– Brilliant, the leading innovator in smart home control, lighting, and home automation systems, today announced a $40m Series B financing round.
– The round was led by Next47 and Celesta Capital with participation by Resideo Technologies, August Capital, Peak State Ventures, Gaingels, and Miramar Ventures.
– Founded in 2015, Brilliant’s mission is to accelerate mainstream adoption of smart home living with affordable and user-friendly home control and automation systems.

– Apollo GraphQL is a San Francisco, CA-based developer of open source and commercial GraphQL API technologies.
– Series D funding was led by Insight Partners with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures, Next47 and Hatim Shafique, Chief Customer Officer at DataBricks.
– The new investment will be used to accelerate the company’s product development efforts.

– Aforza, a digital twin platform for orchestrating consumer packaged goods sales, has landed $22m in series A funding.
– The investment will help grow employees and create a new U.S. headquarters.
– Investors included DN Capital, Bonfire Ventures, Daher Capital, and Next47.
– The company was founded by former Salesforce execs involved in CPG efforts.

– Noname Security, a cybersecurity platform that allows enterprises to manage APIs, closed a $60m series B funding round led by Insight Partners, with Next47, Forgepoint, TSG, Cyberstarts, and Lightspeed Venture Partners participating.
– It brings the company’s total raised to $85m and will be used to scale Noname’s go-to-market and customer success efforts as well as its product and R&D teams.
– APIs, the connectors that clouds and apps use to communicate with each other, will become the cyberattacker’s target of choice, according to Gartner. The analyst firm predicts that by 2022, API attacks will be the most frequent attack vector across the enterprise.
– API vulnerabilities can take many forms, from a developer’s forgotten side project to a software interface improperly configured.

– Sysdig, Inc. announced a $188m Series F funding round at a valuation of $1.19b.
– The round was led by Premji Invest & Associates and Third Point Ventures, with participation from Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, DFJ Growth, Glynn Capital, Goldman Sachs, Insight Partners, and Next47.
– Robert Schwartz from Third Point Ventures, Sandesh Patnam from Premji Invest & Associates, and Enrique Salem from Bain Capital Ventures have joined its board of directors.
– This round follows strong growth in 2020, a rapidly expanding customer base, a thriving open source community, and a massive growth opportunity with containers and cloud.
– In November 2020, Gartner increased its 2021 public cloud forecast to total $304.9 billion, up from $257.5 billion in 2020. [1]

– DataGrail is a San Francisco, Calif.-based modern privacy platform designed to help brands to build customer trust and transparency.
– The company raised $30m in Series B funding.
– The round was led by Felicis Ventures with participation from Next47, Basis Set Ventures, Operator Collective, and previous investors.
– DataGrail intends to use the funds to continue to expand operations and its business reach.

– Pipe, a marketplace for SaaS companies, raised $50m in funding.
– The round was led by Siemens’ Next47 and Jim Pallotta’s Raptor Group, and joined by Shopify, Slack, HubSpot, Okta, Social Capital’s Chamath Palihapitiya, Marc Benioff, Michael Dell’s MSD Capital, Republic, Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six and Joe Lonsdale.

– Skydio raised $170m in Series D funding led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Growth Fund.
– This brings total funding raised to over $340m with a current valuation of over $1bn.
– Andreessen Horowitz, which also led the Series A, is joined in this round by existing investors Linse Capital, Next47, and IVP, along with new investor UP.Partners.
– With the additional capital raised, Skydio will further accelerate product development and global sales expansion to support the rapidly growing demand for its autonomous drone solutions.
– Skydio has been chosen in a myriad of deployments across construction companies, departments of transportation, energy utilities, and police departments.

– Armorblox announced that it raised $30m in Series B venture capital funding.
– The funding was led by Next47 with participation from Polaris Partners and Unusual Ventures, as well as General Catalyst and other early investors.
– Armorblox is on a mission to restore and uphold trust in email communications by stopping targeted, socially engineered attacks from compromising people and data.
– The funding comes amidst fast-paced customer growth during 2020, accelerated further by the widespread shift to remote work and a growing discontent with the complexity and ineffectiveness of traditional email security controls.
– Already protecting over 9,000 organizations, Armorblox is using the new funding to expand its go-to-market, engineering, and data science teams and further cement its position as a next-generation email security provider that is centered around delivering customer value.