Capital Gains: Ex-NSA Chief Raises $33 Million, Thiel and Soros Team Up and More

Former National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander’s startup raised more than $30 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers this week, and financier George Soros invested with Peter Thiel in a bond-trading startup. Here’s the funding news from Silicon Valley:

• Iconiq Capital, the investment firm that manages the money of Silicon Valley executives like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Weiner, led an $85 million investment in the enterprise technology startup Alteryx, alongside Insight Venture Partners and Meritech Capital Partners. Alteryx’s valuation is reportedly somewhere around $1 billion (New York Times).
• Online art-auction service Paddle8 raised $34 million in Series C funding from a group of investors that includes art dealer David Zwirner, artist Rolf Sachs, Working Title Films Co-Chair Eric Fellner and Sony Music CEO Edgar Berger (ARTnews).
• Brandwatch, a British startup that does “social intelligence” (it closely monitors and mines social media data for clients), raised $33 million from Partech Ventures, Highland Capital Partners Europe and Nauta Capital (Forbes).
• Kleiner Perkins, Trident Capital and others invested $32.5 million in IronNet Cybersecurity, the counter-hacking startup founded by former NSA director and retired four-star general Keith Alexander (The Wall Street Journal).
• French human resources software maker Talentsoft landed a $27.6 million investment from Goldman Sachs (Bloomberg Business).
• Peter Thiel and billionaire fund manager George Soros are leading a $25 million investment in the Internet bond-trading startup TruMid. Former Goldman Sachs exec Jeff Bahl also participated in the round, which values the company at over $100 million (Bloomberg Business).
• Israeli data analysis startup Signals Group raised $15 million in a Series B funding round led by Sequoia, with participation from TPY Capital (Globes).
• Utah-based Boombox, which makes stuff like quizzes and polls for digital publishers, raised $5.5 million in Series A funding from investors that included Pelion Venture Partners (Utah Business).

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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