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 in our monthly Money Moves section, or if you have any tips on that activity, please send the information to Sydney Sawaya ([email protected]).

Cisco Buys Another Kubernetes Startup Banzai Cloud

Cisco reached a deal to buy Kubernetes-focused startup Banzai Cloud, which marked its second cloud-native-focused acquisition in two months.

Headquartered in Budapest, 3-year-old Banzai Cloud developed a Kubernetes-based platform that helps enterprises develop, deploy, and scale cloud-native applications. It raised $2.5 million in one founding round in 2018.

Cisco plans to acquire the startup’s assets and team, and it expects the acquisition to close by the end of Cisco’s second quarter fiscal 2021. The companies did not disclose financial details. When the deal closes, the Banzai Cloud team will join Cisco's Emerging Technologies and Incubation group, and they will focus on incubating new projects for cloud-native networking, security, and edge computing environments for distributed applications.

Palo Alto Networks Plunks Down $670M on Expanse

Palo Alto Networks will pay $670 million to acquire attack surface management vendor Expanse.

After the deal closes, Expanse co-founders Tim Junio and Matt Kraning will join Palo Alto Networks.

Expanse, an 8-year-old security startup based in San Francisco, developed an internet collection and attribution platform that monitors the global internet and maps exposed and untracked assets that comprise customers’ attack surfaces. Additionally, the platform evaluates and prioritizes risk, and then mitigates the threats.

Palo Alto Networks plans to integrate Expanse with its Cortex product suite, its artificial intelligence-based detection, prevention, and automation portfolio that includes its Cortex XDR platform for extended detection and response. The combined technology will allow security operations teams to stitch together external, internal, and threat data to provide a more complete view of an enterprise’s threat landscape, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora said in a statement.

Cato Claims Unicorn Status in Wake of $130M Funding Round

Secure access service edge (SASE) vendor Cato Networks claimed unicorn status with a valuation of more than $1 billion after raking in $130 million in its largest funding round to date. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with participation from Coatue, and long-time investors Greylock, Aspect Ventures, Acrew Capital, Singtel Innov8, and Cato CEO and founder Shlomo Kramer also made contributions.

“SASE is the hottest area in IT, and this funding round further attests to Cato’s leadership of the SASE market,” Kramer said.

The Tel Aviv, Israel-based network and security company has raised more than $332 million since it was founded in early 2015. This funding has helped Cato capture in excess of 650 enterprise customers with more than 7,000 locations and 200,000 users, in 100 countries around the world.

Its latest funding round followed about six months after the company announced $77 million in Series D funding.

Movers and Shakers

The fires of Intel’s artificial intelligence (AI) ambition were stoked once again with the acquisition of Israeli machine learning startup Cnvrg.io. The news came less than a week after Intel signaled its intent to acquire U.S.-based AI modeling company SigOpt.

IBM reached a definitive agreement to acquire TruQua Enterprises, an IT services and consulting SAP development partner. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Equinix cut the tape on its 16th International Business Exchange (IBX) data center in the Washington, D.C. area. The company has invested more than $200 million in the Washington, D.C. area in 2020. The digital infrastructure giant also announced an initial investment of $55 million to build its third IBX data center in Osaka, Japan.

SentinelOne, an endpoint security turned extended detection and response (XDR) vendor, closed a $267 million Series F round, putting its valuation above $3 billion.

Menlo Security, a web security vendor and rising SASE star, scored a $100 million Series E round, bringing its valuation to $800 million.

5G and AI chipmaker EdgeQ emerged from stealth with a $51 million funding round led by Threshold Ventures, Fusion Fund, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

Abnormal Security raised $50 million in Series B venture capital funding led by Menlo Ventures. The latest round brings Abnormal’s total funding to $75 million.

Atos, a digital transformation provider, launched its OneCloud cloud migration platform with a $2.4 billion investment over the next five years.

Israel's Cellwize Wireless Technologies parent company bagged $32 million in new financing led by Intel Capital and Qualcomm Ventures.

Accenture acquired Spanish engineering services company Arca. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

JumpCloud collected $75 million in Series E financing led by BlackRock. The company had raised $165 million to date.

Park Place Technologies announced the acquisition of Curvature, an IT support, products, and services company. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Systems management and security software provider Quest Software purchased Quadrotech for an undisclosed amount.

West Monroe announced it has acquired Pace Harmon, marking the largest acquisition in the firm’s history.

Kemp reached a deal to acquire Flowmon Networks, a predictive network performance monitoring and diagnostics (NPMD), and network detection and response (NDR) provider.

IBM acquired application performance monitoring and observability provider Instana in a deal that furthers Big Blue’s hybrid cloud focus.

FireEye announced a $400 million investment led by private equity firm Blackstone Group and said it bought security startup Respond Software for $186 million.

Splunk bought visibility and monitoring company, Flowmill, which follows two acquisitions last month and brings its two-year buying spree total to six startups.

Other World Computing (OWC) announced it is in the final steps of completing its acquisition of the BRU product technologies.

EdgeConneX closed its acquisition by EQT Infrastructure from an investor group led by Providence Equity Partners.

Navisite bagged Dickinson + Associates, an SAP consulting firm based in Chicago, for an undisclosed amount.

Carbon Relay relaunched as StormForge following its acquisition of StormForger, a performance testing as a service platform.

CloudBolt secured $35 million in Series B funding, consisting of both equity and venture debt. The equity was led by Insight Partners and Hercules Capital issued the venture debt.

Cloud data protection and management provider Druva acquired sfApex, a Salesforce developer tools and data migration service provider, for an undisclosed amount.

Developer-focused security startup Ubiq Security raised $6.4 million in a seed equity investment round led by Okapi Venture Capital.

Lightspin emerged from stealth after closing a $4 million funding round led by Ibex Investors.

Streaming SQL database company Materialize collected $32 million in Series B funding led by Bucky Moore of Kleiner Perkins.

Cloud-native networking company Isovalent formally launched with $29 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and Google.