Cisco plans to acquire Isovalent, the company behind Cilium, “an open source, cloud native solution for providing, securing, and observing network connectivity between workloads.” Cilium is built on eBPF, a technology that has gained significant traction recently in its ability to support observability use cases for cloud native infrastructure (think containers.)
Isovalent has been a major contributor to eBPF and Cisco intends to continue supporting the open source community around both eBPF and Cilium. The company had raised $69 mm over two rounds of funding. Their last round was a $40 mm Series B led by Umesh Padval of Thomvest Venturesjust over a year ago.
There are a number of other players in the container ecosystem that may be attractive targets for the likes of IBM, Broadcom, OpenText, and HPE in 2024 –
Cambridge based Solo.io has raised $171mm from the likes of Altimeter, True Ventures and Redpoint. Solo’s offerings leverage open source technologies including Istio, Envoy and Cilium.
Tigera is building an Enterprise business around the open source platform Project Calico. Tigera was founded in 2016 by Ratan Tipirneniand has raised $53 mm. They last raised capital in 2018 so I’d be surprised if we don’t hear from / about them in the near future.
A more recently founded company in the space is Tel Aviv based groundcover, which raised a meaty $20mm Series A in September 2022. Groundcover is backed by Angular Ventures, Zeev Ventures and Heavybit.
Other Fundings and M&A
Snowflake is acquiring Samooha. Samooha provides technology for sharing data securely between enterprises via data clean rooms. Samooha raised $12.5 mm in a Series A round in February 2023 and was backed by Altimeter and Snowflake Ventures.
Okta is acquiring Tel Aviv based Spera, now Okta ISPM for $100 mm – $130mm according to CTech. Spera provides tools for identity security posture management, identity thread detection and response. Okta has been in the news recently (loudly called out by Cloudflare) regarding a breach of its customer support management system in October 2023. This follows another incident from January 2022 where a third-party vendor to Okta was compromised. As a security company getting breached garners the worst kind of publicity. Okta needs to address its internal processes while also building the robustness of its platform. Expect more acquisitions in this area for the company.
Harvey has raised an $80 mm series B from Elad Gil, Kleiner Perkins, OpenAI and Sequoia Capital. Harvey provides a generative AI platform for legal firms and professionals. They are collaborating with investor and partner OpenAI to develop domain-specific models for clients from law firms, corporate teams, private equity firms and other professional service providers. This aligns well with my predictions around Generative AI for 2024. Check out the article here and make sure to subscribefor quality insights and news on everything related to infrastructure software.
Halcyon has raised $40 mm in a Series B round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Halcyon provides an anti-ransomware platform aimed at preventing incoming attacks and mitigating their impact post-breach. Ransomware attacks continue to be a major drain on organizational resourcesin light of continued and growing geopolitical tensions in Europe and the Middle East.
Cloud resource management vendor ScaleOps announced it has raised $21.5mm in a combined Seed and Series A led by Lightspeed, NFX, and Glilot Capital Partners. This is a crowded space, and competes with in-house offerings by the larger cloud providers (though incentives don’t align). Coatue backed Kubecost and Crosslink Capital backed Yotascaleare doing similar things.
My day job is advising growing companies on fundraising and M&A. If you are an investor or entrepreneur I’d love to connect.