Funding

Neocleus Raises $11,4 M in Series B Funding

June 19, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Neocleus, a startup yet to release a product who recently unveiled its ‘endpoint virtualization’ strategy, seems to have been convincing enough in validating its approach to investors. The company has raised $11.4M in Series B funding (PDF) in a round led by Battery Ventures and Gemini Israel Funds, its original investors.

Neocleus applies virtualization to desktops and laptops delivering the flexibility, manageability and security needed to address different user scenarios within a dynamic, dispersed enterprise. The company’s solutions, which include a Xen-based open source Type 1 bare-metal hypervisor for endpoints, aim to enable critical IT tasks to operate in isolated, trusted virtual environments with complete access to the capabilities offered by the underlying endpoint hardware.

Neocleus was founded in 2006 by industry veterans Ariel Gorfung (CEO) and Etay Bogner (CTO) and launched last May with the announcement of the Desktop Hypervisor Framework, an endpoint hypervisor enhancement to the Xen server hypervisor that the company will be contributing to the open source community.

Most recently Neocleus announced Trusted Edge, the first in a suite of virtual software appliances that allows for secure access to corporate resources – for employees, customers and partners – regardless of the endpoint’s location or state of security.

Open Kernel Labs Receives $2.5M Research Grant, Aims To Embed OS And Virtualization In Mobile Devices

June 12, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs), a provider of embedded systems software and virtualization technology, announced today that it has won a $2.5M research grant under AusIndustry’s “Commercial Ready” program, which awards funds to enterprises that demonstrate the highest potential for innovation and its commercialization. The funds will be used to initiate a research, development and commercialization project centered on a technology transfer agreement with Australian research lab NICTA.

This investment will support research, prototyping and early stage commercialization, which will add unprecedented capabilities to OK Labs’ Secure HyperCell technology. Work under the grant will include the complete formal verification of the OKL4 microkernel and support enhancements to OKL4 that enable “better-designed and more secure software for mobile devices and consumer electronics”. The outcome aims to be a platform uniquely able to support resource-constrained, security- and safety-critical embedded devices.

Secure HyperCell technology provides a secure environment for operating systems, applications and drivers on mobile devices. More details regarding the development and commercialization from the project and its integration with OKL4 are expected to be announced at a later date. We’ll keep you updated!

[Source: VMBlog]

Leostream Picks Up Series A Funding To The Tune Of $3 Million

May 6, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Waltham, Mass.-based hosted desktop connection broker Leostream, has raised $3 million in Series A funding led by Meakem Becker Venture Capital, reports Private Equity Hub, citing a regulatory filing.

CEO Mike Palin said the company plans to release details on the financing in coming weeks. Palin is the former CFO of Sitara Networks Inc., a Waltham, MA-based quality-of-service software developer.

Leostream was founded in 2002 by David Crosbie, who is now listed as the company’s CTO. He had previously founded Adero and Bluesocket, a wireless networking firm in Burlington. In 2001, COLT Telecom Group acquired Adero for an undisclosed amount.

Over the years, Leostream has evolved from basic virtualization management to Connection Brokering for both physical and virtual machines. The company boasts a high number of quality partnerships with companies like HP, Intel, Citrix and Microsoft, among others.

DataCore Raises $30 Million In Equity Investment

April 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

DataCore Software Corporation, a US-based vendor of storage virtualization software, today announced that it has accepted a $30 million equity investment from Insight Venture Partners and Updata Partners.

DataCore is a global, privately-held company that was founded in 1998 and has offices in the Americas, Europe and Asia. They are the makers of SANMelody (storage management platform for larger scale networks), SANSymphony (converts PC servers into expansion “disk servers”) and SANMaestro (a “spreadsheet simple” approach to monitoring, analyzing and reporting critical storage and Windows events).

“Insight Venture Partners has built its reputation on finding and investing in companies poised for tremendous success in the industries in which we specialize,” said Jeff Horing, Managing Director, Insight Venture Partners. “DataCore is perfectly positioned as the virtual storage foundation for all server and desktop virtualization platforms, regardless of vendor. We believe that storage virtualization will eventually be as big as server virtualization and that DataCore will be the big beneficiary of this trend.”

DataCore had previously raised around $85 million over four rounds of funding, from firms like Flagship Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Scale Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Van Wagoner Capital Management and Vista Equity Partners.

Most of those institutions remain minority investors, but they did receive partial liquidity via this new round of financing.

[Source: peHUB]

Motorola Joins Investors Behind VirtualLogix (Update)

April 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

According to PC World, Motorola has joined Cisco, Intel and Texas Instruments in funding mobile virtualization company VirtualLogix (see our previous coverage). Update: the official release went over the wire.

VirtualLogix lets a user access two separate operating systems on the same handset with its VLX for Mobile Handsets product line – allowing them to share some resources like memory, but also keeping other areas, such as applications, securely apart.

Today, the company plans to announce that Motorola is a new investor in the company. Motorola is interested in VirtualLogix primarily for its mobile phones, but has also expressed an interest in using it for virtualization in its network equipment, reportedly said Peter Richards, CEO of VirtualLogix.

More when the official announcement comes in!

Update: the official word is in, but doesn’t provide much more details. Motorola made the equity investment through Motorola Ventures, its strategic capital arm, without disclosing the size of the investment.

Motorola joins VirtualLogix’s current investors Atlas Venture, Cisco Systems, DFJ Esprit, Index Ventures, Intel Capital and Texas Instruments. The company raised $16 million in series B last July, and got an extra (undisclosed) equity investment from Texas Instruments last December. The total amount invested in the company so far is $28 million, and the company says it is open to more strategic investors joining the club.

Noteworthy, however, is the comment that was added by our media contact, which shows Motorola’s ambition:

“Motorola is rising to the challenge of competing against competitors like the iPhone to develop disruptive new handsets, that will be less expensive to develop, while providing a much richer user experience. Virtualization can give one phone two different personalities, making it possible to switch between work functionality and fun applications, even between plans and accounts on one device.”

[Source: SMS Text News]

Solera Networks Releases Beta Version Of Solera V2P Tap

April 9, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Solera Networks announced today the availability of its beta version of the free Solera V2P Tap, expanding the company’s initiative toward enabling complete network visibility. Using the Solera V2P Tap, organizations deploying virtual machines can leverage their existing investments in network management and security tools by regenerating virtual network traffic, including intra-server virtual machine network traffic, to their existing physical security infrastructure to monitor and protect virtual network activity.

The company recently raised $ 5 Million in Series B funding by Canopy Ventures, which also led the company’s Series A round in 2006.

From the press release:

For many organizations, monitoring and securing the virtual environment means an additional investment to deploy security tools and processes in the virtual network—the same tools they already have in the physical environment. The Solera V2P Tap sits passively in a virtual environment leveraging VMware Vswitch technology, capturing all network traffic from within the virtual environment and regenerating all or some of that traffic in real-time to the physical environment for monitoring and analysis by existing tools.

The free download of the Solera V2P Tap is now available in beta for evaluation. After completion of the beta, the download will continue to be available for free.

[Source: VMblog]