• Mailgun

  Participated · Equity · Feb 2017

  Mailgun Technologies, based in San Antonio, Texas and led by CEO Will Conway, provides email API technology used by over 150,000 companies to send, receive and track email from within applications. Its platform combines infrastructure, developer documentation, developer tools and customer support to deliver high deliverability across transactional and marketing use cases. Software development teams at Lyft, GitHub, Iterable and Indeed embed Mailgun to power high-volume and high-frequency messaging. The company intends to use proceeds from the transaction to expand its platform and accelerate product roadmap initiatives. The article does not disclose revenue, valuation or other financial metrics. Mailgun positions itself as a developer-first email infrastructure solution. Mailgun is an email delivery service that provides developers an API-driven way to programmatically send emails. The product is focused on developer experience and is positioned alongside services like Amazon SES and SendGrid rather than consumer tools such as Mailchimp. Its user base includes customers such as Slack, GitHub, Stripe and Lyft. Mailgun was Y Combinator-incubated, was acquired by Rackspace in 2012, and has now been spun out of Rackspace. The company says it will use new funding to accelerate its product roadmap, drive growth initiatives and expand customer support. William Conway, previously GM of Mailgun at Rackspace, will become the new company's CEO. Mailgun offers a programmable email platform for developers, enabling sending, receiving, parsing, storage, and search of email via a straightforward API. The product has evolved from a SendGrid-comparable feature set into a more robust email service provider. Mailgun charges based on messages sent/received and storage used rather than per-mailbox pricing, with a free tier and low-cost paid plans. The service powers about 600 clients — roughly 400 on the free plan and almost 200 paid customers. Pricing details in the article note a free plan allowing 200 messages/day and a paid plan at $1 per 1,000 messages plus $1 per GB/month of storage. Founder Ev Kontsevoy positions Mailgun as changing how developers integrate email into apps, likening the ambition to Twilio for email.

• CrowdStrike

  Participated · Series C · Jul 2015

  CrowdStrike offers a hosted endpoint security platform that uses behavior-based analysis to detect potential cyber threats. Its technology has seen broad adoption, with contracts covering more than 16% of the Fortune 1000 and 20% of the Fortune 500. The company reports its software processes over 100 billion security events per day and that its automated threat-detection service makes 2.3 million decisions each second. CrowdStrike says it has doubled revenues and headcount recently and markets a $1 million warranty on its EPP Complete solution. The company raised a new $200 million financing at a valuation above $3 billion while contemplating an IPO. General Atlantic, Accel, and IVP co-led the round, and prior investors March Capital and CapitalG participated. The article notes the security market is intensely competitive, with peers like Cylance and Carbon Black also raising hundreds of millions. CrowdStrike develops the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, a cloud-based next-generation endpoint protection solution that runs AI/ML in the cloud and on endpoints to prevent malware and malware-free attacks. Falcon deploys in minutes, provides real-time protection, and aggregates a large threat database—processing 40 billion security events a day with endpoint deployments in 176 countries. The company reports strong commercial traction, including 476% growth in new EPP subscriptions year-over-year, 382% growth in EPP subscriptions for Fortune 500 customers, 400% growth in $1M+ transactions, and 253% growth in sensors deployed. More than 10% of the Fortune 1000 use CrowdStrike's technology. CrowdStrike says it will use new funding to accelerate global growth and expand engineering, sales, marketing, and operational resources to meet rising demand and expand its domestic and international presence. Following the round, total funding raised is $256 million and the company has a valuation of over $1 billion. CrowdStrike's core product is Falcon, a cloud-based endpoint protection platform delivered as SaaS that aims to secure devices in mobile and cloud environments. The company says Falcon differentiates by protecting even when attacks are not delivered via malware. Because Falcon is provided as a cloud service, CrowdStrike argues the product cannot be purchased and reverse-engineered like traditional security hardware. CrowdStrike reported rapid growth metrics, including a 550% CAGR in ARR over the past three years, 225% year-over-year growth in ACV subscriptions, and a 700% year-over-year increase in transactions worth $1M or more. The company was launched by former McAfee executives in 2011. Management said the new capital will help expand sales, customer support, marketing and research and development as the company scales. CrowdStrike builds the Falcon platform to monitor a company’s data and detect zero-day threats and targeted attacks. The platform identifies malware and learns attributes of attackers to develop responses that raise the cost and risk to adversaries. CrowdStrike uses sophisticated data analytics to create what the article describes as invisible data meshes that detect unusual network loads and other anomalies. The company shares information and analysis with security experts around the world and collects reports on the latest security issues. CrowdStrike was founded by former McAfee CTO George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, formerly VP of advanced threat research at McAfee. It recently completed a new financing to support its product and operations. CrowdStrike was launched by former McAfee CTO George Kurtz and is operating in stealth mode. The company says it will use big-data mining to help enterprises and governments protect their most sensitive intellectual property and national-security information. Details about the product, go-to-market, and operations remain minimal in the announcement. CrowdStrike was co-founded by George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston. The company disclosed a $26 million Series A investment from Warburg Pincus, and Kurtz had been an entrepreneur-in-residence at that firm. The announcement indicates more information will be released later.

• ScaleFT

  Led · Seed · May 2015

  ScaleFT offers a cloud-native access management platform that enables companies to protect resources without traditional VPNs by making intelligent, real-time access decisions based on dynamic user and device conditions. Its ScaleFT Access Fabric is a globally distributed, cloud-native environment that enables fast dynamic authentication and authorization. The platform integrates with identity governance solutions including Active Directory, Okta and Google. Led by CEO Jason Luce, the company plans to use the funding to continue to develop its platform and expand operations. ScaleFT is based in Austin, TX and San Francisco, CA. The company closed a $2M seed funding round in July 2017. ScaleFT was founded by former Rackspace executives and engineers and today launches its first product, Scale Access, aimed at simplifying and hardening access to servers and infrastructure. Scale Access issues fast-expiring keys valid for only a few minutes and supports integration with single sign-on providers such as Google Apps and the SAML standard. The product is designed to work with existing tools and workflows — SSH remains usable, and automation tools like Ansible continue to function as before. The service can also issue certificates for VPNs, web applications, and other infrastructure services, and supports tools requiring a second factor. The company says this approach addresses complexity and security shortcomings of traditional SSH key management. ScaleFT has secured initial seed funding to support product launch and go-to-market efforts.

• Cloudant

  Participated · Series B · May 2013

  Cloudant is a Boston, MA-based provider of a managed NoSQL, globally distributed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) for loading, storing, analyzing, and distributing operational application data. Its service targets developers of large web and mobile applications seeking to eliminate delays, costs, and distractions from managing databases and database administrators. In May 2013 Cloudant raised $12M in a Series B round. Backers included Devonshire Investors (affiliated with Fidelity Investments), Rackspace Hosting, Toba Capital, and existing investors Avalon Ventures, In-Q-Tel and Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. The company intends to use the capital for global expansion and to grow its support, services, and go-to-market efforts. Cloudant is opening a new San Francisco office in addition to its Bristol, U.K. and Seattle offices. Leadership includes CEO Derek Schoettle and co-founders Adam Kocoloski (CTO), Mike Miller (Chief Scientist) and Alan Hoffman (Chief Product Officer). Cloudant is a cloud-based NoSQL database platform built around Apache’s open-source CouchDB framework that provides hosting, administrative tools, analytics, and support. It is designed to scale on the CloudDB framework and emphasizes scalability, flexibility, and high availability against incumbents like Oracle. The platform targets distributed data use cases such as sensor networks, web servers, and mobile device services, positioning itself for "small companies with big data." Founded by MIT Physics PhDs Alan Hoffman, Adam Kocoloski, and Mike Miller, the company launched after three years of development and is YC-funded. Cloudant currently reports 1,300 users and 10 paying customers. Founders say they want to remain poised to be the cloud service underlying future changes in web stacks.

No current team members are available.