Here are some of the most prominent venture capital and merger and acquisition news items from the past month. If you’d like SDxCentral to report on your company’s VC or M&A activity, or if you have any tips on that activity, please send the information to Sydney Sawaya ([email protected]).

HPE Buys Scytale, Embraces Open Source Security

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) said it acquired cloud security startup Scytale for an undisclosed amount. The deal will boost HPE’s identity management technology as well as its credibility within the open source community.

Scytale’s founders, which include engineers from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Duo Security (now owned by Cisco), Google, Okta, PagerDuty, and Splunk, were also some of the founding contributors to the SPIFFE and SPIRE open source projects.

Scytale, which launched in 2017, was SPIFFE’s primary maintainer, and in 2018 both open source security projects joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as sandbox projects.

Intel Ditches Nervana, High on Habana

Like a kid that just got a new toy, Intel has cast aside its line of Nervana neural networking processors (NNP) in favor of the shiny new ones from recently acquired Habana Labs.

“After acquiring Habana Labs in December and with input from our customers, we are making strategic updates to the data center [artificial intelligence] acceleration roadmap,” an Intel spokesperson wrote in an email to SDxCentral. “We will leverage our combined AI talent and technology to build leadership AI products.”

Intel acquired the Israeli AI startup seven weeks ago for $2 billion in an effort to bolster its position in the highly competitive data center processor space. Nervana was also the result of a previous Intel acquisition in 2016.

Other VC/M&A News

In a win for CloudGenix, managed service provider Cissdm announced it added the vendor to its SD-WAN portfolio. Over the past year, CloudGenix worked aggressively to cast a wide net and bring in new service provider partners as part of its ongoing mission to displace industry giants like Cisco.

Snowflake conjured another funding blizzard as the San Mateo, Calif.-based company announced a $479 million Series G financing round on a $12.4 billion valuation.

A U.S. District judge ruled in favor of T-Mobile US’ merger with Sprint. The operators’ quest to merge, which began almost 22 months ago, has been held up by a group of state attorneys general that filed a lawsuit in a bid to block the merger.

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai noted in a blog post that the company would invest more than $10 billion this year into offices and data centers in the U.S. That investment will focus on 11 states where it currently has a presence.

McAfee went big at RSA Conference 2020. In addition to the security vendor’s CTO Steve Grobman delivering an opening-day keynote, McAfee also announced a deal to buy browser isolation startup Light Point Security.

Cloud platform provider DigitalOcean grabbed a $300 million life preserver that it said will help fund its operations to profitability and move toward generating more than $1 billion in revenues within the next five years.

Nokia acquired U.S.-based silicon photonics technology company Elenion in a move that analysts expect will boost its position in an increasingly vertical-centric market segment.

Google penned a deal to buy Cornerstone Technology, a software company that migrates customers’ mainframe workloads to the cloud, in yet another deal that aims to pull more enterprises onto Google Cloud Platform.

Endpoint security company SentinelOne closed a $200 million Series E funding round, which brings its total raised to $429.5 million and its valuation above $1.1 billion.

Chicago-based Nerdio secured an $8 million Series A round led by MK Capital and backed by Nerdio’s own CEO and co-founder, Vadim Vladimirskiy, and CRO Joseph Landes.

Aiven raised $40 million in Series B funding bringing its total funds raised to date to $50 million.

Computational storage provider NGD Systems announced a $20 million Series C funding round.

Cognizant entered a deal to acquire the French operations of EI-Technologies, a Paris based, privately held digital technology consulting firm and independent Salesforce specialist.

Komodo Systems Inc. acquired Conxx Inc. for an undisclosed amount.

Cyber threat intelligence company Sixgill bagged $15 million in new funding.

Google closed its $2.6 billion acquisition of data analytics startup Looker.

Publicis Sapient purchased Sapient.i7 Ltd, the joint enterprise it launched with Tquila Ventures in March 2018.

BMC announced its intent to buy RSM Partners.

Whatfix secured $32 million in Series C funding led by Sequoia Capital India.

Managed IT services company CloudScale365 Inc. penned a deal to acquire eApps Hosting and its Create-a-Cloud platform.

Zero Networks raised $4.65 million in seed funding, led by F2 Capital and Pico Venture Partners.

Open Raven emerged from stealth with $4.1 million in seed funding from Upfront Ventures, Goldman Sachs board member Phil Venables, and Dragos.

German cybersecurity firm Utimaco GmbH closed a deal to acquire cryptographic key management firm Geobridge Corporation for an undisclosed price.

Atlanta-based privacy, security and third-party risk technology platform provider OneTrust bagged $210 million in Series B financing that more than doubled its valuation to $2.7 billion.

Robotics digitization company Ripcord announced an expanded seed funding round of $45 million led by CDK Global.

LinkSquares snagged $14.5 million in Series A financing led by Jump Capital.

Quantum Corporation signed a deal with Western Digital Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp. to acquire its ActiveScale object storage business.

Advent International (Advent) entered into a definitive agreement to acquire all outstanding shares of device visibility and control provider Forescout in an all-cash transaction valued at $1.9 billion.

Carbon Relay announced a $63 million transaction led by Insight Partners to accelerate the growth of its Red Sky Ops service.

Cloud data management company Model9 closed a $9 million Series A funding round led by Intel Capital with participation from existing investors StageOne, North First Ventures, and GlenRock Israel.

PredictHQ raised $22 million in Series B funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures and joined by existing investors.

Deep Instinct bagged $43 million in Series C funding led by Millennium New Horizons, with participation from Unbound, the London-based investment firm founded by Shravin Mittal, along with LG, and existing investor Nvidia.

Digital Realty reached an agreement with Clise Properties to acquire a 49% ownership interest in the Westin Building Exchange in Seattle.

Public attack surface protection company ZeroFOX  secured $74 million in a new round of financing led by Intel Capital.

Salesforce signed a deal to acquire Vlocity for $1.33 billion.

Artificial intelligence computing firm SambaNova Systems raised $250 million in a funding round led by BlackRock Inc.

Sophos announced the completion of its $3.9 billion acquisition by Thoma Bravo.