Technology

RRE Ventures has raised $265 million for its latest fund.

The firm was founded back in 1994, and this is its seventh fund (eighth if you include a separate &opportunity& fund for making follow-on investments). Exits in the last few years include Bitly (acquired by Spectrum Equity), Business Insider (acquired by Axel Springer) and TapCommerce (acquired by Twitter).

General Partner Raju Rishi said that RRE will continue to follow its current investment strategy. That means putting about 60 percent of its money into Series A investments, 5 to 10 percent into seed deals and the rest in B or C rounds.

It also means investing making about half its investments on the East Coast — mostly New York City, where RRE is based. Rishi suggested that with the growth of &a very virtualized tech community of developer from around the world,& New York makes more sense for startups, thanks to the density of industries like media and fashion: &The ecosystem question has become, ‘Where can I be closest to my customer'&

RRE invests beyond New York too. In those cases, Rishi said itusually based on specific sectors that the investment team has researched deeply. Currently, those sectors include healthcare IT, space technology, blockchain, robotics, virtual reality and augmented reality. In contrast, there are some other sectors that RRE sees as &a little bit waning.&

&A great example is, we made the initial investment in 3D printing — we were the original investors in MakerBot,& Rishi said. &Now, we don&t see a striking amount of innovation that space. That doesn&t mean we cut it off at the knees and not invest in it, but itnot something we&re actively looking at.&

Vice President of Business Development Maria Palma added that the firm has also been growing its platform strategy to support portfolio companies in the last couple years.

&You can&t pick a platform strategy thatunique, but you can pick a platform strategy that your firm can uniquely execute,& she said.

For RRE, that means helping startups connect with larger companies for potential partnerships, and also working with founders to better understand things like leadership and hiring. In some cases, she said the firm doesn&t have &the capabilities to deliver that type of training at scale,& so instead it focuses on &what we call community learning — really kind of peer groups … across our companies so they can more easily get answers to their questions.&

Rishi said RRE has had fairly consistent fund sizes (it raised a $280 million sixth fund about four years ago), because its &sweet spot is Series As,& and raising a larger fund would mean investing in more late-stage deals.

&We usually target $250 million, and frankly they always sort of creep up because of existing LPs who want to continue to bet on us,& he said.

And while the fundraising announcement is only happening today, RRE has already backed several startups with the new fund — Bend Financial (health savings accounts), Gem (cryptocurrency), Hypr (decentralized authentication), Ladder (life insurance), Latch (smart locks) and TheWaveVR (VR experiences for music).

BigID announced a big $30 million Series B round today, which comes on the heels of closing their $14M A investment in January. Itbeen a whirlwind year for the NYC data security startup as GDPR kicked in and companies came calling for their products.

The round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from previous investors ClearSky Security, Comcast Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Information Venture Partners and SAP.io.

BigID has a product that helps companies inventory their data, even extremely large data stores, and identify the most sensitive information, a convenient feature at a time where GDPR data privacy rules, which went into effect at the end of May, require that companies doing business in the EU have a grip on their customer data.

Thatcertainly something that caught the eye of Ariel Tseitlin from Scale Venture Partners. &We talked to a lot of companies, how they feel more specifically about GDPR, and more broadly about how they think about data within in their organizations, and we got a very strong signal that there is a lot of concern around the regulation and how to prepare for that, but also more fundamentally, that CIOs and chief data officers don&t have a good sense of where data resides within their organizations,& he explained.

Dimitri Sirota, CEO and co-founder, says that GDPR is a nice business driver, but he sees the potential to grow the data security market much more broadly than simply as a way to comply with one regulatory ruling or another. He says that American companies are calling, even some without operations in Europe because they see getting a grip on their customer data as a fundamental business imperative.

BigID product collage. Graphic: BigID

The company plans to expand their partner go-to market strategy in the coming the months, another approach that could translate to increased sales. That will include global systems integrators. Sirota says to expect announcements involving the usual suspects in the coming months. &You&ll see over the next little bit, several announcements with many of the names that you&re familiar with in terms of go-to market and global relationships,& he said.

Finally there are the strategic investors in this deal, including Comcast and SAP, which Sirota thinks will also ultimately help them get enterprise deals they might not have landed up until now. The $30 million runway also gives customers who might have been skittish about dealing with a young-ish startup, more confidence to make the deal.

BigID seems to have the right product at the right time. ScaleTseitlin, who will join the board as part of the deal, certainly sees the potential of this company to scale far beyond its current state.

&The area where we tend to spend a lot of time, and I think is what attracted Dimitri to having us as an investor, is that we really help with the scaling phase of company growth,& he said. True to their name, Scale tries to get the company to that next level beyond product/market fit to where they can deliver consistently and continually grow revenue. They have done this with Box and DocuSign and others and hope that BigID is next.

IndiaPolicyBazaar, which runs a digital insurance business of the same name and a lending marketplace calledPaisaBazaar.com, is the latest company to join SoftBank$100 billion Vision Fund after it announced a new funding round of over $200 million.

The deal was led by the Vision Fund with participation from existing investors includingInfoEdge, the company behind jobs platformNaukri.com. The startupother investors count Softbank, Temasek, Tiger Global and True North, but an announcement fromPolicyBazaar didn&t specifically mention if any of those names took place in this latest round.

This new round takes PolicyBazaar to nearly $350 million to date. The deal is another investment in India for the Vision Fund, which so far has backed OYO Rooms, Flipkart and Paytm parent One97 Communication among others.

PolicyBazaar was founded in 2008 initially as an information portal for learning about insurance and insurance programs. Today, the company operates its own digital insurance brand and a marketplace that aggregates and selects deal from across the industry.

Across both services,PolicyBazaar claims to process100 million visitors in website traffic per year with a transaction volume thatapproaching 300,000 per month. More broadly, the company estimates thatPolicyBazaar.com is used to purchase over 20 percent of life insurance coverage in India andseven percent of the countryretail health coverage.

Going forward, PolicyBazaar is targeting 10 million transacting customers by 2020, which it believes it can reach by growing at acompound annual growth rate of 80 percent.

&Over the last decade, PolicyBazaar has become synonymous with online insurance shopping in India. We believe that the Indian insurance market continues to remain massively under-developed and PolicyBazaar, supported by SoftBankcapital and ecosystem, is uniquely positioned to dramatically increase the adoption of insurance products in the country,&Munish Varma, partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, said in a statement.

PolicyBazaarclosest ideological rival is Acko, but the two companies are quitecontrasted.

WhilePolicyBazaar is a decade old, Acko is very much a newcomer whichhas raised $42 million since its launch some 18 months ago. Most recently, Ackoadded Amazon after theU.S. retail giantled a $12 million investmentthat was announced last month. In addition, Acko founder Varun Dua is a co-founder ofCoverfox, an online insurance policy aggregator that also rivalsPolicyBazaar.com.