According to the announcement, the $45 million Security-as-a-Service company already partners with more than half of the largest providers that host or deploy cloud services. With threats to data’s welfare on the rise, the market for services that keep it safe grows. Alert Logic’s partnership with Welsh Carson allows for further tech investment and enables an international future for the company.

“Businesses are becoming more and more dependant all the time on strategic applications and data that resides in data centers,” says Alert Logic CEO Gray Hall. “As people move [applications and data] to the cloud they need different types of security solutions to protect their infrastructure in the cloud, and that’s our business.”

While the company’s anchored by its American roots for now, Welsh Carson’s resources give Alert Logic’s the potential to expand their reach. That means more products in more markets. “Three to five years from now we would expect to cover all major markets around the globe, and have a significantly expanded security product suite,” Hall says. “We’ve always invested heavily in our technology and are actively doing that today, but with Welsh Carson’s backing we have greater resources to invest faster, and not only making our products and technology scale more effectively, but also broadening the coverage of the cloud security services.”

The board decided last year Alert Logic would seek recapitalization opportunities in 2013, and give investors the chance to realize their investments or stick around long-term. Morgan Stanley led the company through the process and into an enviable position. ‘It wound up being a competitive scenario [to partner with Alert Logic] where several of the top private equity firms in the world submitted bids and Welsh Carson came out on top.”

The partners now share a vision for the future and agree on ways to realize it. “The management team and Welsh Carson see eye to eye on the size of the opportunity, the long-term duration of the opportunity, the company strategy and we think that this market segment that we’re pursuing is multiple billions in fact we’ve estimated the market at more than $5 billion,” Hall says. “And today as a [$45 million] company we believe we’ve only scratched the surface of that opportunity.”

Partnership with Welsh Carson provides capital and cushion as Alert Logic weighs options for its financial future.

“Management and Welsh Carson have a common mind and a common strategy that we’ve bought into that we think will be successful over the next few years,” Hall says. “What this means for the company three to five years from now could range from an IPO, to simply maintaining our independence as a private company; and the fact that Welsh Carson is starting now gives us the flexibility to keep our options open there.”

“It has always been our mission to make the world more open and connected. Although more than a billion people around the world already use Facebook every month, we are always looking for ways to help connect the rest of the world as well,” Facebook’s Director of Product Management Tom Stocky  explained in a Facebook status update announcing the deal. “Voice technology has become an increasingly important way for people to navigate mobile devices and the web, and this technology will help us evolve our products to match that evolution. We believe this acquisition is an investment in our long-term product roadmap as we continue towards our company’s mission.”

Stocky pointed to the acqui-hire intent of the acquisition, stating “With this deal we will welcome some of the industry’s most talented people to our engineering teams in Menlo Park, California.” Facebook has indicated it will continue to support the Jibbigo app for the time being.

Considering Facebook’s international social audience, it is easy to understand why it would want to boost its speech translation abilities with an in-house approach. The social network had relied on translation services through Microsoft’s Bing. Owning its own translator services gives it better leverage in making translation a core focus of its platform as it pursues its mission to make the world more connected.

“Facebook, with its mission to make the world more open and connected, provides the perfect platform to apply our technology at a truly global scale,” the Mobile Technologies team said in a statement on Jibbigo’s blog. “We look forward to continuing to develop our technology at Facebook and finding new and interesting ways to apply it to Facebook’s long-term product roadmap.”

Mobile Technologies will join Facebook at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.

The Series B round was led by GSV Capital Corp. (GSVC), Learn Capital, Laureate Education Inc. and International Finance Corp., the investment arm of the World Bank, with participation from Yuri Milner, . the Russian investor who manages DST Global.

“Demand for education in developing countries is growing rapidly due to population growth and the rising share of students seeking university education,” said Elena Sterlin, IFC Senior Manager for Health, Education and Services. “Coursera’s innovative model is a breakthrough in delivering low-cost university and continuing education to students through online courses.”

Coursera hosts free online classes taught by professors. Universities partner with the service to license the courses with their own students in exchange for a fee, saving valuable classroom time for discussion rather than a rote lecture. The company began offering the classes as a supplement to higher education, but then achieved ACE approval to offer accredited education. Antioch University, for example, offers credit for a Coursera web class taught by University of Pennsylvania faculty.

“We created Coursera in response to real and pressing demands for quality, accessible education around the world, and today we are proud to be part of a growing movement that is making a tangible impact on this global challenge,” said Andrew Ng, Co-Founder of Coursera.

The investment brings Coursera’s total funding to $65 million, an impressive sum considering the company is barely a year old. The brainchild of two computer science professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, the company collaborates with 83 educational institutions on four continents to offer about 400 college level courses for free online. The company has an enrollment of more than 4 million students.

Coursera will use the funding to double its staff to 100 over the next several months, as well as expand its mobile apps and Signature Track offerings, which charges students a fee to provide certification of the education. It also plans to invest in international expansion and multi-lingual platforms.

Education investments have been a rising trend, and this investment is the latest example. Venture investments in education grew 41 percent in 2012 to $632.3 million, the highest since the Dot.com peak in 2000, according to the National Venture Capital Association.

The company competes against Udacity, which also launched out of Sanford. Udacity has so far raised $15 million in October from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Charles River Ventures.

“Coursera is on the forefront of transforming the $4.5 trillion dollar learning industry,” said Michael Moe, Chairman and CEO of GSV Capital. “In the global marketplace, knowledge is the currency that provides people the opportunity to participate in the future. Coursera is democratizing access to the best universities and professors in the world.”

Now the company has raised a Series C $22 million round led by Menlo Ventures and Iris Capital, with participation from FSN PME and all existing investors, including Idinvest Partners, OMNES Capital and Galileo Partners. The new funding will fuel global marketing efforts as well to spur research and development.

Scality’s RING Organic Solution provides petabyte-scale storage that distributes data across multiple references to eliminate the risk of failure or the need to go offline. One of the company’s first customers, Telenet, signed in July of 2010, has multiplied its data center capacity more than 10 times yet has had to shut down a data center in order to update its systems. “Every hard drive will fail at some point, but we move the data around based on drive functionality so we create a system that is extremely autonomous,” Jerome Lecat, CEO of Scality, told Red Herring.

Selling technology since 2010, the company four of the top 10 cable operators in the U.S. and leading telecom companies in France, Italy, Germany, and the UK as clients. Adoption is steamrolling at 500 percent year over year growth.

“Our investors are a perfect match for the DNA of the company:  They share our vision for the future of data storage and they understand the global market place,”  Lecat said in a statement.  “I have managed several start-ups, but this is the first time I have seen a 5x sales growth on an annual basis.  A disruption is happening in the market and we are driving it.  This is very exciting.  We are going to continue growing and are recruiting to sustain this growth including increasing our investment in R&D.”

Facing a $100 billion storage market, Scality meets a price point unequaled in the industry with an attractive scalable model.

This latest round brings Scality’s total funding to $35 million. It has offices in San Francisco, Paris, New York, Washington DC, and Tokyo.

“The growth opportunity in the software storage market is very exciting for us,” said Doug Carlisle, managing director, Menlo Ventures.  “The intersection of Mobile, Social, Big Data and Cloud Infrastructure is creating a disruption in technology innovation.  Scality is leading the disruption in software defined storage technology.  Since its introduction in 2010, Scality’s RING software storage product has seen rapid adoption by companies eager to try a new storage approach.  We look forward to watching Scality continue to innovate in data storage solutions for the web scale infrastructure markets.”

Scality was a 2012 Red Herring Top 100 North America winner in 2012.

Though many in the online food delivery space find themselves stuck in the rush hour of tech, Delivery Hero landed a decent funding round recently from the investor of an online food ordering rival. The $30 million Series D was led by Phenomen Ventures, a new Russian VC firm that also invested in Delivery Hero’s rival Foodpanda, which too shares a cut in the online orders it generates through the web and mobile apps.

The round follows a $50 million round Delivery Hero scored about a year ago from Kite Ventures.

Founded two years ago and headquartered in Berlin, Delivery Hero provides an online food ordering platform in over 14 countries, primarily in Europe but also Australia, South Korea, China, India and Mexico.

The latest round “takes us beyond profitability,” Delivery Hero CEO Niklas Östberg told Red Herring in an email. “It’s primarily for technology and strengthening of our existing markets further.”

Orders have been ringing off the hook with 100 percent revenue increases over the past year, Östberg told Red Herring. The 600-employee company claims over $400 million in turnover. It holds the top market spot in Sweden, Austria, Finland, Germany, Poland and Mexico.

“A clear reason to our growth is that we spent a lot of money to build an outstanding product to our customers,” Östberg said.

Östberg stated there is no connection between Delivery Hero and its rival Foodpanda, also a Phenomen Ventures investment. “There is a big difference in markets and size. Glad to see Phenomen investing into us and not Foodpanda,” Östberg said.

With this latest round, Delivery Hero has raised $116 million in venture investment as well as $10 million in debt. In addition to Phenomen Ventures, this latest round had participation from existing investors Team Europe, Kite Ventures, ru-Net, Tengelmann Ventures, Holtzbrinck Ventures, Point Nine Capital and Kreos Capital.

“There is a constant drive towards improving our customer experience further and promote our product to a wider group,” Östberg concluded. “This is our key focus.”

Delivery Hero was a winner of the Red Herring Europe 100 award last April.

Now, Fab has raised an impressive $150 million at a $1 billion valuation to fuel its expansion. Not yet in Asia, Fab plans to soon extend into China and other parts of Asia through the strategic advice of Tencent, which will be taking a seat on the company’s board and overseeing its entrance.

”It’s a way to enter markets through strategic partners who can help mitigate risk and will increase the likelihood of success,” Fab’s CEO Jason Goldberg told Forbes.

Nearly 65 percent of China’s ecommerce market are 18 to 35 years old, the majority of which are women, which suits Fab’s audience.

Goldberg hopes to take Fab to the heights of the world’s top ecommerce giants such as Amazon, Alibaba, eBay and Rakuten with a $10 billion valuation.

Though the company has achieved a tenth of its dreams, it still has a long way to go. The company has about 14 million registered users who have bought 6 million products. Sales quintupled in 2012, and are expected to double this year. Gross margins have grown from 29 percent in 2011 to 43 percent today. Not yet profitable, Fab is on track to be in the black by 2015. The company’s US division could be profitable now if it weren’t for reinvestment. The company targeted sales between $200 million and $300 million this year, about double the size of last year’s value.

Though the company has already raised $310 million in previous investment, this latest $150 million infusion won’t be the last time Fab passes around the proverbial venture hat. The company plans to raise an additional $50 million to $100 million in the last few months.

Goldberg reiterated that the company raised such a sizable round not because it is in a bubble, but because in preparation for the future.

“I want to be really clear on this as I’m sure there are skeptics who will ask and wonder why Fab needs so much money,” Goldberg explained on the company’s blog. “Fab is focused on the long term. We are focused on creating ‘Wow!’ shopping experiences that will result in customers making 20+ purchases from Fab within a couple of years.”

The company will invest in software and app development “ to advance current and future offerings in order to address new and pressing operational and productivity challenges faced by healthcare organizations around the world,” it stated in a press release. It will make investments in the US as well as emerging nations. The investments will focus on efforts to care for more patients, reduce costs through workflow optimization, and minimizing redundancy.

“GE is investing in software and analytics to better help our customers manage the operational complexity of the healthcare system,” said John Dineen, President & CEO, GE Healthcare. “These new software solutions will look to connect caregivers in a meaningful way to the systems upon which they rely, enabling them to deliver better informed diagnoses and improved care.”

GE Healthcare will design new applications in conjunction with its software development arm and research hubs.

Technology is drastically changing the modern healthcare system. The federal government has mandated that all medical facilities switch to electronic hospital records. Health care providers are offered “meaningful use” checks as incentives to switch to digital records, or face penalties by 2015. These upgrades have been expensive, but the switch to digital should bring about an overall cost savings.

GE is trying to capitalize on these efforts, as well as cut out waste in its own systems. It has a team of over 3,000 software developers working on ways to improve medical information management, particularly through increased data, analytics, connectivity and insight into operational and departmental processes and workflows. It has also made strategic investments into a number of business software development companies such as Pivotal.

“Healthcare has always relied on ’big data,’ and the need to understand data is even greater now. What is important is how we use data,” Dineen added, “providing the right technology that allows physicians to pinpoint the right diagnosis; match it to the right treatment; and make more informed decisions.”

It’s the biggest purchase McAfee has made since its own acquisition to Intel in 2010 for $7.68 million.

The offer has been accepted by Stonesoft’s CEO Ilkka Hiidenheimo, Chairman Hannu Turunen and Timo Syrjaelae, a board member, who together hold 34.7 percent of shares. The deal is recommended by the company’s board.

“The mega-trend for cyber security isn’t showing any signs of slowing down as you’re always hearing about some corporation being hacked,” Mikael Rautanen, an analyst at Inderes Oy in Helsinki, told Bloomberg. “Stonesoft has the potential to see strong growth so this is a pretty good deal for Intel, and the offer price makes it a good deal for Stonesoft shareholders.”

Based in Helsiniki, Stonesoft offers a scope of cyber security solutions including next-generation firewalls, evasion prevention systems and SSL VPN solutions. It features military-grade firewalls either through software, hardware or virtualized appliances. A Gartner security report recently awarded the company a “visionary status.” The company offers one of the most complete security solutions in the industry, which explains McAfee’s interest.

“McAfee already designs and deploys a high-assurance firewall, which provides protection to the world’s most critical networks including government agencies,” Pat Calhoun, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Network Security for Intel, wrote in his blog. “With this acquisition, I am extremely confident that we can deliver a next-generation firewall with the cutting-edge, technology from Stonesoft that is designed to meet the needs of an entirely new larger enterprise segment.

“…With Intel’s backing, we can now provide two leading firewall solutions that will be a critical layer in our Security Connected strategy,” Calhoun continued. “This investment in Stonesoft will also allow us to focus our resources on evolving our IPS platform to be the market-leading solution to help businesses defend against the most sophisticated and advanced threats. Couple IPS and firewall with our advanced threat intelligence, threat evasion expertise, and leading web and email protection solutions, and there is no question McAfee will be leading the way in the network security space.”

Founded in 1990, Stonesoft has more than 6,500 customers, including governments, retailers, and financial services companies. Though the company enjoyed net sales of 9.2 million euros ($12 million) for the first quarter of this year, up 12 percent from the previous year, but suffered a loss per share of 0.03 euro cents ($0.04), down by 0.02 euro cents on a year ago.

The acceptance period for the offer is scheduled to start on May 21 and run for three weeks.

A number of analysts, who peg Weibo’s value at between $600 million and $2.5 billion, have described the transaction as generous.

The deal stands out as one of the largest Internet deals in China and will likely affect the ecosystem significantly.

Alibaba retains an option to increase its stake by up to 30 percent at an unspecified price. The deal generates $380 million for Seina Corp.’s Weibo over the next three years, providing substantial revenue for a company that struggled to monetize its service.

Weibo works similarly to Twitter, which is blocked by the Chinese government. It has more than 500 million users.

In a statement, Alibaba chairman Jack Ma explained that the company hopes to integrate ecommerce options into the social microblogging service. He also explained that Weibo will provide much needed mobile expertise and insight as the company attempts to focus greater on mobile, key as Chinese consumers get over security concerns of paying with a mobile device. The companies will share data, develop better online payment methods, and cooperate on advertising, according to the Wall St. Journal.

“We believe e-commerce will play a vital role in building an ecosystem around Weibo’s open platform,” said Charles Chao, Chairman and CEO of SINA.  ”Weibo and Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms are natural partners.  Together we provide a unique proposition not only to existing online merchants, but also to individuals or businesses, who wish to offer products and services on social networking platform to take advantage of the traffic shift toward social and mobile Internet.”

Alibaba is expected to soon go public with a valuation around $100 billion, according to Reuters.

The round was led by Tiger Global Management, and included a new investment partner, T. Rowe Price. It brings Eventbrite’s total investment to $140 million.

“We believe Eventbrite has a strong underlying financial model that will continue to scale, and its valuation will be well supported by traditional financial metrics in the future,” said Henry Ellenbogen, Portfolio Manager at T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. “When we look at private companies, we look for companies that possess the capabilities and mindset to build a much larger and durable company. We believe that the Eventbrite team has the track record and skills to achieve that status.”

The funding will be used to further innovate the company’s platform, accelerate international growth, evolve its mobile capabilities, and hire personnel.

Though the company has long been eying an IPO, this latest investment means it can take its time.

“This gives us flexibility in setting the timeline for a later IPO, on our schedule,” co-founder and CEO Kevin Hartz told the Wall St. Journal.  ”An IPO is an inevitability, but the timing is (to be determined).”

People close to the deal said the company’s valuation was about $600 million to $700 million.

The talk of an IPO was more than just a rumor. Hartz told the Next Web in June that its next capital raising would be an IPO rather than another funding round. The company apparently changed its mind.

Eventbrite competes head to head with Ticketmaster, which is actually Live Nation Entertainment following its merger with Live Nation in 2010. Eventbrite has sold more than 100 million tickets and registrations, or more than $1.5 billion in gross ticket sales since its 2006 founding. A third of those sales have happened in the last nine months.

“Live experiences are the new luxury good — from large festivals and concerts to conferences and political rallies, people are increasingly looking to share live experiences with people of similar interests and passions,” said Kevin Hartz, CEO of Eventbrite. “We’re pleased to be able to work with existing as well as new investors who truly understand the opportunities that these kind of occasions represent, as well as the power of the platform we have built to make them happen.”