VentureBeat

Breach Security has raised $6 million in a second round of funding to expand its business of making web application firewalls that stop hackers.

The Carlsbad, Calif.-based company creates a security appliance, dubbed WebDefend, that can check incoming traffic for malicious software at a high speed without slowing down a web site, said Mike Pierce, chief executive of the company. The company licenses the appliance for a $75,000 one-time fee. WebDefend protects more than 15,000 commercial sites such as Overstock.com, Audiotel, and Sovereign Bank. Sites like these can’t be slow, but the risk of a security appliance is that it could slow down the site for Internet visitors as the appliance scans for possible attacks.

The investment shows that the security sector is hot enough to see frequent new fundings. Identity theft and regulations requiring companies to protect consumer data are driving corporations to improve security.

As identity theft or embarrassing web hacks grow, everything in the security technology chain is getting a makeover. IBM bought Watchfire for an undisclosed sum last year to improve security for applications. Chip makers such as Pixim, which are selling chips for security cameras being installed in places such as China, have raised money. Cisco has started a security camera business. Accertify received money from Intel Capital to protect merchants against credit card fraud. And Webalo is protecting company data from being stolen via mobile browsers on purloined cell phones.

“At the time we started, the bad guys weren’t as sophisticated and were preoccupied with defacing web pages,” Pierce said. “Now it has escalated to the point where they do it for profit. We have had to take our products to the next level.”

Enterprise Partners of San Diego, SRBA No. 5 of Los Angeles, and Evergreen Venture Partners of Israel participated in the round. To date, the company has raised $32.5 million since its founding in 2004. The company has 65 employees.

The company’s most direct competitor is Imperva, which raised a $20 million fourth round in April. Others include Citrix Systems and F5, both of which provide load-balancing servers but also have features such as a web application firewall.

Breach Security is trying to stand out because it inspects Internet packets more deeply than other products do without slowing down a site. It does so in real-time, protecting against attacks where speed is of the essence. Pierce said the company can install the appliances within a day.

VMIX, a company that once sought to be YouTube, but which changed direction to provide software to large web properties to share video, has raised $16.5 million in funding.

VMIX joins a host of companies doing much the same thing, including Brightcove, Reality Digital, Vsocial and VideoEgg, to name a few. These all serve third-party sites with video technology.

The San Diego VMIX offers a video player and a content management system that includes social networking features. Visitors to a company site using VMIX can do things like upload their own videos, share videos with other users and vote top videos. The site owner can customize the VMIX player to match the site’s overall design, control the sorts of videos appearing on the site, and upload their own videos.

It isn’t as sexy as viral user-generated video sharing sites like YouTube. VMIX had original planned to be such a site (the destination site is still at VMIX.com). But providing quality software to media organizations has turned out to be a bigger business for VMIX: Client companies don’t want to put the time and money into building their own online video software.

VMIX says it has 190 web sites using its software, including movie studios like Universal, Paramount, Lyon’s Gate, Fox Searchlight (see screenshot, below) MGM as well as newspapers like the Chicago Tribune. Through its partners, VMIX reaches over 60 million unique monthly visitors.

VMIX has done little marketing, it says, relying instead on customers recommending the software to others. New investors include JK&B Capital and ATA Ventures. They join existing investors Mission Ventures and Enterprise Partners.

San Diego’s TargeGen, a biotechnology targeting disease treatments related to abnormal blood-vessel growth, raised $40 million in a fourth funding round. New investors included Innovis Investments, VantagePoint Venture Partners and CTI Life Sciences Fund, joined by existing investors Forward Ventures, Enterprise Partners, Chicago Growth Partners.

TargeGen’s potential disease targets range from eye diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD) to cancer to heart disease. Its leading drug candidate, TG100801, completed an early-stage phase I trial in AMD-related vision loss in February, but said only that the drug appeared safe and “well tolerated.”