VC watch: RLX rounds up $23 million

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Recent Deals

• RLX Technologies, which specializes in blade servers, has raised $23 million more in venture financing, the company said Thursday, raising the total of investments in the company to date to $100 million. Investors in the most recent round include Austin Ventures and Sternhill Ventures. In April, the company appointed Doug Erwin, a former executive at BMC Software and PentaSafe, as chief executive.

• Sandbridge Technologies announced Wednesday that it raised $19.5 million in a second round of funding. Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, Infineon Ventures, China Development Industrial Bank, and previous investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Atlas Venture and Columbia Capital all participated. Sandbridge, a semiconductor company based in White Plains, N.Y., has raised a total of $33.5 million.

•  Sabrix announced Wednesday that it raised $10.5 million in a third round of funding, led by Trinity Ventures. Previous investors Mohr, Davidow Ventures and Venture Strategy Partners contributed to the round. The San Ramon, Calif.-based company has raised a total of $29.6 million. Sabrix develops tax management software designed to manage tax exposure and penalty risk.

• Astaro announced Monday that it raised $6.2 million in a first round of funding, from Insight Venture Partners and Wellington Partners. Burlington, Mass.-based Astaro develops Linux-based security gateways that integrate firewall, VPN (virtual private network), content filtering, and antispam and URL filtering.

• Agility Communications, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based maker of optical network components, won a grant of $2 million from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The money will go toward Agility's $3 million, three-year project to create a chip that would integrate an optical amplifier, a high-speed optical modulator and a widely tunable laser.

Agility was one of several high-tech companies to be awarded grants from NIST's Advanced Technology Program. NIST, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, announced last week the grants, which it made to companies working on "high-risk, high-payoff" technologies. The others include:

• Mobile Systems Verification, a Chicago company working on automated testing tools for wireless applications, won a $2 million grant to fund nearly its entire two-year project to create an Advanced Mobile Application Testing Environment (AMATE) that's designed to make wireless communications more reliable and effective by simulating users of wireless devices by the millions.

• RAPT Industries, a start-up based in Livermore, Calif., took in $2 million toward a $3.5 million project designed to advance its work on a process for etching and polishing optical and semiconductor materials faster than currently available technologies.

• Valaran, a Princeton, N.J., provider of business process and network integration software, won a $2 million grant to speed its work on software that will help mobile communications flow on networks with "low or unpredictable bandwidth" using Jini Network Technology. That technology, developed by Sun Microsystems for use in consumer electronics, finds itself increasingly used for connecting diverse and complex business applications.