The 53 startups that will be huge in 2016, according to venture capitalists

Company name: Vulcun

VC: Sequoia's Aaref Hilaly

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $13.3 million

What it does: Vulcan is a fantasy league for eSports (aka pro video games).

Reason: "If you are not a teenager, you may not have heard of 'e-sports,' meaning competitive multi-player video gaming where teams compete against each other for prizes,"says Hilaly.

"But it's become a phenomenon: more people watch the finals of tournaments for League of Legends or Counter-Strike, than any sporting event other than the Super Bowl. Vulcun is capitalizing on this trend by enabling e-sports participants to trade skins (digital goods)," Hilaly says.

Company name: Confluent

VC: Sequoia's Aaref Hilaly and Lightspeed Venture Partners' Arif Janmohamed

Relationship: No relation. These VCs just think it's cool.

Funding: $30.9 million

What it does: Confluent offers a commercial version of an open-source project called Kafka, a computer "messaging" system that handles bits of data computers send to each other.

Reason: "Ask any developer, and they will wax lyrical about Kafka, the open source distributed messaging system. The team behind Kafka left LinkedIn and created Confluent, an open core company built around Kafka which, along with others like Docker and MongoDB, are becoming the leaders among a new generation of open source companies," Hilaly says.

"The team invented Kafka, the leading streaming data platform and is commercializing it for the enterprise," adds Janmohamed.

Company name: VarageSale

VC: Sequoia's Bryan Schreier

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $68 million

What it does: Take eBay and make it local. That's what VarageSale does: let's people buy, sell and connect with others in their neighborhoods.

Reason: "VarageSale unlocks local person-to-person transactions so anyone can buy and sell low cost items without friction. VarageSale's app is fun, fast, and engaging. And most of all, VarageSale's trusted community approach makes it the safest place to buy, sell, and be together on the Internet," Schreier says.

Company name: Branch Metrics

VC: Sequoia's Bryan Schreier

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $18.05 million

What it does: Allows mobile apps to add hyperlinks inside their apps.

Reason: "Branch is quickly becoming the backbone of the mobile ecosystem and has become fundamental to the growth of many of our mobile startups," Schreier says.

Company name: Namely

VC: Sequoia's Pat Grady

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $77.8 million

What it does: All-in-one human resources software for payroll and benefits.

Reason: "People software (payroll, benefits, and talent management) has been a necessary evil for far too long. With Namely, it’s a competitive weapon," Grady says.

Customers praise it for being easy to use, he adds.

Company name: Datadog

VCs: Sequoia's Pat Grady, New Enterprise Associates' Chetan Puttagunta and Bessemer's Brian Feinstein

Relationship: No relation. These VCs just think it's cool.

Funding: $53.4 million

What it does: Lets developers and IT pros watch and monitor all of their apps and data across all of their cloud services at once.

Reasons:

"It’s like crack for developers," Grady says.

"It's changing the way enterprises monitor their cloud infrastructure. The company has signed some of the biggest up and coming companies such as Airbnb, Zendesk as well as established enterprises like HP," says Puttagunta.

Feinstein adds, "Infrastructure and application monitoring in the cloud. Great visualizations and integrations with hundreds of services. Growing like a weed."

Company name: EverString

VC: Lightspeed Venture Partners Peter Nieh

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $78.7 million

What it does: Uses big data to help companies find sales prospects.

Reason: EverString is a "SaaS [cloud computing] company at the forefront of bringing data science to B2B selling resulting in dramatic increases in sales efficiency and performance," says Nieh.

EverString is growing "rapidly" and has a "stellar team led by Vincent Yang, a product visionary in this space, and with some of the brightest minds in data science," he adds.

Company name: Juicero

VC: Lightspeed Venture Partners' Peter Nieh

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $90 million

What it does: Juicero isn't even out of stealth yet and the whole Valley is buzzing about it. It's going to bring people the freshest juice they've ever tasted.

Reason: "Juicero is looking to be the Keurig of fresh juice. Massive market waiting to be disrupted," says Nieh.

Company name: Highfive

VC: Lightspeed Venture Partners' Arif Janmohamed

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $45.4 million

What it does: Corporate videoconferencing.

Reason: "Incredible founding team from Google that build the world’s easiest to use and most affordable video conferencing system that’s built for the mobile and cloud era," Janmohamed says.

Highfive CEO cofounder Shan Sinha previously cofounded DocVerse, bought by Google for $25 million in 2010. He then ran Google's product management for Google Apps Enterprise.

Company name: Mic Networks

VC: Lightspeed Venture Partners' Jeremy Liew

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $32 million

What it does: News site geared for millennials.

Reason: Mic is "CNN for millenials. A mission-driven company, focused on real news, meeting millenials where they are, in their feeds and on their phones," says Liew.

"It has 20 million ComScore uniques, scored an interview with POTUS, co-hosted the Democratic presidential debate, hired the exec editor of NPR news as exec editor – pretty remarkable for such a young company," he adds.

Mic was founded in 2011.

Company name: Laurel and Wolf

VC: Lightspeed Venture Partners' Jeremy Liew

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $25.5 million

What it does: Find an interior designer online.

Reason: "Marketplace for interior design, extraordinary CEO, and finding a clever way to attack furniture ecommerce at scale," says Liew.

Company name: Segment

VC: Accel's Vas Natarajan and Bessemer Venture Partners' Brian Feinstein

Relationship: Natarajan is an investor. Feinstein is no relation, just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $44.6 million

What it does: Segment is a single place that collects all customer data that can then be used by many other apps like analytics, marketing automation and databases.

Reason: "Segment is one of Accel's fastest-growing SaaS companies. It has quietly built a tremendous reputation, powering analytics for a number of the Valley's fastest-growing companies," says Natarajan.

"Single API that collects customer data and pipes it to any analytics tool. Seeing rapid adoption from the developer community," says Feinstein.

Company name: Looker

VC: Accel's Vas Natarajan

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $48 million

What it does: Looker offers self-service big-data analytics software that makes it easy for data scientists to let business people ask questions and do research.

Reason: "Looker sits at the intersection of traditional BI/visualization and more powerful analytics tools like Birst, Tableau and others," says Natarajan.

"It's fast becoming one of the most beloved services in the 'data toolkits' of Silicon Valley companies. The BI/analytics market is massive and they are quickly stealing share," he says.

Company name: InVision

VC: Accel's Vas Natarajan

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $79.1 million

What it does: InVision allows programmers/designers to build interactive realistic web and mobile app mock-ups and prototypes.

Reason: "InVision is a design collaboration platform for product teams and powers designers at Uber, Twitter, Evernote and many others. It has quickly become of the de facto design and collaboration tools in Silicon Valley and beyond," Natarajan says.

He describes it as the "fourth leg of the stool (Atlassian-Slack-GitHub-Invision) for how teams function."

Company name: Mapbox

VC: Accel's Vas Natarajan

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $62.6 million

What it does: Mapbox is mapping platform that lets developers add maps to their apps. It's not just competing with Google Maps, but also with enterprise incumbants like GIS mapping company ESRI.

Reason: "Mapping is one of the most important apps on mobile. Mapbox offers an open-source, high performance stack of tools for developers to integrate map-based experiences into apps. Importantly, developers aren't beholden to Google to Apple and can leverage the Open Streetmap community for free data," says Natarajan.

Companies from Foursquare to Pinterest are using Mapbox, the company says.

Company name: Origami Logic

VC: Accel’s Jake Flomenberg

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $49.3 million

What it does: Origami organizes a deluge of marketing data to show how all marketing efforts perform on a daily basis.

Reason: It's becoming increasingly difficult for marketers to answer the simple question 'What happened today?' let alone take action as a result of it," says Flomenberg.

"Customers like Visa, Cisco, Intel, JCPenney, Omni Hotels and Pernod Ricard are already getting value out of Origami Logic. Expect to see them make a big push into the mainstream market next year," he adds.

Company name: Databricks

VC: Accel’s Jake Flomenberg

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $47 million

What it does: Databricks provides commercial support for a popular big data open source project called Apache Spark. Spark crunches through vast amounts of data very fast.

Reason: "Databricks is the driving force behind Apache Spark, an easy to use open source data processing engine. Spark promises to democratize data analytics and make it easier for companies to build their own data driven apps," says Flomenberg.

Company name: Zoomdata

VC: Accel’s Jake Flomenberg

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $22.2 million

What it does: Companies have collected vast amounts of data stored in low-cost systems like Hadoop or open-source databases. Zoomdata lets them easily turn that data into charts, graphs and answers.

Reason: "With Zoomdata’s Visual Analytics Platform, users can now visualize billions of records in real-time and query across multiple sources," says Flomenberg.

And it can work with data that's stored in the cloud and in the data center, he says.

Company name: Visier

VC: Accel’s Jake Flomenberg

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $46.5 million

What it does: Analyzes HR data to help companies analyzing their human resources efforts.

Reason: "Visier focuses on actionable analytics on our most precious resources, our employees. HR data is gold that virtually no one is mining. Visier is helping to change that," Flomenberg says.

Company name: UserTesting

VC: Accel’s Kobie Fuller

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $48.5 million

What it does: UserTesting provides crowdsourcing usability testing of apps.

Reason: "UserTesting provides qualitative feedback from real people at a cost-effective price point, with lightning fast speed. The feedback is crucial in helping companies understand what they can be doing better to offer a the best experience possible," says Fuller.

Company name: Sensoria

VC: Accel’s Kobie Fuller

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $5.56 million. (Plus $116,000 raised on Indiegogo in 2013.)

What it does: It makes smart clothing full of sensors. Best known for its smart socks that tracks speed, cadence, foot strike for runners.

Reason: "Sensoria is a wearable platform that can be integrated seamlessly into apparel/other wearable goods that provides quality biometric and user feedback," says Fuller.

"Wearables will become more and more part of our everyday lives. The health and usage data will help inform us on how we can better live our lives, increase athletic performance and more," he adds.

Company name: Banjo

VC: New Enterprise Associates' Scott Sandell

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $121 million

What it does: Banjo monitors social media by location to show off what's happening anywhere in the world, in real time.

Reason: "Banjo is identifying real-world events using the social web and advanced imaging processing faster than any other method of news discovery," Sandell says.

Company name: Nextdoor

VC: New Enterprise Associates' Scott Sandell

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $210.2 million

What it does: Nextdoor helps neighborhoods create private social networks.

Reason: "Just like LinkedIn has become a social network for professionals, Nextdoor can become the social network for communities," says Sandell.

Company name: Jet.com

VC: New Enterprise Associates' Matt Sacks

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $545 million

What it does: Jet is a new Amazon competitor that charges low prices by selling bundles of products together.

Reason: It's the "fastest growing ecommerce company in history," says Sacks.

Company name: Combatant Gentlemen

VC: New Enterprise Associates' Matt Sacks

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $1.84 million

What it does: Three year-old online startup has upended the custom menswear market by offering finely crafted, 100% Italian wool suits that start from $160. They now sell all sorts of men's clothing.

Reason: "Vertically integrated brand in men’s formal wear that has scaled significantly while bootstrapped," Sacks says.

Company name: Raise

VC: New Enterprise Associates' Matt Sacks

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $87.2 million

What it does: Raise lets you sell your unwanted gift cards or buy them off of someone else, saving money in the process.

Reason: Raise is attacking "the huge ($400 billion) and strategically important gift card market," says Sacks.

Company name: Shiftgig

VC: New Enterprise Associates' Matt Sacks

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $35 million

What it does: Shiftgig finds contract workers to fill job postings from restaurants, hotels and retail industry.

Reason: "Leading marketplace for hourly labor, a large and under-served industry with continual turnover," Sacks says.

Company name: Placester

VC: New Enterprise Associates' Chetan Puttagunta

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $50.83 million

What it does: A one-stop shop for online marketing needs for real estate agents.

Reason: "Every year, the real estate industry spends nearly $25 billion on marketing through largely offline means. Placester is helping those agents better connect with home buyers and sellers online," says Puttagunta.

Company name: Wealthfront

VC: New Enterprise Associates' Chetan Puttagunta

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $129.5 million

What it does: Affordable online investing

Reason: "Changing how investors manage money; they continue to grow rapidly," says Puttagunta.

Company name: Forter

VC: New Enterprise Associates' Chetan Puttagunta

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $18 million

What it does: An automated real-time system that allows online retails to approve purchases.

Reason: "With Forter, ecommerce companies can eliminate fraud and increase revenue. Over black Friday and Cyber Monday, the company helped customers process billions of transactions while eliminating fraud," says Puttagunta.

Company name: enVerid

VC: OurCrowd's Jonathan Medved

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $1.34 million

What it does: It has brought the efficient, affordable air conditioning technology created for submarines and the space station to commercial buildings.

Reason: "Cleans the air, saves huge energy, makes big bucks…the 'poster boy' company for the post-Paris climate change conference," says Medved.

Company name: Mobile ODT

VC: OurCrowd's Jonathan Medved

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: Not disclosed (but at least $3 million in grants and other seed funding)

What it does: It is creating breakthrough optical diagnostic devices and software services that use a smartphone's camera to detect cancer.

Reason: "Fighting cervical cancer in Africa with the cell phone camera," Medved says.

Company name: Surgical Theater

VC: OurCrowd's Jonathan Medved

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $9.53 million

What it does: Surgical Theater is a startup that makes a Surgery Rehearsal Platform (SRP) where neurosurgeons can plan operations, do trial-runs to determine outcomes and practice techniques.

Reason: "The operating room goes full virtual reality starting with the brain….for real!" says Medved.

Company name: Windward

VC: OurCrowd's Jonathan Medved

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $15.8 million

What it does: Windward has built a big data platform that captures data from maritime sources. It can track a single ship and shipment to analyzing worldwide trade patterns.

Reason: "Big data mining on the high seas to save the planet," says Medved.

Company name: Samsara

VC: Andreessen Horowitz's Scott Rubin

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $25 million

What it does: It offers easy-to-deploy wireless sensors and software for the Internet of Things world, where everyday devices join the internet.

Reason: "Software-centric sensors for industry," says Rubin.

Company name: Textio

VC: Andreessen Horowitz's Scott Rubin

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $9.5 million

What it does: Textio uses machine learning to show how your job listings and candidate emails will perform before you’ve even posted them.

Reason: "AI-powered text platform to optimize CVs, job listings, talent searches," says Rubin.

Company name: Gigster

VC: Andreessen Horowitz's Scott Rubin

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $12.5 million

What it does: Gigster helps you hire contract Silicon Valley software developers or entire product management teams on demand. Promises a quote within minutes.

Reason: "Product managers and top software developers for any software project, large and small."

Company name: PlanGrid

VC: Andreessen Horowitz's Scott Rubin

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $59.1 million

What it does: PlanGrid is a cloud-based app that allows users to store blueprints and construction documents on iPad and iPhone.

Reason: "A collaboration tool for building and construction projects, from RFIs to blueprints," says Rubin.

Company name: Procore

VC: Bessemer Venture Partners' Brian Feinstein

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $49 million

What it does: cloud software for construction management

Reason: "Modernizing the construction industry. Used on some of the most important projects in NYC like Hudson Yards and WTC. Growing ~150% y/y," says Feinstein.

Company name: Intercom

VC: Bessemer Venture Partners' Brian Feinstein

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $65.75 million

What it does: A single suite of communication products that all teams can use including sales, marketing, product, and support.

Reason: "Software for customer communication. Marketing, live chat, and support all rolled into one. Growing ~150% y/y."

Company name: HackerOne

VC: Bessemer Venture Partners' Brian Feinstein

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $34 million

What it does: A crowdsourcing platform for bug bounty platforms, meaning it allows companies to hire hackers to test the security of their apps and websites, paying for bugs found.

Reason: "Marketplace for bug bounty programs that has emerged as the leader in this new approach to security. Marten Mickos just joined as CEO," says Feinstein.

(Mikos has a history as a tech CEO who leads his companies to big-dollar acquisition exits.)

Company name: ThinkingPhones

VC: Bessemer Venture Partners' Brian Feinstein

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $87.86 million

What it does: Cloud software for company phone systems.

Reason: "Moving the enterprise phone system to the cloud. Growing ~130% y/y," says Feinstein.

Company name: Cockroach Labs

VC: Google Ventures’ Dave Munichiello

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $6.25 million

What it does: An early-stage startup building a database that can survive anything, even a data center outage.

"Cockroach Labs is launching a web-scale database for the future. The team (multiple successful companies) has created an "un-kill-able" database," says Munichiello.

"Big data is getting harder to manage and current databases pale in comparison to the tools that Google and Amazon offer to their internal teams. Cockroach Labs' CockroachDB is changing that," he adds.

Company name: ThousandEyes

VC: Google Ventures’ Dave Munichiello

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $25.5 million

What it does: Gives IT pros a dashboard for every network in use from the private, corporate network to pubic cloud software-as-a-service clouds like Slack, Salesforce, Box, Gmail.

Reason: "IT organizations' reputations are impacted daily by their users' experiences on third party SaaS platforms like Salesforce, Box, Slack, Gmail, Evernote, Workday, etc. Thousand Eyes arms CIOs and CTOs with visibility," says Munichiello.

Company name: Skyport Systems

VC: Google Ventures’ Dave Munichiello

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $30 million

What it does: Offers an extremelty secure server and related software to keep very important apps and data safe.

Reason: "Skyport Systems believes in a zero-trust approach to computing where servers/endpoints are actively kept secure while networks are treated as if they're continually open/breached," says Munichiello.

"IT organizations are investing in a suite of security tools and we think they're going to start to invest in the most secure infrastructure (servers)," he adds.

Company name: CliQr

VC: Google Ventures’ Karim Faris

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $38.4 million

What they do: Helps companies choose and manage cloud computing services.

Reason: "CliQr is a service that helps you figure out the best cloud for your application, it can then move workloads seamlessly to your cloud of choice (public or private) and make sure things are running as efficiently as possible there," says Faris.

Company name: Incorta

VC: Google Ventures’ Karim Faris

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $2.37 million

What it does: Analytics on data and transactions as they occur.

Reason: "Real time analytics on big data without the need for manipulation and cleaning to unlock its value," says Faris.

Company name: ThreatStream

VC: Google Ventures’ Karim Faris

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $26.3 million

What they do: Threatstream helps IT pros aggregate and analyze enormous amounts of indicators that show hackers could be attacking their companies.

Reason: "There's a lot of bad stuff out there. Threatstream lights up your existing infrastructure with real context so you can make the best possible decisions on what's dangerous," says Faris.

Company name: Dtex Systems

VC: Google Ventures’ Karim Faris

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $15 million

What it does: Dtex is computer security that stops the hardest kind of hacks, those that come from "insiders" employees and other who are authorized to be on the network.

Reason: "Dtex has a very lightweight agent that monitors user endpoints to give the enterprise visibility on potential insider threats without impacting network traffic or user privacy," says Faris.

Company name: FullStory

VC: Google Ventures’ Karim Faris

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $11.9 million

What they do: FullStory lets you record, replay, search, and analyze each user's experience with your website.

Reason: "A super-searchable DVR for all customer interactions. FullStory allows organizations to empathize with their users to improve the overall experience," says Faris.

Company name: Invotas

VC: Google Ventures’ Karim Faris

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: Undisclosed.

What it does: It takes manual security tasks, from examining threats to documenting them, and automates those processes.

Reason: "Invotas has developed a cool security solution that automates many of the tasks that analysts do manually," says Faris.

Company name: Tamr

VC: Google Ventures’ Rich Miner

Relationship: VC is an investor.

Funding: $41.2 million

What it does: It's not enough to just collect all kinds of data, companies need to clean it for accuracy and categorize it before they can ask questions using it. That's what Tamr does.

Reason: Tamr is in the "hot area of big-data/data curation. Tamr organizes the data at enterprise scale and curates large numbers of data repositories," says Miner.

Plus cofounder and CTO "Mike Stonebraker won the Turring award this year," says Miner. That's the $1 million ultimate prize in computer science.

Company name: Trifacta

VC: Google Ventures’ Rich Miner

Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.

Funding: $41.3 million

What it does: Trifacta is also in the data-cleaning business, organizing big data so that it can be better used by analytics.

Reason: "They focus more on the UI and tools for individual analysts to analyze a small number of different data sources," Miner says.