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]).

Aruba Bumps Cisco From the Pentagon

Aruba Networks swept the last remaining vestiges of Cisco’s switching gear from the Pentagon building as part of a Department of Defense modernization effort.

The deal will see Aruba deploy its Edge Services Platform (ESP) architecture to automate the network, eliminating time consuming and often tedious processes such as port mapping and initial switch configuration. Aruba ESP is targeted at campuses, data centers, branches, and remote workers, but it only supports Aruba’s access points (APs), switches, and SD-WAN gateways.

The vendor’s Access Switches will replace existing Cisco switching gear that has reached end of life. The deployment will include more than 150,000 wired ports, distributed across the 6.5 million-square-foot facility. Alongside wired infrastructure, the DoD plans to deploy 3,000 additional Aruba APs to further extend wireless access throughout the campus.

AMD Bags Xilinx for $35B

AMD bought chipmaker Xilinx for $35 billion in a deal that gives AMD in-house FPGA technology and boost its prowess in data center and mobile compute where it competes against rival Intel, which is the only other big FPGA player.

Xilinx makes FPGA-based acceleration cards that that offload workloads including SDN, virtualized switching, NFV, and artificial intelligence inference, among others, freeing up the CPU for other applications. In March, it announced a new smartNIC for tier-two and three cloud service providers, operators, and private cloud data centers.

The Xilinx acquisition came amid rapid consolidation in the semiconductor market with Intel and Nvidia spending billions of dollars acquiring competing chipmakers. In September Nvidia agreed to pay $40 billion for Arm, and earlier this year closed a deal to buy Mellanox for $6.9 billion.

Juniper Jumps On SD-WAN Vendor 128 Technology

Juniper announced the $450 million acquisition of SD-WAN vendor 128 Technology in a bid to bolster its Mist networking portfolio.

With the acquisition, Juniper aims to be a one-stop-shop for enterprises, universities, and other campuses regardless of whether they need WAN, WLAN, or LAN-switching capabilities. It also positions the company to more directly compete against rivals Cisco and Aruba, the latter of which acquired Silver Peak for $925 million in July.

The deal, which is expected to close during Juniper’s fourth-fiscal quarter of 2020, will see 128 Technology integrated into Mist under the leadership of Sujai Hajela, Mist’s co-founder.

The announcement came less than a month after Juniper announced the acquisition of assurance testing vendor Netrounds for an undisclosed sum. Like 128 Technology, Juniper plans to wrap Netrounds into its WAN portfolio and enable service providers to ensure end-user experiences.

Movers and Shakers

Cisco reached a deal to acquire Portshift, a 2-year-old startup that developed a Kubernetes-based platform to secure containers and serverless applications.

Veeam purchased Kasten, a Kubernetes-orchestrated container data protection startup, for $150 million in cash and stock.

Automation company Hyperscience raised $80 million in Series D financing led by Tiger Global, bringing the company's total funding to $190 million.

Intel announced its acquisition of SigOpt. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Verizon signed an agreement to acquire certain assets of Bluegrass Cellular, a rural wireless operator serving central Kentucky.

Multi-cloud startup Alkira raked in $54 million in Series B funding led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT). Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and GV — formerly Google Ventures — also participated in the latest funding round. The funding round came just six months after Alkira emerged from stealth mode with $30 million Series A funding.

Network operator GTT entered into an agreement to sell its infrastructure division to Squared Capital in a deal worth $2.15 billion. For the money, Squared Capital will walk away with GTT’s pan-European, North American, sub-sea, and transatlantic fiber networks and data center infrastructure.

Splunk kicked announced two application performance monitoring acquisitions, Plumbr and Rigor, to build out its recently launched observability portfolio. The data and security platform vendor didn’t announce a purchase price for either company. They followed three acquisitions last year, including two other application monitoring and observability vendors SignalFX, which Splunk bought for $1.05 billion, and Omintion.

Quantum Metric collected up to $25 million of debt capital from Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).

Cloud communications platform provider Twilio dropped $3.2 billion in an all-stock deal to purchase Segment.

Public cloud security provider Sonrai Security secured $20 million in series B funding led by Menlo Ventures. The latest round of funding brings the company's total raised to-date to $38 million.

Epsilon entered into a definitive agreement to buy 7D Digital, a UK-based software development company. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cloud engineering platform provider Pulumi collected $37.5 million in Series B funding led by NEA with participation from Madrona Venture Group and Tola Capital. The new funding brings the total raised to date to $57.5 million.

Rockset scored $40 million in Series B funding, bringing the total amount raised to $61.5 million.

Accenture completed its acquisition of business-to-business (B2B) sales firm N3.

Deep learning company Deci raised $9.1 million in a seed round led by Israel-based VC firm Emerge and global VC fund Square Peg.

SK hynix took over Intel‘s NAND memory and storage business in a $9 billion acquisition that included Intel’s SSD, NAND component and wafer business, as well as its Dalian memory manufacturing facility in China.

Marvell announced it will acquire rival chipmaker Inphi for roughly $10 billion in cash and stock options. Marvell plans to reorganize the combined company into a single U.S.-based chip giant.

Solo.io bagged a $23 million Series B round of financing, bringing the company’s total funding amount to $37 million.

Airkit, a low-code platform provider for customer engagement, emerged from stealth with $28 million in funding from Accel, Emergence Capital, and Salesforce Ventures.

Armory raised a $40 million Series C financing round led by B Capital, with Lead Edge Capital and Marc Benioff, participating. This new round brings the company's total funding to-date to over $82 million.

Digital risk protection provider ZeroFOX acquired the Cyveillance business from LookingGlass Cyber Solutions. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Akamai acquired Irish network security company Asavie in an all-cash deal to boost its 5G strategy.

Macrometa secured $7 million of new round seed financing led by DNX Ventures, with the participation from existing investors Benhamou Global Ventures, Partech Partners, Fusion Fund, Sway Ventures, Velar Capital and Shasta Ventures.

Gitpod raised $3 million in seed funding from Crane Venture Partners, Speedinvest, and Vertex Ventures US, as well as a new partnership and native integration with GitLab.

Fast-tracking SaaS development and innovation platform provider Frontegg announced a $5 million Seed round led by Pitango, with backing from i3 Equity and Global Founders Capital.

Infiot, backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Neotribe Ventures, Westwave Capital, and Harpoon Ventures, emerged from stealth with $15 million in financing to develop its access platform for internet of things devices.

Doppler secured $2.3 million in Seed funding led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Abstract Ventures and Soma Capital.

Shipa launched its cloud native Kubernetes management service with with $3.75 million in seed funding co-led by Engineering Capital and Jump Capital.

Accurics bagged $20 million across seed and series A financing raised in the past six months led by Intel Capital and ClearSky.

Ping Identity announced its acquisition of ShoCard for an undisclosed amount.

Microsoft 365 management platform CoreView closed a $10 million Series B funding round led by Insight Partners.

Cloud communications platform provider Alianza acquired Message Hopper for an undisclosed amount.