Here are some of the most prominent venture capital and merger and acquisition news items from April. If you’d like SDxCentral to report on your company’s VC or M&A activity in our monthly Money Moves section, or if you have any tips on that activity, please send the information to Julia King ([email protected]).

The surge of public cloud services will continue in 2022, and nearly capture $495 billion in global spending this year, according to Gartner. This represents a 20.4% increase in spending from 2021.

The market research firm predicts public cloud spending will reach nearly $600 billion by the end of 2023.

“Cloud is the powerhouse that drives today’s digital organizations,” Gartner VP Sid Nag said in a statement. “CIOs are beyond the era of irrational exuberance of procuring cloud services and are being thoughtful in their choice of public cloud providers to drive specific, desired business and technology outcomes in their digital transformation journey.”

The most successful IT leaders view the cloud as an enabler, and organizations that combine cloud services with other emerging technologies will fare even better, he added. 

Enterprise IT spending on security, cloud, and data centers is set over the next two years, however increased cybersecurity concerns will continue to drive steady enterprise IT spending growth across Asia, according to a pair of new analyst reports.

Gartner estimates that overall worldwide IT spending will increase 4% this year to $4.4 trillion, with an accelerated 5.5% growth to nearly $4.7 billion in total spend in 2023. That yearly increase will be down from the 9.5% surge witnessed in 2021.

The forecast growth is connected to enterprises needing greater flexibility in their operations. 

“CIOs are accelerating IT investments as they recognize the importance of flexibility and agility in responding to disruption,” Gartner VP John-David Lovelock said in a statement. “As a result, purchasing and investing preference will be focused in areas including analytics, cloud computing, seamless customer experiences, and security.”

Goldman Sachs invested $125 million in Fortress Information Security.

Equinix priced $1.2 billion of bonds in its fourth green bond offering. 

Grain Management acquired LightRiver’s Technologies & Software entities. 

NEC Corporation led the financing for BostonGene’s $150 million Series B funding round.

Grafana Labs closed a $240 million Series D investment round.

Turn/River Capital acquired Tufin.

Kaseya acquired Datto.

Thoma Bravo acquired SailPoint Technologies. 

KKR acquired Barracuda Networks. 

Docker acquired InfoSiftr. 

AWS committed more than $30 million to early stage startups as part of its new AWS Impact Accelerator.

Elisa Polystar acquired FRINX.

LinkSquares raised $100 million in Series C funding led by G Squared.

Appfire acquired Comalatech. 

Appwrite raised $27 million in its Series A funding round.

Talend acquired Gamma Soft.

Ascend.io raised $31 million in Series B funding led by Tiger Global.

Nord Security raised its first ever outside capital at a $1.6 billion valuation.

HelpSystems acquired Terranova Security.

Perforce acquired Puppet.

greymatter.io raised $7.1 million in its Series A funding round. 

PwC acquired cloud engineering company Applications Consulting Training Solutions.

Critical Start secured over $215 million in strategic growth investment from Vista Equity Partners.

DoControl raised $30 million in its Series B funding round.

Blueshift Cybersecurity raised $6 million in its seed funding round.

deepset raised $14 million in Series A funding led by GV.

ARMO raised $30 million for the first open-source Kubernetes security platform.

Pollen Mobile closed the seed funding round for its next-generation decentralized wireless network.

Demostack raised $34 million in Series B funding. 

d-Matrix raised $44 Million in funding to build a compute platform targeted for at-scale transformer AI datacenter inference.

Salad.com raised $17 million in its Series A funding round.

alphaMountain.ai raised $2.7 million in its seed funding round for threat intelligence for cyber protection and investigation platforms.

Devos Technology acquired Kognos. 

Source Defense raised $27 million in Series B funding. 

Sophos acquired SOC.OS.

SonarSource raised $412 million in new investment.

Capital Telecom Group acquired ElectraComm Services.

Harness' valuation increased to $3.7 billion with $230 million in Series D funding.

Intigriti raised more than €21 million in Series B funding.

LightEdge acquired NFINIT.

Ayar Labs raised $130 million in Series C funding. 

MOU acquired 100% of Spetz Tech Limited.

Strider Technologies raised $45 million in Series B funding. 

Cortex Labs joined Databricks.

Providence acquired Airties.

Coherent raised $75 million in Series B funding led by Maverick Capital.

Synopsys acquired WhiteHat Security from NTT.

Capital One Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, Verizon Ventures, and Wipro Ventures joined an over $1 billion Securonix growth investment as strategic investors. 

Teleport raised $110 million in its Series C funding round at a $1.1 billion valuation.