Series A
Orchard Platform, a company building the backend infrastructure aimed for connecting institutional investors with Peer-to-Peer (P2P) loan originators like Lending Club and Prosper, has secured $12 million in new venture financing from Canaan Partners, Spark Capital, and a number of notable angel investors, including John Mack (former Morgan Stanley CEO), Vikram Pandit (former Citigroup CEO), Hans Morris (ex-Visa president), and Max Levchin (PayPal co-founder). Mack and Pandit were notably embroiled in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Orchard Platform is based in New York.
Andreessen Horowitz is among the investors in the $8 million Series A round for Cazena, a cloud-based data warehousing SaaS start-up. A16z was joined by North Bridge Venture Partners, a VC firm out of Waltham, Mass., where Cazena had been operating in stealth mode. Speaking to Beta Boston, a16z partner Peter Levine called Cazena “a big deal, because it shifts the economics. Rather than buying big expensive hardware, their customers can leverage cloud economics,” where storage (and costs) are discrete, and can be increased over time to match customer preferences. Cazena was founded by former members of Netezza, an on-site data storage company that was purchased by IBM for $1.7 billion four years ago.
Series B
A massive $542 million Series B round was announced today by Magic Leap, a wearable technology company that promises to deliver to its users a non-immersive augmented reality experience (i.e. unlike Oculus’ Virtual Reality platform). There are no public product demos available, but that has not deterred some of the industry’s heaviest hitters from getting involved in the round. The participating investment firms include Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Google, and Qualcomm Ventures, with additional investment coming from the private equity giant KKR, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams’ Obvious Ventures, and the film production company Legendary Entertainment (The Dark Knight, The Town, etc.). Magic Leap, which has now raised nearly $600 million, recently opened an engineering office in Palo Alto, Calif., but the company is still based in Hollywood, Florida.
Mirantis, an OpenStack software and service provider, has raised $100 million from lead investor Insight Venture Partners, repeat backers Intel Capital, WestSummit Capital, Ericsson Venture Partners, and new investors SAP and August Capital. The company expects to go public in 2016, while Cisco (Metacloud) and EMC (Cloudscaling) have acquired two of Mirantis’ OpenStack competitors in the past few months. Forbes, meanwhile, is reporting that the financing marks the single largest Series B round ever to be raised by an open source-based software company.