Grazed from BizJournals.  Author: Mike W. Thomas.

Rackspace Hosting’s stock jumped Thursday, Aug. 14, on news that hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb had purchased a multi-million dollar stake in the cloud-computing company.  Loeb’s Third Point LLC had purchased shares valued at $244 million by the end of June, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Bloomberg reports.

Rackspace recently announced a renewed focus on providing support-based cloud services to the market amid swirling speculation about a possible buyout of the company...

Read more from the source @ http://www.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/blog/2014/08/billionaire-s-investment-makes-rackspace-stock.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bizj_sanantonio+%28San+Antonio+Business+Journal%29

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: CJ Arlotta.

Nasuni's vision of pairing on-premise hardware with cloud storage has gained more support from investors. The Natick, Massachusetts-based storage services provider this week said it has raised an additional $10 million in Series C financing, bringing the round's total to $30 million.

Previous investors Flybridge Capital Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners participated in this extension of Nasuni’s Series C funding round. A "strategic investor" also contributed funds...

Grazed from CNet.  Author: Dara Kerr.

Venture capital investor confidence is on the up and up, and they're setting their sights on the tech world, according to a new survey by the National Venture Capital Association and Deloitte.  The two firms released the results of their annual Global Venture Capital Confidence survey on Wednesday, which shows that investors are increasingly being drawn to top categories in the tech industry, including cloud computing, mobile tech, and robotics.

"It's very positive results on the market overall, and very positive on tech," Jim Atwell, national managing partner for Deloitte's Emerging Growth Company, told CNET. "Tech companies are the sectors that have the most confidence the most excitement around them."...

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Bright Computing founder and CEO Matthijs van Leeuwen says his company has just closed a new $14.5 million financing round. Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) and DFJ Esprit co-led the Series B funding round, with participation from Prime Ventures and existing shareholder ING Corporate Investments.

The San Jose, California-based company develops management software for clusters, grids and clouds for storage, big data and databases. The additional funds will be used to invest in the Bright Computing team, expand the company's product line and extend its ability to serve customers, the company's CEO said this week in a company blog post...

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Open source cloud computing is on the rise, and one vendor is hoping to take things to the next level. Odoo, formerly OpenERP, recently went through a change of name, and the company has also raised $10 million in funding to push its open source cloud marketing, but it also plans to soon release version 8 of its suite of cloud-based business services.

A media alert noted that the company has made "gentle waves" in the open source software world, but it is hoping to make a bigger splash this year. Odoo provides customers with a suite of open source business applications that are aimed at organizations with a lower level of technology experience and knowledge. Its goal is to help small and medium businesses (SMBs) with any of their online needs, from building their own websites to running ecommerce, accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), human resources, manufacturing and more...

Grazed from PredictionIO. Author: Editorial Staff.

PredictionIO today announces the finalization of $2.5M in funding in a capital raise whose investors include Azure Capital QuestVP, CrunchFund, Stanford StartX-Fund, Kima Ventures, IronFire, Sood Venture and XG Ventures. The funding will be used to accelerate product development and marketing and sales and operations for the company’s open source machine learning server for predictive analytics.

PredictionIO aspires to fill the role in the predictive analytics space played by MySQL in the relational database space by delivering an open source platform that empowers data scientists to both leverage a pre-defined library of predictive algorithms as well as create new algorithms that they can either choose to contribute to the platform, or keep to themselves. Built using Scala, the PredictionIO platform supports JVM and Java-based code as well as backend Hadoop-based data. Typical use cases for PredictionIO’s technology include the production of personalized content and recommendation engines, as well as algorithms that predict the behavior of users and industries based on historical trends...

Grazed from GlobalNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Racemi, a provider of automated server migration software, has closed a $10 million Series C round of venture financing. The round included new investors, led by Milestone Venture Partners, along with existing investors Harbert Venture Partners, and Paladin Capital Group.

The funds will be used to further scale Racemi sales, services and engineering to meet growing demand for its cloud migration software, which automates the process of migrating workloads to public, private and hybrid clouds. "The increasing adoption of cloud computing presents a tremendous opportunity for Racemi and this round will help accelerate our efforts to enter new markets and deliver the truly unique capabilities of our solution," said Lawrence Guillory, CEO, Racemi...

Grazed from Dark Reading. Author: Ericka Chickowski.

Tens of millions of venture capital dollars recently have been flowing into some growing cloud security endeavors. The cloud security market is heating up within the venture capital community, with the past two months flush in funding for startups operating with a wide range of business maturity levels.

That activity has been punctuated over the last month by a hefty round of funding for three already proven cloud security vendors with established technology and a growing roster of clients: Skyhigh Networks, Netskope, and Okta. The increased investment is another signal of growing IT interest in not only reining in the security of cloud deployments, but also finding better ways to harness the power of cloud computing to deal with some of today's biggest security challenges. Here's the skinny on each deal...

Grazed from Cloud Computing Info. Author: Massimo Ferrari.

CloudPhysics is a provider of a SaaS performance and capacity analytics solution, the first in its segment to leverage the informations collected for its customer datacenters to improve the intelligence and effectiveness of the product itself. The company, founded in November 2011 from John Blumenthal and Irfan Ahmad, both former VMware employees, but publicly presented only in July 2012, announced today a new Series C funding of $15M that comes on top of a $10M Series B funding achieved in August 2013 and led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and of a previous $2.5M funding from angel investors and the Mayfield Fund, announced in August 2012, for a total funding of $27.5M in 3 years.

This new funding, that sees Jafco Ventures to support Kleiner Perkins Caufield and the Mayfield Fund in this new round, will be invested to furtherly improve the storage monitoring side of the product, launched today as a new Storage Analytics, and to develop the custom reporting area where CloudPhysics is already quite strong with the ability to create infographics and scorecards with a more “high level” aim...

Read more from the source @ http://cloudcomputing.info/en/news/2014/06/cloudphysics-raises-15-million-in-series-c-funding.html

Grazed from EconomicTimes.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Google Capital is investing in Chennai-based customer support software provider Freshdesk, along with existing investors Tiger Global and Accel Partners. Tiger Global led the $31 million (about Rs 184 crore) funding round.

This is the firm's fourth round of funding. It previously raised $13 million (about Rs 77 crore) from Tiger and Accel. Girish Mathrubootham, cofounder of Freshdesk, said Google Capital's investment is a validation of the company's business.   "They have a great brand name, have excellent network and have huge reach into small and medium businesses...