding allows us to continue to build and refine our industry-leading MLOps platform to support our partners and enable them to efficiently manage the vast amount of data the world has to offer, bringing the platform to where the data and decisions are made.”