Participated · Series B · May 2022

Certora builds formal verification tools for smart-contract security, notably its Prover product that finds rule violations or formally proves their absence. The Prover is designed to complement human audits and bug bounties and has identified bugs in Aave, Compound, Balancer and SushiSwap, often before deployment. Certora currently secures about $50 billion of DeFi assets and today supports only EVM-compatible blockchains. The company plans to port its flaw-detection technology to new blockchains, with Solana next and then Polkadot, and has stated a goal to cover all blockchains within the next year. Leadership includes Shmuel Mooly Sagiv, a pioneer of formal verification and chair of computer science at Tel Aviv University. The firm recently raised a $36 million Series B to fund development and blockchain expansion.

Participated · Equity · Dec 2018

Cloudify is a cloud management and orchestration company that enables service providers and enterprises to automate, manage and virtually transform network and application services. Its platform supports orchestration from core locations to branch sites and multi-access edge devices. The vendor-agnostic orchestration solution adapts to interfaces across networks and IT landscapes and supports infrastructure management and virtual network functions. Led by CEO Ariel Dan, the company plans to use newly raised capital to accelerate international expansion and build its partner ecosystem to support customer success. Cloudify raised $7M in funding in December 2018. The company was established in 2014 by parent company GigaSpaces Technologies and became independent in July 2017.

Participated · Equity · Jun 2018

Puppet is a Portland, Oregon–based infrastructure automation company that builds tools to help organizations automate and manage infrastructure. The company announced a $40 million debt round from BlackRock Investments. The financing is structured as a loan to be repaid, and BlackRock holds a board observer seat. CEO Yvonne Wassenaar, who joined about 18 months ago, has been rebuilding the executive team, adding CMO Erik Frieberg, CRO Paul Heywood and CTO Abby Kearns. Puppet says it views the debt as the first step in a longer-term relationship with BlackRock and is positioning the company for a potential IPO. The company also notes the pandemic has increased demand for automation solutions. Puppet previously raised almost $150 million in prior financings, including a $42 million Series F in 2018 and $22 million in debt financing in 2016. Puppet builds a DevOps automation and management platform that covers applications, cloud services, containerized services and networking devices. The company sells both open source and commercial products and says more than 40,000 companies use its software, including over 75% of the Fortune 100. Puppet has expanded internationally, made acquisitions (including Reflect this month), and established an APAC regional presence in Singapore. CEO Sanjay Mirchandani says the company is focused on expanding its product portfolio to help customers discover, deliver and operate software across cloud and containerized environments. Financially, Puppet has raised $150 million to date and recently closed a $42 million venture round. The company’s rapid customer growth and expansion are presented in the article as contributing to a materially higher valuation than its last disclosed post-money valuation in 2014. Puppet Labs is a Portland, Ore.-based DevOps company. The company secured a $22 million credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank as a precautionary measure rather than to fund growth. CEO Luke Kanies said Puppet still has half of its last equity round in the bank and expects to be cash-flow positive soon. Puppet appointed former Genentech CFO Lou Lavigne to its board, where he will chair the audit committee as the company prepares for a future IPO. The company is expanding its Portland waterfront headquarters with a lease to add 37,500 square feet to its current 75,000-square-foot office, with the new lease taking effect in 2018. Leadership described the credit line as a cushion for risk mitigation in case of economic uncertainty. Puppet Labs provides a software platform that enables system administrators to gain operational agility, efficiency and insight to proactively manage dynamic infrastructure. The platform supports scaling from tens of servers to thousands, both on-premises and in the cloud. Led by founder and CEO Luke Kanies, more than 18,000 companies use Puppet, including Bank of America, Cisco, Citrix, eBay, NYSE, PayPal, salesforce.com and WebEx. The company currently employs more than 300 people and has added Mukesh Sharma as vice president of sales, EMEA. Puppet Labs raised $40M in this round and has raised $86M in total since June 2009. It intends to use the funds to invest in people, technology advancements and global expansion. Puppet Labs provides systems management and datacenter automation software, including the open-source Puppet configuration management framework and the commercial Puppet Enterprise. Puppet Enterprise simplifies provisioning, configuring, and managing virtualized and cloud infrastructure for system administrators, and the firm acquired MCollective for server orchestration. Customers named in the article include Zynga, Twitter, NYSE, Disney, Citrix, Oracle/Sun, Constant Contact, Match.com, Shopzilla, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Stanford University. The company has seen 3.5 million downloads of its software in the past year, signaling strong adoption. Puppet Labs plans to use new funding for product development as well as sales and marketing and is positioning its software to bring SaaS into the data center. It is pursuing strategic integrations with virtualization vendors, notably VMware, to enable automation across heterogeneous, multi-vendor environments.

Participated · Series E · Jul 2017

HyTrust provides solutions that automate security controls for software-defined computing, networking and storage workloads to deliver visibility, granular policy control and data protection across private, public and hybrid clouds. The company positions itself as a leader in cloud workload protection and emphasizes automated policy enforcement and compliance to help enterprises and government agencies secure workloads. HyTrust said it will use its new funding to expand sales and marketing and to fund new product development. A portion of the proceeds is earmarked to finance the announced acquisition of DataGravity. The company cites adoption by large financial institutions and government agencies as validation of its approach. HyTrust is headquartered in Mountain View, CA and is backed by both strategic partners and venture investors including VMware, Cisco, Intel, Fortinet, In-Q-Tel, AVP, Sway Ventures, Granite Ventures, Trident Capital and Vanedge Capital. HyTrust develops software to secure next-generation datacenters by automating data protection and continuously enforcing security policies for the people and tools that operate private, hybrid and public clouds. Its products provide policy-based controls, visibility and data security to help enterprises meet compliance mandates, improve application uptime, and reduce the risk of compromise. The company positions itself as a leader in private and hybrid cloud security and lists technology and go-to-market partners including VMware, VCE, Symantec, CA, McAfee, Splunk, HP Arcsight, Accuvant, RSA, IBM and Intel. The latest funding round is intended to boost marketing, sales and product development and to support expansion into international markets. HyTrust is backed by strategic investors VMware, Cisco, Intel, In-Q-Tel and Fortinet alongside venture investors Granite Ventures, Trident Capital, Epic Ventures, AITV and Vanedge Capital. It has also expanded its relationship with City National Bank to provide additional venture debt and credit facilities to support future growth. HyTrust develops security technology designed for virtualized data centers that consolidate compute, storage and networking into a software layer. Its core product mediates between administrators and the virtual infrastructure, providing a role-based system to control and monitor administrative actions. The platform enables real-time visibility into administrator behavior versus permitted actions to reduce the risk of accidental or malicious changes. HyTrust emphasizes protecting modern data centers from both insider risks (e.g., administrators erasing or copying VMs) and remote attacks that can cross continents. The company positions its solution as a response to new security challenges created by management platforms in virtual environments. The articles note the company has secured venture funding to support its product and growth. HyTrust delivers real-time control, administrative account monitoring, logging and compliance assurance to enable secure cloud adoption and virtualization of critical workloads. The company’s products focus on enforcing policy, auditability and administrative controls at the virtualization and cloud layer to mitigate concentration of risk. HyTrust positions its solution to provide cloud control, visibility and operational readiness for mission-critical workloads and to satisfy security teams and compliance auditors. The company announced a strategic investment and technology-development agreement with In-Q-Tel to fuel product development and expand support operations. That partnership is intended to broaden HyTrust’s reach into the federal sector and address unique government agency requirements. HyTrust is headquartered in Mountain View, CA and is backed by investors including VMware, Granite Ventures, Cisco Systems, Trident Capital and Epic Ventures. HyTrust has developed a policy management system specifically for virtualization that enables IT departments to control and virtualize servers. The company helps organizations manage and control virtual infrastructure. TechCrunch reports HyTrust launched last year. It says the new funding will be used to drive product development and to fuel sales and marketing efforts. HyTrust faces competition from Catbird. The company has raised a total of $16 million to date following the latest round.

Participated · Series B · Oct 2016

Blue Medora is an IT monitoring integration company that interconnects over 150 technologies across cloud computing, on-premise hardware and virtual desktops. The company recently introduced BindPlane, an IT monitoring integration service that collects and provides data across the entire stack, identifies performance issues, and eliminates blind spots with built-in dashboards for centralized collection and reporting of rich dimensional data. Blue Medora serves more than 350 marquee brands, including Chase, Delta and Safeway. It received a $10M growth investment from Edison Partners and intends to use the funds to accelerate growth in the enterprise market. As part of the financing, Edison Partners’ Lenard Marcus joined Blue Medora’s board of directors. Nathan Owen is CEO and co-founder and leads the company from Grand Rapids, MI. Blue Medora is a Grand Rapids, MI-based provider of integration software for common application performance management, cloud management and database management platforms. Its software extends cloud management, APM and IT operational analytics platforms by adding health, performance and relationship data on underlying compute, storage and network infrastructure. The company also offers SelectStar, a database performance-monitoring platform that combines database and cloud infrastructure monitoring to track and optimize critical database performance and availability metrics. Led by CEO and co-founder Nathan Owen, Blue Medora recently closed an $8M Series B1 to support growth. The company intends to use the proceeds to expand sales, marketing and R&D investments. The Series B1 was led by First Analysis with participation from existing investors Lewis and Clark, Wakestream Ventures and eLabs Ventures. Blue Medora creates software that offers a single view of applications, databases and infrastructure to resolve IT issues, increase uptime and optimize performance. The company is known for developing extensions for virtualized and application management platforms such as Oracle, IBM, VMware vRealize and New Relic. Last month it launched SelectStar, a SaaS-based solution that unifies database and cloud infrastructure monitoring. Blue Medora intends to use new funds to increase customer adoption, channel growth, global presence and technology partnerships. Led by co-founder and CEO Nathan Owen, the company has raised $14.5M in total capital since its inception. It is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Blue Medora provides cloud-based software solutions that enable administrator teams to work collaboratively on infrastructure to avoid downtime, resolve performance problems and make predictive insights using advanced analytics. The company supports VMware’s vRealize Operations and Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control platforms and plans to continue integrating its software into additional cloud management platforms. Led by co-founder and CEO Nathan Owen, Blue Medora intends to use new funding to grow its engineering, sales and marketing teams. The announcement states the company has raised $6.0M in total funding following the latest round. The company is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and will expand platform integrations as a primary product development focus. No operating metrics were disclosed in the article. Blue Medora develops virtualization and cloud monitoring and management plugins that extend popular enterprise management systems such as Oracle Enterprise Manager and IBM Tivoli. The company has produced a range of certified integration products that extend monitoring and management to cloud, virtualization, ERP, CRM, enterprise directory and messaging software. It is working on systems management and monitoring solutions to extend Oracle EM's virtualization capabilities through VMware integration. Blue Medora intends to use new funding to continue to expand and to commercialize its plugins. The company was founded in 2007 and is led by CEO Nathan Owen. It currently employs 22 people and expected to add another 13 employees in the next 18 months.