Fitbit’s mammoth initial public offering was the big Bay Area fundraising event of the week, roping in more than $700 million for the company and giving investors who paid the IPO price of $20 an immediate 50 percent bump in the first day of trading Thursday.
But a few other companies in the region also scored some notable cash:
—Santa Clara, CA-based Cohesity emerged from stealth mode Wednesday to report that it had already raised a total of $70 million from a roster of prominent venture firms.
The company will use the money to refine and launch the Cohesity Data Platform, which is designed to break down functional walls between company data sets that are often stored with multiple outside vendors. The idea is to help companies more easily manage and mine all their data for insights, whether the information is held in the costly primary storage reserved for mission-critical business apps, or in the cheaper secondary storage used for purposes such as archiving and backing up data.
Cohesity describes its CEO Mohit Aron as a pioneer in the field of “hyperconvergence”—combining secondary storage into a united platform along with computing functions. Aron helped design the Google File System as an engineer at Google between 2003 and 2007.
Google Ventures participated in the $55 million Series B investment round Cohesity completed this month. The round was led by ARTIS Ventures and Qualcomm Incorporated, through its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures. Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, and Trinity Ventures also invested. Cohesity had already raised a $15 million Series A round last year, led by Sequoia Capital and Wing Venture Capital.
—San Francisco-based Doctor On Demand, a telemedicine company that offers immediate video-based consultations with physicians, announced this week it has closed a $50 million round of Series B financing.
The company was founded in 2012 by talk show psychologist Phil McGraw—best known as Dr. Phil—his son Jay McGraw, and CEO Adam Jackson.
Doctor On Demand says large employers such as Comcast and Union Bank & Trust have become clients because they favor its business model over that of older telemedicine providers that charge companies subscription fees. Doctor On Demand charges employers only when one of their staffers makes use of the service by arranging a video appointment with a doctor or psychologist enlisted in the company network.
Tenaya Capital led the Series B round, joined by new investors Qualcomm Ventures; Dignity Health; Anne Wojcicki; and other growth stage firms. Doctor On Demand’s existing investors Venrock, Shasta Ventures, and Sir Richard Branson also participated. The Series B brings Doctor On Demand’s total fundraising to more than $74 million.
—San Jose, CA-based Fetch Robotics, which debuted its human-sized warehouse robots in late April, raised a $20 million Series A round led by SB Group US, or “SoftBank.” Seed investors O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Shasta Ventures also participated. Fetch will use the money to beef up its marketing and sales unit and to meet demand for the robots.
