Big Data VC Funding: Crittercism and Fundbox

This week may have been a little slow for capital funding in the big data industry after Intel’s huge funding to Cloudera, but here are a couple of funding stories that made news this week.

Crittercism gets funding

To make things just a bit easier for the mobile apps user community, your mobile apps performance tracker gets another round of funds. As you probably know, some major digital businesses Netflix, Yahoo, or   LinkedIn—get their mobile apps monitored by a cleverly called company,  Crittercism. This company’s primary service is tracking the performance of mobile apps.

As the number of high-profile businesses who have adopted this technology continues to grow, this company will have a better chance of prospering in the market, even more so with its recent funding. Crittercism just announced a $30 million capital funding round from Scale Venture Partners, with participation from InterWest Partners, Accenture, and VMware.  An interesting point to note is that VMware’s participation in the funding establishes its willingness to support Crittercism in future technological breakthroughs.

The funding will be used to upgrade the company’s existing technology and services. Crittercism is a market leader—distinguishing itself from its competitors by providing a wide-range support of carriers, operating systems, and apps monitoring services. Their monitoring tool has the capability for setting alerts that can be programmed to go off when the apps’ performance degrades.

Crittercism’s new technology called zero-touch app wrapping is slated to provision monitoring of mobile apps in absence of the code behind those apps. This strong capability will certainly be a value addition to the mainstream features that mobile-apps monitoring tools of this category offer.

Andrew Levy, co-founder and chief executive officer of Crittercism, told VentureBeat in an interview,

At the end of the day, you can’t manage mobile apps with web technology…They have their own set of issues and a set of problems that our product addresses…I’d say our product is at least 18-24 months ahead of everyone else in the market.

To date, the San Francisco-based Crittercism has raised a total $48.7 million. Starting out in 2011, the company has a current employee strength of 70+, which they hope to expand to 130 by year end.

Fundbox raises capital funding

Small businesses have a strong reason to rejoice!  Fundbox is ready to dole out money to small and mid-sized businesses. These businesses do not have to depend on customer payments anymore for boosting their services.  Though a big data startup, Fundbox has managed to attract large funding, around $17.5 million, which the company hopes to use to support small and mid-sized businesses.  Fundbox’s strategy includes closely reviewing business data to determine whether instant payment on pending invoices is a smart move. The reward for taking such a risky venture is charging a hefty fee—the higher the risk, the higher the charge. In an interview with Venture Beat, Fundbox revealed that in-depth data analysis is essential to their success.

Fundbox, as per speculation, has managed to rope in a number of investors who will pump in a steady flow of capital. Though Fundbox has declined to identify all the investors, the fact remains that their future business prospect is bright as they have access to a great deal of capital, which will put their rivals at a discomfort.

Fundbox does not apply the same parameters of measuring a potential business’s credit-worthiness—the assessment criteria are appropriately tailored to match a particular business’s operating characteristics. This way, Fundbox goes an extra mile in ensuring that their investment risks are suitably adjusted. With the recent spurt of venture capital funding pouring into the company, Fundbox is well positioned to explore more investment possibilities.