Daily funding roundup - February 18, 2016

Aria Systems raised $50M; Verizon led $57M in Jana; Vera closed $17M Series B funding

• Vyopta, provider of video collaboration analytics, closed its very first round of venture capital, netting the company a $5 million Series A led by AVX Partners. AVX is managed by Chris Pacitti, a venture capitalist who also serves as general partner at Austin Ventures. In addition to funding, the firm will provide Vypota with a team of "C-suite-level operational advisors" composed of three alumni of Austin-based SolarWinds: former CEO Mike Bennett, former CMO Rita Selvaggi, and former VP of Technology Josh Stephens.
  
  
• German startup datapath.io raised a €965,000 ($1.1 million) seed round from Target Partners and Speedinvest to further develop its network performance management platform. Datapath.io, which was founded in May 2015, works with cloud providers and networks providers like Amazon Web Services, Hibernia Networks, and Cogent. The startup previously received seed funding from Techstars and several other investors. This investment from Target Partners and Speedinvest will be used to hire further in engineering and sales and grow its global network.
  
  
• Phenomenal Foods, LLC dba “Nomva” closed a $3 million Series A fundraising round. The two lead investors in Nomva’s Series A round are Evolution Media Partners (Evolution) and Taylor Fresh Foods (Taylor Farms). Beckman explained that Nomva will use the new funds to “support and build customer relationships, scale distribution nationwide, and grow internal talent.”
  
  
• Student Loan Genius, Austin-based student loan benefits provider, raised $3 million in seed funding, largely spearheaded by Gibraltar Ventures, an affiliate of Prudential, along with an affiliate of John Hancock/Manulife. Other participants in the round included Kapor Capital, which invests in organizations led by diverse teams that develop social impact solutions, Capital Factory and Village Capital.
  
  
• Israeli cybersecurity firm Siemplify raised $4 million as it launched its platform that reduces the time between cyber attack identification and resolution. The company, whose investors include 83North Venture Capital, said it uses real-time graph analysis and methodologies gained from military intelligence.
  
  
• Nimble Collective raised an $8.5 million round to develop a cloud-based community for aspiring animators. New Enterprise Associates led the round for the Mountain View, California-based startup, which is targeting the estimated 10 million professional and aspiring animators around the globe. Animation is an estimated $90 billion worldwide market, but it remains a tough industry to break into.
  
  
• Orion Labs, a startup behind the Onyx push-to-talk wearable device, landed $9 million in new funding from Motorola Solutions Venture Capital and Avalon Ventures. The startup is also unveiling the second version of its Onyx wearable for push-to-talk app-enabled voice communication that some have likened to a Star Trek communicator badge.
  
  
• GridGain Systems, provider of the enterprise-grade In-Memory Data Fabric based on Apache Ignite, raised $15 million in Series B financing led by Sberbank and MoneyTime Ventures, with the participation of Almaz Capital and RTP Ventures. Victor Orlovski, General Partner at MoneyTime Ventures, will also join the GridGain board of directors. The funding round will be used to expand sales, marketing and R&D, and to fuel GridGain’s continued international growth.
  
  
• Vera closed $17 million in Series B financing, led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from existing investors Battery Ventures, Clear Venture Partners, and Amplify Partners. As part of the financing, Stefan Dyckerhoff, Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures will join the Vera board of directors. To date, Vera has raised over $31M in total funding. The injection of new capital will fuel the company's aggressive growth on its mission to become the trusted standard for securing and sharing all forms of business information.
  
  
• Jana is a Boston-based mobile Internet company raised $57 million in new venture capital funding led by Verizon Ventures. To date, the company’s mCent product has over 30 million users in 93 developing countries and is integrated into 311 mobile carriers. Jana is the brainchild of Nathan Eagle, who says the genesis came while on sabbatical from his faculty role at the MIT Media Lab.
  
  
• Aria Systems, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of an enterprise platform to grow recurring revenue, raised $50 million in Series E funding. Backers included existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Venrock and VMware and new investors Rembrandt Venture Partners, Madison Bay Capital Partners and Hercules Technology Growth Capital. The company intends to use the funds to accelerate fuel marketing, sales and development efforts.

If you are interested in being included in our funding roundup, submit your press release or blog post about your financing round to mitos@vator.tv. 

Image source: dcinno.streetwise.co