Here are some of the most prominent venture capital and merger and acquisition news items from October. 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 Emma Chervek ([email protected]).

Solo.io hit unicorn status after raising another $135 million — but not intentionally — setting the company up to better compete in the still-evolving managed service mesh space.

“We honestly did not need to raise [funds] whatsoever. We had tons of money in the bank,” Solo.io CEO Idit Levine said in an interview with SDxCentral. But the managed service mesh provider has been “growing like crazy,” with Levine citing the company’s 500% quarter-over-quarter growth. 

“More money will allow us to go faster, bigger, and stronger. And that's the reason that we took it,” Levine said.

Solo.io will use part of the funding to expand its sales, engineering, and marketing teams to mirror the growth of the company, Levine said. Part of this funding will also go toward product research and development.

Cisco reached a deal to acquire replex, a Kubernetes governance and cost-management startup the company says will boost its AppDynamics observability platform.

Its technology helps cloud-native enterprise customers better predict costs and provides transparency across Kubernetes environments, replex claims.

“Replex’s deep expertise in Kubernetes, real-time data extraction, and analytics will further strengthen AppDynamics’ world-class product and engineering team as we accelerate the delivery of Cisco’s full-stack observability vision,” AppDynamics GM Linda Tong wrote in a blog post.

Rakuten Mobile acquired Estmob.

PVcase raised $23 million in Series A funding.

Kentik announced it raised $40 million in Series C funding.

BMC acquired StreamWeaver.

One Identity acquired OneLogin.

NetApp acquired CloudCheckr.

Qualcomm acquired Veoneer in an all-cash transaction valued at $4.5 billion.

Orca Security raised $550 million in Series C funding.

Domino Data Lab announced it raised $100 million during its Series F funding round.

Coalition completed its acquisition of Attune.

Celonis acquired Lenses.io.

GlobalFoundries announced it will list its shares on the Nasdaq exchange.

Pluribus Networks raised $20 million in investments.

Chronosphere closed its Series C funding round with $200 million in investments.

Virtuozzo acquired Jelastic.

Gretel.ai raised $50 million in Series B funding.

Aware raised $60 million in Series C funding.

Forcepoint acquired Bitglass.

Black Kite raised $22 million during its Series B funding round.

CAST AI closed its Series A funding round with $10 million in funding.

Big Network raised $2 million in seed funding.

Palo Alto Networks announced it will transfer its stock exchange listing from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol PANW.

Comcast Business announced that Comcast Government Services acquired Defined Technologies.

Alation acquired Lyngo Analytics.

Query.AI closed its Series A funding round with $15 million in investments.

Dell Technologies board of directors approved distribution of a special stock dividend to Dell stockholders of all its shares of Class A and Class B common stock of VMware.

Keysight Technologies acquired Scalable Network Technologies.

vFunction raised $26 million in Series A funding.

Valence announced $7 million in seed funding.

HelpSystems acquired PhishLabs.

Cybereason secured a $50 million investment from Google Cloud.

Invicti Security signed an agreement for a $625 investment led by Summit Partners.

Hex Technologies raised $16 million in Series A funding.

Aiven announced a $60 million Series C extension, valuing the company at $2 billion.

Staircase AI raised $4 million in seed funding.

New Relic announced the launch of New Relic CodeStream to bring observability and code collaboration into integrated development environments.

REsurety raised $16 million in Series B funding.

AVANT announced a growth investment of an undisclosed amount from Pamlico Capital.

HelpSystems acquired Digital Guardian.

Gluware raised $43 million in growth funding.

ClickUp closed its Series C funding round with $400 million in investments. 

SlashNext raised $26 million in Series B funding. 

SUSE acquired NeuVector.

Shares of GlobalFoundries opened on the Nasdaq, giving the company a market capitalization of $26 billion.

Yugabyte closed its Series C funding round with $188 million in investments. 

Microsoft acquired Two Hat.

ClickUp raised $400 million in Series C investments.