MuleSoft, a San Francisco, Calif.-based company with a platform that connects different applications, data sources, and APIs used frequently in the enterprise, has raised $128 million to bring total funding to $258.5 million. The latest round involved a number of investors, including Salesforce Ventures (which led the round) and existing backers like NEA, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Meritech Capital Partners. Also participating were institutional investors Adage Capital Management, Brookside Capital, and Sands Capital Ventures, providing further evidence that the company is close to an IPO. The raise was done at a reported $1.5 billion valuation.
Ripple Labs, a company behind an open source payment platform and the developer of the Ripple protocol, has raised $28 million in Series A financing. Investors included the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, Cryptocurrency Partners, AME Cloud Ventures, and RRE Ventures.
Samsara, a manufacturer of inexpensive hardware and networking solutions for wireless, data-capturing sensors, has secured $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz. The company was recently founded by Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket, who together in 2012 sold the company they had previously founded, Meraki Inc., to Cisco Systems for $1.2 billion. Marc Andreessen will join the Samsara board. “Industrial sensors is something they didn’t do,” Andreessen told The Wall Street Journal, referring to Biswas and Bicket. “But the architecture and the philosophy is very similar to what they did at Meraki. They already have a special playbook that they were able to prove at Meraki.”
AlphaDraft is the latest company to capitalize on investor enthusiasm for fantasy sports. The company raised $5 million in seed financing from a host of investors that included the talent agency William Morris, former commissioner of the National Basketball Association David Stern, and Melo7 Tech Ventures, the VC fund founded by New York Knicks forward Carmelo Anthony. Other VC firms like Greycroft Partners and KEC Ventures also participated.
Google Ventures is pouring $15 million into Farmer’s Business Network, a so-called “farmer-to-farmer” data network. The platform is designed to steer buying decisions away from the recommendations of seed companies, which are the product of “highly controlled experiments,” according to FBN co-founder Charles Baron, and towards the observations of farmers from across the United States. Google was joined by previous backers DBL Investors and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The San Carlos, Calif.-based company has now raised nearly $24 million in a little over a year.