SDxCentral reported on more than 33 different funding rounds this year, but seven topped the charts. From containers to SD-WAN companies, investors dedicated more than $620 million in funding to these startups.

Unlike in the past, when it was easy to see a trend in what types of companies were attracting investor dollars, 2017 was not so clearcut. In fact, we saw investors putting money into a variety of different areas including Internet of Things (IoT), cybersecurity, the cloud, and containers.

Here's a snapshot of the companies that we covered in 2017 that attracted the largest amounts of funding.

Turbonomic: $50M, Series E

Performance assurance company Turbonomic raised $50 million in Series E led by General Atlantic and other existing investors. This fifth round of funding for the company brings its total investment to about $120 million

Turbonomic’s platform is designed for the hybrid cloud and enables users to automatically manage the performance of an application. It provides decision automation on adding or removing CPU, memory or storage, VMs, and containers. The platform recently added capabilities on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

The platform serves a variety of verticals from healthcare to finance and more. The company announced in July that it now powers a Cisco cloud tool that manages 30 million of raised data center floor space for Cisco’s IT department.

SentinelOne: $70M, Series C

SentinelOne, a security startup, raised $70 million in a Series C round led by Redpoint Ventures, one of the company’s customers, Sound Ventures, and other prior investors.

The security company has an endpoint protection platform that reactively responds to security threats in data centers, endpoints, and cloud. The product deploys on the device it’s watching, which spans Windows- or Linux-based servers, or Windows, Mac OS, or Linux end-user devices. SentinelOne earlier this year partnered with Fortinet to launch a technology and alliance integration program, allowing partners of the S1 Nexus program to access SentinelOne APIs.

The company has raised over $110 million to date since its initial seed round in 2013. SentinelOne was founded by CEO Tomer Weingarten, formerly VP of products at Toluna Group, and CTO Almog Cohen, formerly of Check Point. The founder of WhiteHat Security, Jeremiah Grossman is SentinelOne’s chief of security strategy.

Actility: $75 M, Series D

Lannion, France-based IoT company Actility gained $75 million in Series D funding from Creadev, Bosch, and others. Cisco joined BNP Paribas as new investors following the initial announcement in April. At the time of the announcement, the company’s intent for the funding was to increase its U.S. reach and expand its IoT platform into the new vertical markets.

Following the successful funding round, Actility began work on a high-profile low-power wide area (LoRa) IoT project with Comcast. In part because of this deal and others with Orange, SoftBank, and other global operators, the company began more aggressively hiring in hopes to more than double its team. The funding  also was used to acquire Abeeway, a geolocation firm.

Actility provides managed IoT services with its ThingPark platform, which manages the communications between sensors, base stations, and applications. Since its initial seed funding round in 2010, the company has raised more than $100 million.

Looker: $81M, Series D

Looker, a business intelligence and data analytics company, closed an $18.5 million Series D funding round led by Alphabet’s growth equity investment fund, CapitalG. The company’s expertise is in SQL, allowing easy connection and data aggregation across multiple databases.

Looker has partnerships with most of the major database companies — including Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, IBM, Google, Cloudera, and more. Additionally this year, the company released an analytics suite for Amazon Web Services (AWS), primarily to optimize performance and monitor spending in the cloud.

The Series D funding will help with the startup's investments and integrations with database technologies and continue its international expansion. Looker has raised $177.5 million since 2013 and is based in Santa Cruz, California.

Cradlepoint: $89M, Series C

The cloud-based software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) vendor, Cradlepoint, raised $89 million in a Series C funding round led by TCV. The company has made a number of news headlines since its launch.

In 2015, following its Series B growth equity funding round of $48 million, Cradlepoint acquired SDN vendor Pertino. This acquisition transformed its technology into a cloud-managed SD-WAN offering. The Series C funding announced this year will further Cradlepoint’s inclusion of wireless connectivity within its technologies — expanding initiatives in SD-WAN, 4G, 5G connectivity, and moving into the IoT market.

The company was founded in 2006 and is based in Boise, Idaho. In 2016, Cradlepoint established offices in Japan and Australia to support its cloud-based WAN service with Softbank.

Cohesity: $90M, Series C

Cohesity, a secondary storage provider, secured $90 million in a Series C funding round led by GV and Sequoia Capital, bringing the company’s total funding to $160 million. The round also included investors Qualcomm Ventures, Cisco Investments, HPE, and more.

Cohesity’s data platform is a hyperconverged platform that consolidates all secondary storage and data services at web-scale on a single infrastructure. The software can run in multiple cloud infrastructures including Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or on premises.

The company launched in 2015 with two large rounds of funding: a Series A totaling $15 million also led by Sequoia Capital and Wing Venture Capital, and a Series B round of $55 million led by ARTIS Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures. Cohesity was founded by Nutanix founder Mohit Aron, who left Nutanix to start Cohesity.

Illumio: $125M, Series D

In June, data center and cloud computing security company, Illumio closed $125 million in a Series D funding round led by J.P. Morgan Asset Management. This brought the company’s total funding to $26 million.

Following the funding round, Illumio added features to its microsegmentation-based security platform, adding visualization and security policy development. Earlier in the year, the company expanded its Adaptive Security Platform (ASP), adding switch support.

In a conversation with SDxCentral, 451 Research analyst Eric Hanselman, noted that these added capabilities were the “logical next step” for the security company in competing with other data center analytics platforms, including CIsco and VMware. Hanselman noted that Illumio offers a different approach, coming from the workload environment.

Tricentis: $165M, Series B

In the largest round of funding that SDxCentral has covered since the beginning of 2017, software testing company Tricentis, raised $165 million in a Series B funding round led by private equity and venture capitalist firm Insight Venture Partners.

Currently, Tricentis has a single-product offering — deemed Tosca — which the company claims can automate over 90 percent of software testing. The funding will contribute to scaling its operations and boost U.S. sales.

Tricentis was founded in 2009 in Vienna, Austria, by Wolfgang Platz, now the chief product officer, and Franz Fuschsberger, now the chief sales officer. The company’s current CEO, Sandeep Johri, joined the company in 2013 and moved its headquarters to Los Altos, California. Prior to the series B funding round, the company relied on bootstrap funding, and one outside funding round of $9 million from venture firm Viewpoint (now part of Kennet Partners) in 2012.

The company competes with the testing businesses of HPE and IBM. Research firms Forrester and Gartner both put Tricentis in leadership ranks with the two giants.

 

Update: This article was updated Dec. 6, 2017 to include Illumio's funding round.