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]).

CrowdStrike Pays $400M, Buys Humio for XDR Boost

CrowdStrike agreed to pay $400 million for Humio, which provides cloud log management and observability technology, to boost its extended detection and response (XDR).

London-based Humio, which also has offices in San Francisco, Seattle, and Denmark, counts Aruba, New York City Cyber Command, Bloomberg, Michigan State University, and SpareBank 1 among its customers. The 5-year-old startup developed a data ingestion and analytics platform that CrowdStrike says will enable it to provide contextual index-free XDR “at a speed and scale that no other vendor can match.” Humio claims its platform “has virtually no latency even at massive ingest volumes” and can scale to hundreds of terabytes per day.

The Humio acquisition will expand CrowdStrike’s XDR capabilities by ingesting and correlating data from any log, application, or feed to deliver actionable insights and real-time protection, CrowdStrike CTO Michael Sentonas wrote in a blog post.

Palo Alto Networks Pays $156M for Bridgecrew

Palo Alto Networks reached a deal to acquire Bridgecrew, a DevOps security startup, for $156 million in cash.

The 2-year-old startup, based in San Francisco, raised $18.1 million to create its developer-focused security platform, and its open source infrastructure-as-code scanner, Checkov, surpassed 1 million downloads last year in its first full year of availability. Bridgecrew’s customers include Globality, BetterHelp, Databricks, and People.ai.

Palo Alto Networks said it will fold the startup’s technology, which codifies infrastructure configuration during development, into its Prisma Cloud security platform. This will allow it to integrate cloud security across the application lifecycle, Palo Alto Networks’ Lee Klarich wrote in a blog post.

HPE Buys CloudPhysics, Rolls Out ‘Opportunity Engine’

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced the acquisition of CloudPhysics. The companies did not disclose the purchase price, but CloudPhysics has raised $27.5 million over three funding rounds.

Founded in 2011, CloudPhysics is a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based analytics platform designed to identify inefficiencies in the data center and suggest ways to address them by simulating the introduction of new technologies, resources, or services.

The platform ingests more than 200 usage metrics from virtual machines, physical servers, storage arrays, and network infrastructure to determine where inefficiencies may exist. Based on this data, the platform generates personalized reports on resource utilization and how different technologies may remedy the situation.

HPE sees CloudPhysics as a way to help its partners address customers’ needs and accelerate the evaluation and procurement process. “Customers can accomplish their IT goals with more efficient IT infrastructure planning and procurement,” Tom Black, SVP and GM of HPE Storage, wrote in a blog post.

Movers and Shakers

Kong’s battle to position Kuma as the service mesh of choice received a $100 million funding boost that could come in handy as the Google-based Istio service mesh platform struggles to find its footing. Kong has now raised $171 million through four funding rounds, which tripled its valuation since its Series C to $1.4 billion.

Granulate raised a $30 million Series B funding round, bringing the company’s total amount raised to $45 million.

Telefónica issued the first sustainable hybrid bond of the telco sector, amounting to $1.19 billion.

Pliops closed a $65 million oversubscribed funding round, led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT).

Aviatrix scored $75 million in a Series D funding round led by General Catalyst and backed up by first-time investors Greenspring Associates, Meritech Capital, and TrueBridge Capital Partners. This brings its total raised to $151 million.

Nobl9 secured $21 million in Series B funding led by Series A investors Battery Ventures and CRV.

Service Express, a third-party, post-warranty data center maintenance services provider, announced its acquisition of Blue Chip.

Security analytics and automation vendor Rapid7 bought Alcide.IO Ltd., a provider of Kubernetes security based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Application relationship management provider vArmour collected $58 million in new financing led by AllegisCyber Capital and NightDragon.

Datadog acquired Timber Technologies, the developers of Vector, a vendor-agnostic, high-performance observability data pipeline. The company also entered a definitive agreement to acquire Sqreen, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) based security platform.

Autonomous cybersecurity platform company SentinelOne purchased Scalyr, a cloud-native, cloud-scale data analytics platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

UiPath bagged a whopping $750 million Series F funding round at a post-money valuation of $35 billion.

Vitruvian Partners reached an agreement with Apax Partners to acquire a majority stake in Expereo.

Expereo announced its acquisition of SD-WAN & SASE provider Videns. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Databricks closed a $1 billion Series G funding round that put the company at a $28 billion post-investment valuation.

SecurityAdvisor raised a $7.3 million Series A funding round led by ClearSky Security along with additional investment from Crosslink Capital, SixThirty Ventures, and Cyber Mentor Fund.

Vendia announced a $15.5 million Series A funding round led by Canvas Ventures with participation from BMW i Ventures, Sorenson Ventures, and Vendia’s seed stage investors.

Data intelligence company Collibra penned a deal to acquire OwlDQ, a predictive data quality software provider. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Touchcast secured $55 million in Aeries A funding led by Accenture Ventures, Alexander Capital Ventures, Saatchi Invest, and Ronald Lauder.

Cloud data integration platform Matillion completed a $100 million Series D funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Verizon announced it entered into a definitive agreement to acquire incubed IT.

Symend collected an additional $43 million of Series B financing following $52 million it previously raised in May 2020.

API platform RapidAPI acquired Paw, an API design and collaboration tool, for an undisclosed amount.

Arlington, Va.-based data privacy management company WireWheel bagged a $20 million Series B funding round.

TigerGraph raised $105 million in Series C funding, bringing the company's total funding raised to over $170 million.

Cloud native storage management vendor StorageOS announced a $10 million Series B funding round led by Downing Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures, and MMC Ventures.

Zadara acquired NeoKarm, a flexible multi-cloud hybrid platform provider, for an undisclosed amount.

Sphere completed a $10 million Series A funding round led by ForgePoint Capital.

OutSystems, an application platform provider, secured $150 million in new financing. The round, co-led by Abdiel Capital and Tiger Global, values OutSystems at $9.5 billion.

Platform9 closed its Series D funding with an additional $12.5 million for a total of $37.5 million led by WRVI Capital.

LogicMonitor entered a deal to acquire Airbrake, a developer-centric application error and performance monitoring company.

Kaseya announced its acquisition of security operations center (SOC) provider RocketCyber.

Katana Graph, a high-performance scale-out graph processing, artificial intelligence (AI), and analytics company, completed a $28.5 million Series A financing round led by Intel Capital.

Atera, a remote-first IT management company, collected a $25 million investment from K1 Investment Management.

Evinced scored $17 million in Series A funding co-led by M12, Microsoft's venture fund, BGV, and Capital One Ventures.

HelpSystems signed a definitive agreement to acquire vulnerability management and threat assessment provider Digital Defense.