2016 was a very good year for a lot of D.C. area startups. Plenty of them raked in the cash, from brand new companies finding interested angel investors to veterans of venture capital who saw eight or nine-figure checks come their way. Ahead of the coming year, check out the top funding rounds for local startups this year.
Distil Networks
Arlington-based cybersecurity startup Distil Networks closed a $21 million funding round in August led by Silicon Valley Bank. Distil specializes in blocking malicious automated attacks on company servers. These bot attacks are capable of helping criminals steal vital information, commit identity theft and hamstring the processing speed of major companies and organizations. And they are getting better and more adaptive, which is where Distil comes in.
PhishMe
Leesburg, Va.-based cybersecurity startup PhishMe raised $42.5 million in a funding round in July, led by Washington, D.C.-based Paladin Capital Group. PhishMe offers phishing threat management solutions against malware and drive-by attacks. It trains employees to notice and stop so-called spear phishing attacks, usually emails pretending to be from legitimate sources.
Fugue
Frederick, Md.-based cloud data infrastructure developer Fugue (formerly Luminal) raised a $20 million round led by New Enterprise Associates in January. Fugue creates technology that clients can use to manage cloud software to get better performance for lower costs.
Virtru
Washington, D.C.-based encryption software startup Virtru closed a $29 million funding round in August led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Virtru does data encryption and digital privacy protection. Its software makes it impossible for any individual email or other packets of data sent online to get decoded illicitly. This "object level" security makes it so that even if the data were scraped from a database by hackers, they wouldn't be able to read what it says.
Sonatype
Fulton, Md.-based cybersecurity company Sonatype raised $30 million in February with Goldman Sachs leading the round. The funds are being used to build up the company's sales and marketing teams and also guide product development efforts and explore "international market opportunities." To date, the company has raised $74.71 million since its launch in 2008.
Snagajob
Arlington, Va.-based Snagajob closed an impressive $100 million round in February backed by Rho Acceleration, NewSpring Capital and the Invus Group. A spokesperson for the online marketplace for hourly job seekers noted when the funding round closed that Snagajob has nearly doubled its revenue from employers and has more than doubled its traffic since 2013. In June, the company also bought rival PeopleMatter for an undisclosed amount.
Zoomdata
Reston, Va.-based Zoomdata closed a $25 million round led by Goldman Sachs in February. The capital is being used to hire more engineers and other staff while bringing Zoomdata's "Data Sharpening" tech into its next phase. Comcast Ventures also joined Goldman Sachs as a new strategic investor in the company. To date, Zoomdata has raised $47.2 million since its launch in 2012. Later this year, Zoomdata raised an unknown amount from the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.
Everfi
Just one week after announcing it would acquire compliance education company LawRoom, D.C.-based EverFi closed a $40M round, backed by Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt. Part of that funding helped the education technology company complete its acquisition. The company has raised $61M to date, including this funding round.
