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]).

Nvidia Takes Arm Off SoftBanks’ Hands in $40B Deal

Nvidia ended months of rumors, announcing the $40 billion acquisition of Arm Holdings from Japanese mega-conglomerate SoftBank. Under the deal, Arm will continue to operate out of its headquarters in Cambridge, England, and will retain its brand, open licensing, and customer neutrality.

While it remains to be seen how deeply Nvidia plans to integrate with Arm, the chipmaker plans to invest heavily in research and development, beginning with the construction of an Arm-based supercomputer on Arm’s campus.

The acquisition comes at a time when Nvidia — best known for its GPU technologies — is rapidly expanding into new verticals including cloud, AI compute, and switching. Nvidia is also an existing Arm customer having licensed the chip designer’s architectures for various products, including its mobile Tegra offering, which is famously used in Nintendo’s Switch game console.

Accenture Bets $3B on Cloud First

Accenture placed a $3 billion bet on expanding cloud options for its clients that have been impacted by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The bet is on Accenture’s Cloud First group. This new organization will include 70,000 employees and integrate Accenture’s experience with cloud migration, infrastructure, application services, and ecosystem partners. Those partners include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Alibaba Cloud, IBM, and Oracle.

The new group’s focus will be on providing clients with access to Accenture’s breadth of services to help them more quickly migrate their operations to the cloud. The firm noted a specific focus on integrated edge computing into the cloud.

Accenture said the $3 billion investment will be spread over a three-year period. That should be a safe investment as Accenture generated $11 billion in cloud revenues for its most recent fiscal quarter. The group will be led by Accenture’s own Karthik Narain. The exec is based in Silicon Valley and most recently served as the lead of Accenture’s North America Technology operations. Narain will also be joining Accenture’s Global Management Committee.

Red Hat Scores Samsung OpenShift 5G Deal

Samsung inched closer to its open RAN vision and landed an agreement with Red Hat that makes it the first major radio access network (RAN) vendor to publicly build 5G services on OpenShift.

The vendor recently pledged to make its fully virtualized RAN 5G offering commercially available before October. Samsung’s collaboration with Red Hat on OpenShift illustrates another activity aimed at accelerating its path to open RAN.

The agreement calls for Samsung to use the full range of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud portfolio, including OpenShift, OpenStack, Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux, Ansible Automation Platform, and OpenShift Container Storage. The effort involves Samsung’s 5G virtualized RAN, core, and mobile edge computing.

While other major RAN vendors are working with Red Hat on OpenShift, Samsung is the first to publicly adopt the Kubernetes container platform. “It’s a big one, but there’s others that we’ve been working with for some time,” Ian Hood, chief technologist at Red Hat, told SDxCentral.

Movers and Shakers

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) completed its acquisition of Silver Peak in a transaction valued at $925 million.

VMware and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) led a $6 million digital infrastructure sustainability research initiative calling on academic research groups to present a new generation of innovation to clean up IT’s digital footprint.

Contact center AI provider Observe.AI closed a $54 million Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures. The financing brings the company’s total funding to $88 million.

Application development provider Progress acquired DevOps provider Chef for $220 million in a deal that will broaden the former’s reach into the developer market. The deal came on the heels of Chef CEO Barry Crist admitting that the firm was being “highly impacted” by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Ahana announced $2.3 million in additional seed financing led by new investor Lux Capital. The financing expansion brings total funds raised to $4.8 million.

Accenture entered an agreement to acquire tech-driven sales and demand-generation firm N3. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Pure Storage announced that it will purchase Portworx in a $370 million, all-cash deal. Under the deal, Pure Storage will gain the cloud-native storage provider’s technology and team of engineers that will form a new Cloud Native Business Unit led by Portworx CEO Murli Thirumale and co-founders Goutham Rao and Vino Jayaraman.

AppDirect collected $185 million in new financing led by Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) and existing investors.

Snyk secured a $200 million investment led by Addition. This latest round brings Snyk's total investment to $450 million and the company's valuation to more than $2.6 billion.

Cloud data platform unicorn Snowflake started trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) following an initial public offering (IPO).

Senet bagged $16 million of new financing led by Fisk Ventures.

Sumo Logic began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange, pricing 14.8 million shares at $22 each.

Ericsson coughed up $1.1 billion to acquire Cradlepoint in a bid to bolster its position in the enterprise WAN market.

Enterprise-class colocation, connectivity, and managed services provider DataBank signed a definitive agreement to acquire zColo, including certain U.S. and European data center assets, from Zayo Group Holdings. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Green House Data rebranded as Lunavi to unify its recently acquired companies and nine locations throughout North America.

Container and Kubernetes security provider StackRox secured $26.5 million in funding led by Menlo Ventures.

Decentralized marketing infrastructure provider InfoSum bagged $15.1 million in Series A financing led by Upfront Ventures and IA Ventures.

Microsoft entered into a definitive agreement to buy ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, in an all-cash deal for $7.5 billion.

Ionir scored $11 million in funding led by Jerusalem Venture Partners.

Veritas penned a deal to acquire Los Angeles-based software company Globanet for an undisclosed amount.

Arizona-based cybersecurity consulting and managed services firm Cerberus Sentinel acquired Atlanta-based cybersecurity assessment firm Clear Skies Security

Aligned announced the completion of its $1 billion senior secured credit facility that is the first U.S. data center sustainability-linked financing.

InCountry raised $18 million in funding led by Caffeinated Capital and Mubadala Investment Company’s financial investment arm Mubadala Capital. InCountry has raised $39 million in total capital to date.

Arista Networks acquired Awake Security for an undisclosed amount in a deal that gives the networking vendor a network detection and response (NDR) security platform that Awake CEO Rahul Kashyap bragged has stolen customers from Arista’s arch-rival Cisco.

Digital experience monitoring provider Catchpoint signed an agreement to acquire Webpagetest and Webpagetest.org. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

FireMon secured $40 million in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank.

Cloud-native data analytics and security company Devo Technology bagged a $60 million Series D funding round.

Mavenir announced it purchased ip.access to add 2G and 3G capabilities to its open radio access network (RAN) portfolio and boost its small cell offering.

Zero trust access platform provider Axis Security announced a $32 million Series B funding round led by Canaan Partners.

Data-centric computing company Fungible announced that it has acquired the assets of Cloudistics. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Stack Infrastructure closed $325 million of structured debt financing.

Juniper Networks penned a deal to buy assurance testing vendor Netrounds for an undisclosed sum. Juniper plans to wrap Netrounds into its WAN portfolio and enable service providers to ensure end-user experiences.

VMware acquired open-source based automation software provider SaltStack.

Netdata completed a new round of financing totaling $14.2 million led by Bessemer Venture Partners, extending its Series A funding to $31 million.

Cloud-native enterprise data catalog company data.world secured $26 million in new financing led by Tech Pioneers Fund.

DeepCube completed a $7 million Series A funding round led by Canadian VC Awz Ventures. The latest funding brings the total invested in DeepCube to $12 million.

Varada raised $12 million in Series A financing led by MizMaa Venture.

NTT DoCoMo returned to its corporate roots in a $40 billion deal that will bring it under complete control of NTT. The Japanese telecommunications giant already owns 66% of the mobile operator, which it spun off in 1991.

McAfee finally pulled the trigger on its long-rumored IPO.

Macrometa announced the close of a $7 million seed financing round led by DNX Ventures.

EDB closed on its acquisition of 2ndQuadrant, a global PostgreSQL services and tools company based in the United Kingdom.

Check Point Software acquired a new cloud-based technology that delivers secure remote access created by Odo Security. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Arm-only server vendor Bamboo secured $7 million in new funding led by existing investors Seraphim Capital and Opea Holding.

Quest Software acquired Binary Tree for an undisclosed amount.