Seed Funding
Y-Combinator alumnus AnyPerkhas secured an additional $3 million in seed funding to help companies manage and distribute the perks they provide to employees. The Vegas Tech Fund, FundersClub, and Vayner/RSE participated alongside around a dozen angel investors to finance the two year-old, San Francisco-based company. The round will supplement the $1.5 million the company initially raised from Y-Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz. In addition to traditional perks like gym memberships and hotel deals, over 2500 customers in the AnyPerk network also have access to discounts from dating services like Match.com and car-hailing apps like Lyft. The company plans to use the cash infusion to build location-awareness into its mobile app.
Series A
Enterprise security and systems management company Taniumhas raised $90 million from Andreessen Horowitz in its first round of funding since being founded in 2007. The round reportedly values the company at $900 million. Marc Andreessen was positively giddy about the investment. Writing on Twitter: “Collectively partners @a16z have maybe 200 years of systems management; Tanium is a breakthrough like we’ve never seen,” before adding in his next 140 character sequence, “Tanium –> people responsible for large networks & software, what Google –> people on the Internet. Don’t say that lightly.”
The maker of Wi-Fi connected LED lightbulbs, LIFX, has raised $12 million in a round of Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital, as investors continue to be bullish on smart home products. Founded in Australia, but now with offices in Los Altos, CA, LIFX raised its first $1.3 million from Kickstarter in just six days. In a press release, Sequoia’s Omar Hamoui wrote: “LIFX is one of the fastest growing and promising smart home companies…As consumers adopt connected home technologies, the LIFX bulb will be a starting point because it’s easy to install and immediately useful on a daily basis.” LIFX lightbulbs retail for $99, but the expense is rationalized by the fact that the bulbs are engineered to last twenty-five years and can be changed to any of 15 million colors from a mobile app.
Series C
Skyhigh Networks, a Cupertino, CA-based provider of security solutions for cloud computing, has raised $40 million from Salesforce.com and returning investors Greylock and Sequoia Capital. CEO Rajiv Gupta told The New York Times that the company is not yet profitable, but that it also still has cash in the bank from the $20 million in Series B it raised last year. The latest round brings total funding to $65.5 million. The two-year old company counts Cisco, DirecTV, and BMC Software among its customers.
M&A
Google’s Nest Labs “smart-home” division announced that it would pay $555 million to acquire Dropcam, a producer of small cameras for remote home security. In a blog post, Dropcam co-founder Greg Duffy spoke of Nest and Dropcam as “kindred spirits. Both were born out of frustration with outdated, complicated products that do the opposite of making life better.” The two brands will operate as separate entities into the foreseeable future before ultimately merging. Dropcam raised nearly $50 million from a host of investors that included Accel Partners, Bay Partners, and Kleiner Perkins. Nest was acquired by Google earlier this year for $3.2 billion.
Oracle announced that it has agreed to acquire two companies, Micros Systems and LiveLOOK. The decision to acquire Micros Systems, a software provider geared towards the hospitality and restaurant industries, is a substantial one. The $5.3 billion purchase price ($68 per share, roughly an 18% premium to the share price before rumors about the merger were reported by Bloomberg last week) would be the company’s largest acquisition since its $7.4 billion deal for Sun Microsystems in 2009. It is expected to be finalized by the end of the year. Less is known about the announced acquisition of LiveLOOK, a New Jersey-based provider of screen-sharing visualization technologies, although it comes on the heels of Salesforce’s unveiling of a similar feature, called SOS, in April. Oracle has spent around $50 billion to acquire over 100 companies in the last ten years.