Numecent, a stealth startup building a patented “cloudpaging” technology, just raised $2 million in Series A funding from undisclosed corporate investors. The $2 million tranche is a part of a larger $10 million funding round, and is in addition to the $7.5 million in seed funding the company has already raised from private investors. Exact details as to what Numecent is developing are not known, beyond a general description of what “cloudpaging” means, as provided by the company.

The term “cloudpaging,” says Numecent, refers to a specific (and patented) “push-pull” paging technology which allows software instructions and data to be demand-paged from the cloud in real-time. The company claims that cloudpaging will allow any software, app or game to pull this data on-demand to any connected device in a secure, metered and virtualized fashion. The company is even positioning cloudpaging as the successor to streaming, and holds 10 patents for application streaming and virtualization through its subsidiary, Endeavours Technologies. It’s also worth mentioning that Endeavors Technologies was spun out of a think tank for a DARPA project.

Numecent is also now claiming to have high-profile testers who have begun to deploy its hybrid-cloud solution in mission-critical environments. The company plans to exit stealth in March, at which time the company will reveal more details about the cloudpaging technology itself and how it’s being used.

Alongside the funding news, Numecent also announced that Osman Kent, previously the co-founder of 3Dlabs, has joined the company as the new CEO.

Earlier this month, Numecent launched an “application jukebox” for Red Hat, which allows traditional Windows applications to be delivered to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization-hosted desktops.

Tweet This Post

Sumo Logic, a startup focused on enterprise log management and analytics, has raised $15 million in Series B funding round led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from previous investors Greylock Partners and angel investor Shlomo Kramer. The new funding brings the startup’s total venture capital backing to $20.5 million.

Today, Sumo Logic emerged from stealth to unveil its log management and analytics platform, aiming to help companies to uncover operational and security insights buried in enterprise log files. The startup was founded by ArcSight veterans Christian Beedgen and Kumar Saurabh in 2009, to provide a cloud based system for managing the massive amounts of enterprise log data.

similar to other cloud based data management offerings, Sumo Logic wants to eliminate the need for expensive on premise-based log management applications. Using algorithms, the service provides enterprises with operational and security insights from their log data in real time, at a massive scale. We’re told the service can analyze petabytes of log-data a day.

Sumo Logic’s architecture features an elastic petabyte scale platform that collects, manages and analyzes enterprise log data, reducing millions of log lines into valuable operational insights in real time. The cloud-based service is powered by Sumo Logic’s Elastic Log Processing, which is a scalable architecture that enables log analytics at a large scale; and LogReduce, which are a set of adaptive algorithms that reduce millions of logs into a small number of patterns.

The platform also features real-time interactive forensics and push analytics to provide proactive detection and notification of trends, changes and anomalies in data. Sumo Logic’s service also mines global trends and anomalies across customer organizations.

As Beedgen explains, there is a major opportunity behind providing a cloud-based alternative to log management because enterprises have real problems managing and analyzing log and machine data. He says existing products can suck in data but have poor analytics and data analyzation with too many false positives.

Sumo Logic has an innovative approach, he says, because it provides a scalable elastic architecture, applied machine learning for IT intelligence, and the horsepower to process massive amounts of IT data.

The new funding will be used towards expanding engineering and marketing. Sumo Logic faces competition from Splunk, which just filed for an IPO.

Tweet This Post

Mykonos (the security software company, not the lovely Greek island) has secured $4 million in a Series A funding round led by previous backer Tom Golisano, founder and chairman of Paychex.

New investors include Ironport founder Scott Banister, Jeff Clarke (executive chairman of Travelport, chairman of Orbitz and board member of Red Hat) and Mike Jones (founder and CEO of Clover Capital).

Mykonos’s Web Security product uses deception to “detect, confuse, slow down and prevent attackers” in real-time in order to help companies protect their websites and Web apps from malicious hacker and proactively prevent fraud and theft.

Just recently, the company moved its headquarters to the heart of Silicon Valley – they also have offices in New York.

Tweet This Post

Cloud computing software and service provider Joyent has secured an $85 million round of new funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by European group Weather Investment II. It also included Telefónica Digital, the growth arm of global telecom giant Telefónica, which participated as a strategic investor.

Weather II is a strategic shareholder in telecommunications companies. Most notably, it holds a 20% stake in Vimpelcom, the world’s sixth largest mobile telecommunications group by subscribers. Joyent states that Weather II was advised in the round by investment and management group Accelero Capital. Both Weather II and Accelero focus on telecommunication and related media and technology companies in telecom and enterprise markets.

“We are delighted to make this strategic investment in a company that is providing solutions to some of the toughest problems in cloud computing, such as cloud performance, resiliency and security,” said Khaled Bichara, co-CEO of Accelero Capital.

Meanwhile, Matthew Key, Chairman & CEO of Telefónica Digital praised how Joyent’s technology would fit perfectly with technologies it has developed in-house and its own cloud services model.

Joyent’s cloud software suite SmartDataCenter is used by developers and enterprises worldwide. With JoyentCloud.com, the company provides public cloud services to a number of well-known companies, including LinkedIn, Gilt Groupe, Dell and Kabam. It’s also the steward of the open source server-side JavaScript project Node.js, a runtime for developing data-intensive, real-time apps, and a contributor to Joyent SmartOS, an open source project which powers the commercial software SmartDataCenter.

According to David Young, CEO and founder of Joyent, the new funding will enable Joyent to “build out a global compute offering to assist customers in expanding consistent software, support and services to their clients.”

Throughout 2012, Joyent plans to roll out a collection of “seamlessly connected high performance clouds” serving global corporations on every continent, the company says.

The San Francisco-based company had previously raised $5 million in September, which brought it close to $30 million total. The company’s existing investors include El Dorado Ventures, Epic Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Intel Capital, and Liberty Global.

Tweet This Post

Enterprise-focused cloud performance analytics company Tidemark, formerly known as Proferi, has raised $24 million in new funding led by Redpoint Ventures with existing investors Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Dave Duffield, co-founder and co-CEO of Workday participating. This brings the total amount raised to more than $35 million. Redpoint partner Geoff Yang will join Tidemark’s Board of Directors.

Founded by Romanian entrepreneur Christian Gheorghe, the Tidemark Enterprise Performance Management Platform delivers real-time, risk-adjusted metrics management; strategic, financial, operational planning and forecasting; and profitability modeling applications.

Tidemark’s premise is that enterprises are investing billions yearly in traditional business intelligence systems that were not built for today’s data deluge and do not provide the forward-looking analysis that is required of businesses today.

Basically Tidemark monitors and analyzes business data, including key performance indicators, key risk indicators and other data for enterprise business planning functions. The software can produce full profit and loss reports by product, customer, supplier and channel to understand the detailed drivers of cost and improve margins.

The web applications are built with a HTML5 user interface and includes application components such as processes, goals, dimensions, KPIs, calculations, risks and controls. Tidemark also features integrations with a number of cloud and on-premise systems for sourcing structured and unstructured data including PDFs, MS Office documents and blogs.

The new funds will be used for customer acquisition.

Tweet This Post

Kwaga, a Paris, France-based startup that specializes in tools to make email ‘smarter’ by leveraging semantic technology, has raised $1.55 million in Series A funding. The company, which received seed funding from Seedcamp and Kima Ventures after its founding in 2008, raised the money from unnamed private investors.

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

Tweet This Post

Every business seems to want its own mobile software, and now Pyxis Mobile is transforming to help companies build apps for themselves. Previously, Pyxis created apps for enterprise financial services companies, but today pivots to offer its app development platform directly to clients. The company has rebranded itself as Verivo Software, and taken a $17 million funding round from Commonwealth Capital Ventures, as well as existing investors Ascent Venture Partners and Egan-Managed Capital.

The new funding will build on the combined $7.15 million secured in Pyxis Mobile’s Series A and B rounds. The money will go towards marketing, product development, recruiting, APIs, and growing its global presence with new offices in Europe and Asia.

Rather than having to work with an outside vendor to issue updates and support, Verivo’s platform will let clients take care of everything in house. Clients can build apps with a drag-and-drop interface, deploy them across device types and operating systems, and manage functionality changes.

The shift from Pyxis Mobile to Verivo has been 16 months in the making, so the platform has already been utilized by several clients beyond financial services. Sales companies like Bunzl have built field operations apps for their employees, Indiana State University offered a campus information app to students, and health tech companies like Healthrageous have used apps to retain customers. Other clients include Allstate Insurance, Halliburton, and Oracle.

Enterprise mobility software demand is booming. Verivo saw license bookings increase by 220 percent and revenue run rate up 50 percent in 2011. By distributing the development power, Verivo can improve its platform in a scalable way instead of fixing the apps of individual clients.

Tweet This Post

Exclusive - I first learned about hosted business intelligence software startup RJMetrics a few weeks ago, when Fab.com founder Jason Goldberg wrote how he made creative use of their software suite for his latest fundraising round; in fact he said he liked it so much he asked to invest in the company.

Fast forward to today: RJMetrics has landed $1.2 million in seed financing from Goldberg, early-stage VCs including SoftTech VC, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel and Zelkova Ventures, and other angel investors such as Wharton Professor Kartik Hosanagar and DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg.

In addition, Jason Goldberg has joined the Philadelphia startup’s board of directors.

Founded in January 2009 by Robert J. Moore (the ‘R’) and Jake Stein (the ‘J’), RJMetrics was bootstrapped to date and managed to get to profitability by selling subscriptions for its hosted business intelligence software to organizations that operate database-driven websites (mostly e-commerce companies, SaaS vendors, social media organizations and online content providers).

Basically, RJMetrics provides tools for database analysis, enabling its customers to extract data from their business and transform it into a more suitable format for analysis and providing them with the means to turn it into beautiful, actionable charts.

Moore and Stein were both formerly employed by venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners, so they knew that they’d be better off waiting as long as possible before raising outside capital, and only agreed to take on investors when they were absolutely sure that it would “generate positive returns”.

For one, they say, almost 100 percent of this seed funding round came from firms or individuals who have used RJMetrics’ product extensively, which is always a big plus.

Tweet This Post

Big consumer brands generate all sorts of consumer interest and expertise, but they’ve generally struggled to capitalize on these relationships to improve themselves. Lithium has been building itself into a market leader at solving this problem over the last ten years, offering white-label community sites and related products that allow brands to let users share ideas with each other — and tell the brands what they’re doing well, or not.

The company is now doubling down on its business, raising a $53.4 million fourth round of funding on top of the $39 million that it has previously brought in.

The competition has been heating up as more brands wake up to the value of user-generated content, with relatively established competitors like Bazaarvoice, Jive Software and Get Satisfaction being joined by newer entrants that have focused on the Facebook platform, like Buddy Media and Vitrue. This additional money will help Lithium build up more of a lead, especially on Facebook where it is relatively new.

New chief executive Rob Tarkoff tells me that the additional funding will go towards doubling the employee headcount from the 200 or so it currently has through hiring and acquisitions (like Scout Labs in 2010). Its existing set of products include support sites and forums, including game mechanics and social ranking features to encourage quality participation, and analytics software to help brands understand what their consumers care about. Beyond building out sales and marketing efforts in the US and around the world, and continuing to invest in its core products, you should look for it to move into adjacent areas.

It only launched its Facebook product in May, for example, which mainly meant introducing its technology for identifying and promoting top users. But maybe it will expand the products it has available for pages — page apps, possibly, or more ways of buying Facebook ads to help page engagement? Tarkoff didn’t confirm that line of speculation, other than to say they were potential new opportunities.

Tarkoff himself has been at the company for around 100 days, having previously been an executive at Adobe, in charge of its digital enterprise solutions businesses. The new round of funding is being led by new investor NEA, with SAP Ventures also getting in, as well as all of the existing investors — Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, Emergence Capital, Greenspring Associates, Shasta Ventures and Tenaya Capital.

Tweet This Post

Mu Sigma, a provider of analytics and data-driven decision support services for enterprise customers, has raised $108 million in funding in a round led by growth equity firm General Atlantic.

The financing comes about half a year after Mu Sigma raised $25 million from Sequoia Capital, which also participated in this round.

Headquartered in Chicago with most of its 1,500+ employees working out of Bangalore, India, Mu Sigma is a professional services firm that helps companies analyze ‘big data’ to “institutionalize decision support”.

In a statement, Mu Sigma says it is already profitable and able to finance its operations on its own, but that it raised more venture capital to ‘accelerate growth’.

A portion of the new capital will be used to purchase shares held by existing shareholders, but the company did not disclose which shareholders and how much of the $108 million injection will be reserved for the buybacks.

Mu Sigma did say all current shareholders will retain stakes in the company.

More in this Wall Street Journal article.

Tweet This Post