The Next 25 Big Enterprise Startups

Cloudera helps companies build big data systems using an open source technology known as Hadoop. Hadoop can analyze huge quantities of data using low-cost hardware and enterprises are eating it up.

Cloudera is one of the leaders in this area created by some Valley heavy hitters including ex-Facebook-er Jeff Hammerbacher; Yahoo's former VP engineering, Amr Awadallah.

Watched by: Ping Li, Accel Partners.  "The category leader in innovating and deploying Hadoop in enterprise."

Relationship to VC: "It's mine."

Fun fact: The inventor of Hadoop (and head guy at the Apache Foundation), Doug Cutting, works for Cloudera.

Flash storage is changing how companies can store data -- making it faster and using less energy. It's the same type of storage used in in a thumb drive or in mobile phones. Nimble Storage is helping to create enterprise flash storage for "post PC" devices (also known as virtualization).

Watched by: Ping Li, Accel Partners."Nimble has developed an innovative file system that leverages the best of flash and disk natively for mainstream enterprise applications."

And watched by: Jim Goetz, Sequoia. "The emerging storage leader."

Relationship to these VCs: "It's mine."

Fun fact: After EMC shot a promotional video of a stunt motorcyclist jumping over the entire EMC line of 40 storage products, Nimble Storage CTO Umesh Maheshwari did the same with a mountain bike over a single Nimble Storage array. 

Once a company builds its complicated Hadoop big data app, Platfora offers technology that lets average business users work with the app. The company is still in stealth, and isn't launching the product until Q4. But enterprises have been hearing about it and have overwhelmed the company with requests to join its beta program.

Watched by: Ping Li, Accel Partners. "A data visualization/discovery application built on top of big data platforms like Hadoop. It allows enterprises to extract value out of all their big data plaforms."

Relationship to VC: "No relation. I just think it's cool."

Fun fact: The office lobby features glowing blue highlights and others in the building at first thought the it was a nightclub.

Okta is a cloud app that manages employee accounts and logins for other Web and cloud applications. It simplifies how IT departments will get employees up and running on software-as-a-service apps, and how to turn those logins off when an employee leaves the company.

Since launching in January 2011, Okta has nabbed over 130 enterprise customers including LinkedIn, Pabst Brewing Company, Comcast, Pandora and Nestle Purina.

Watched by: Jim Goetz, Sequoia Capital, Okta is "redefining authentication."

Relationship to VC:  "No relation. I just think it's cool."

Fun fact: Okta is a meteorological scale that is a measure of cloud coverage. Okta was first called SaaSure, but co-founders Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest nixed the name after Todd's wife thought it sounded too much like French perfume.

Sencha offers tools for developers to build HTML5 apps on any device. HTML5 is the next generation Web standard for interactive apps, competing with the likes of Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.

Sencha says that developers in 201 countries use its wares, and counts half of the Fortune 100 as customers.

Watched by: Jim Goetz, Sequoia Capital "The HTML5 market leader, with 1M enterprise developers."

Relationship to VC: "It's mine."

Fun fact: Sencha recently doubled its Silicon Valley, Redwood City, headquarters to 30,000 square feet.

Yesware is an email tool for salespeople that track emails, create templates, syncs with a CRM system and so on. It launched 9 months ago and on July 19, its 50,000-user signed up.

Watched by: Brad Feld, Foundry Group. "E-mail and CRM need to be integrated. Yesware is making it so."

Relationship to VC:  "It's mine."

Fun fact: CEO Matthew Bellows and other software engineers practice meditation so seriously that Feld nicknamed the company "The Monastic Startup."

An app for iPhone and Android that gives you one-touch access into any conference call without dialing, remembering codes, and writing down conference details. The number of new MobileDay users has grown by 466% in the past 90 days.

Watched by: Brad Feld, Foundry Group, "Conference calls on a mobile phone are a nightmare. This fixes it.

Relationship to VC:  "It's mine."

Fun fact:  The co-founders have collectively started over 11 small companies prior to MobileDay, though none of them were big, splashy names. (Examples include Copper Conferencing and TFStor).

mPowa is taking on Square but aiming itself at enterprises that already accept credit cards. Its fees are lower than Square's and it allows people to pay for purchases with a credit card, or a chip or PIN-enabled payment method -- popular in Europe. Its app is available on Android, iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Phone.

Watched by: Brad Feld, Foundry Group.

Relationship to VC: "No relation. I just think it's cool."

Fun fact: When mPowa hit the scene, Square was upset and threatened legal action -- but not over the mPowa's technology. Square was mad about the look-alike photo on mPowa's web site. mPowa voluntarily changed it.

Blue Jeans solves a big problem with videoconferencing. It's a cloud service that lets everybody talk to each other no matter what videoconferencing service they use. It was founded in 2009, and its service went live last summer. In its first year of operation it has connected over a quarter of a million participants in over 3,000 cities in over 200 countries around the world

Watched by: Brad Feld, Foundry Group, "Just closed a big round." ($25 million in June.)

Relationship to VC: "No relation. I just think it's cool."

Fun fact: The first 10 people Blue Jeans hired had no experience in the videoconferencing industry -- that was on purpose.

Braintree makes software that lets web sites and mobile apps accept credit cards. It processes over $4 billion worth of transactions annually for over 2,000 companies including LivingSocial, OpenTable, GitHub, Airbnb, Heroku and Uber. $1 billion of that are mobile transactions.

Watched by: Ryan Sweeney, Accel Partners,  "As more and more commerce is done via mobile devices and/or the Internet, Braintree is a becoming an ever important piece of the ecosystem." 

Relationship to VC: "It's mine."

Fun fact: Founder Bryan Johnson named the company because his favorite president was John Adams from Braintree, Massachusetts. Braintree sounded smart but not stodgy to him.

Qualtrics makes research and analytics software for enterprises. It helps companies make sense of "unstructured external data" meaning documents from customers, sales channel partners, suppliers, employees. Qualtrics is growing and hiring like made. It added 41 people  in the last quarter to 202 employees.

Watched by: Ryan Sweeney, Accel Partners, "There is 10 times more unstructured data to aggregate and analyze outside of the data center" than all the "big data" inside a data center.

Relationship to VC: "It's mine."

Fun fact: The office has a dog named Barnaby.

Dial Uber on your mobile phone and within minutes, a professional driver in a sleek black car will arrive curbside, charged to your credit card on file, tip included.

Watched by: Ryan Sweeney, Accel Partners. "Not only does Uber solve the annoying problem of not being able to find a cab, but it also displays the power of building a business purely on the mobile phone."

Relationship to VC: No direct relation but it is a customer of one of Sweeney's portfolio companies, Braintree.

Fun fact:  Earlier this month in eight cities, Uber let customers hail a nearby ice cream truck to their location.

With the Square device and app, companies can accept credit card payments anywhere with an iPhone, Android or iPad. Square has been insanely successful and is growing like crazy.

A year ago, the company had about 100 employees and processed over $1 billion in payments a year. Today, it has over 300 employees and is processing over $6 billion in payments a year. It doesn't hurt that Square was founded by Valley A-list dude Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter.

Watched by: Ryan Sweeney, Accel Partners. "Definitely a company with a lot of hype, but I feel it is completely warranted. In my opinion Square is rapidly disrupting the manner in which offline SMBs accept payments."

Relationship to VC: "No relation. I just think it's cool."

Fun fact: All of Square's conference rooms are named after famous town squares from around the world.

Big Switch Networks is a startup focusing on a huge trend in enterprise network equipment "software defined networking." VMware just bought its competitor, Nicira, for $1.26 billion. Big Switch is like a little brother to Nicira. Both companies helped develop this technology while at Stanford. Big Switch's co-founder also comes from Cisco and worked for Index Venture's Mike Volpi.

Watched by: Mike Volpi, Index Ventures. "Big Switch creates a programmable layer for the network making networking services – like firewalls or loadbalancers – 'applications' in SDN rather than hardware appliances. This is a very exciting sector that is just getting warmed up."

Relationship to VC: "It's mine."

Fun fact: After one of the company's engineers engaged in a 67-reply-long email thread about which espresso machine to buy for the office, the person was officially given the title "Head Barista." The 44-person company now owns three espresso machines and a french press.

Big data is the "hype" term but it often refers to a technology called Hadoop, which lets companies store vast amounts of data affordably, and run applications on top of that data.

Hadoop is open source software largely developed at Yahoo about five years ago. Hortonworks was spun off of Yahoo. The core team is lead by the lead architect for Hadoop – Eric Baldeschwieler – and the former COO of Spring Source – Rob Bearden. In its first year, Hortonworks has put more than 60 partnerships in place with the likes of Microsoft, Teradata, Net App and more.

Watched by: Mike Volpi, Index Ventures. "Hortonworks is to Hadoop what Red Hat is to Linux. They just introduced their first commercial distributions: HDP 1.0 and a gathering up a star-studded customer list."

Relationship to VC: "It's mine."

Fun fact: Employees are treated to in-office massages every other week.

Workday is a software-as-a-service company offering human resources and finance/accounting tools. It's been so successful at stealing away customers from the big enterprise software companies like Oracle and SAP, that each of them spent big bucks to acquire Workday's competitors.

Watched by: Mike Volpi, Index Ventures. "Workday is the clear leader in the HR space and now expanding into other IT software verticals. Terrific and experienced management team lead by Aneel Bhusri – huge opportunity in the future."

Relationship to VC: "No relation. I just think it's cool."

Fun fact: Workday won't be a startup much longer. It reportedly has filed a confidential S1, one of the first companies to take advantage of that provision from the new JOBS ACT. It won't need to release its S1 to the public until 21 days before its road show starts with an expected IPO in October.

Pure Storage has created enterprise storage systems made entirely out of flash memory -- the same type of small-in-size, low-power memory used in a thumb drive or in mobile phones.

The popularity of those devices has meant that flash has become a lot more affordable. When the company started, others were also working creating enterprise flash devices, but were often mixing it with the old disk technology.

Watched by: Mike Volpi, Index Ventures. "Pure takes advantage of the economies of scale in consumer flash memory and applies them to mainstream storage use cases. This is a huge step forward for performance and for energy consumption. Pure is also lead by terrific team – Scott Dietzen and others and they promise to be a major player in storage."

Relationship to VC: "No relation. I just think it's cool."

Fun fact: The company has taken old fashioned storage hardware and crafted a beer fridge and wine rack out of it, on display at their offices. The beer fridge is featured in this company promo video (skip to 1:56 to see it.)

Bromium is doing for computer security what VMware did for servers. The company has created a technology called "micro-virtualization" that lets potentially dangerous software run in a safe container, alongside trusted enterprise apps, and the enterprise PC user never know the difference.  In this way, PC users can download apps or open attachments without worrying about unleashing a virus on the company.

It was founded by Simon Crosby, who is known as the founder of XenSource, an open source competitor to VMware. XenSource was acquired by Citrix for $500 million in 2007.

Watched by: Peter Levine, Andreessen Horowitz. "Bromium upends the security market by creating software that invisibly isolates all applications and processes from security threats."

Relationship to VC: "It's mine."

Fun fact: The company's name is a play on Chromium.

GitHub is a web site where programmers can store, share and collaborate on open source projects.

It has become so popular that open source programmers are using it like a resume -- showing off the kinds of work they've done -- almost like a LinkedIn for programmers.

GitHub raised a whopping $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz which was the largest investment the VC firm ever made -- and one of the largest single VC rounds of all time.

Watched by: Peter Levine, Andreessen Horowitz. "Fundamentally transforms the way programmers develop software by hosting source code in the cloud and enabling a social network for developers. The result is more efficient and collaborative software development. GitHub has become the de-facto standard for software developers and is now the largest repository of source code on the planet."

Relationship to VC: "It's mine."

Fun Fact: GitHub CEO Tom Preston-Werner paid $5 for the GitHub's Octocat logo design from a stock-images website. But he eventually paid an artist a few thousand dollars to redraw a version that the company could fully own.

DataGravity is interesting for two reasons: what it does and who its founder are.

DataGravity’s products will remove the need for large complex software packages just to tap into the data that the company already has stored. It was started by Paula Long, the co-founder of Equalogic, a storage company acquired by Dell in 2007 for $1.4 billion. It's other co-founder is John Joseph, an early Equalogic executive.

Watched by: Peter Levine, Andreessen Horowitz. "DataGravity’s plan is to have storage be more than a data repository and to actually reveal information that adds value to a business. This has the potential to reshape how storage is delivered and managed going forward."

Relationship to VC: "No relation. I just think it's cool."

Fun fact: The company is housed in temporary offices right now and the engineers are having to work in tight quarters with the business folk. "Engineers trying to be quiet and proper is pretty funny," Long told us. "We have them dressing better, including wearing shoes while in the office."

Sunglass.io is changing the computer aided design industry by building social, browser-based software for 3D modeling.

Watched by: Peter Levine, Andreessen Horowitz. "Designers can take a 3D model and rotate, flip or scale it, all while collaborating with other designers during the process. The team behind Sunglass comes from MIT. Co-founder Kaustuv DeBiswas earned his Ph.D in design computation and was a TED fellow last year while his co-founder Nitin Rao is an MBA from Sloan that started his career out in social enterprise and microfinance."

Relationship to VC: "No relation. I just think it's cool."

Fun fact: The yellow/black colors for the Sunglass logo are inspired by "Kill Bill" movies directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Veeva is like a cross between Salesforce.com and Box for the pharmaceutical industry.

Its software-as-a-service offerings meets all regulatory requirements. Its also as easy to use as any Web site, its customers rave. It has already nabbed over 150 customers, from some of the world’s largest pharma companies to emerging biotechs. It was founded in 2007 by ex Salesforce.com and Siebel Systems execs.

Watched by: Jason Green, Emergence Capital. "Probably the biggest company you never heard about -- one of the biggest SaaS businesses" for the pharma industry.

Relationship to VC: "It's mine."

Fun fact: Orange is the the company's official color. Naturally, that means conference rooms are named after different types of oranges.

ServiceMax is a cloud app for managing anything to do with how companies support customers in the field, from tracking warranties, to tracking service visits.

It is also built on Force.com, Salesforce.com's app cloud for Mobile/social apps. ServiceMax sales grew by 185% last year, and sales to large enterprise companies grew by more than 300%.

Watched by: Jason Green, Emergence Capital. "Applications for field service a very big global opportunity."

Relationship to VC: "It's mine."

Fun fact: ServiceMax offers free healthcare to all employees.

Marin Software offers software for managing advertising campaigns including paid search, social media, display advertising, and mobile campaigns. It counts such companies as Macy’s, PriceGrabber and Salesforce.com as customers.

More than 1,500 advertisers and agencies manage $3.5 billion in annualized online ad spend through Marin Software.

Watched by: Jason Green, Emergence Capital. "Marin manages all the Google spend for most of the large Internet properties."

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

Fun fact: Marin's co-founders Chris Lien (CEO), Joseph Chang (EVP Engineering and Operations) and Wister Walcott (EVP of Products and Professional Services) were high school buddies.

Hootsuite is an app that allows teams to manage their social media posts to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Tumblr, and other sites. It is used by 79 of the world’s Fortune 100 companies.

Hootsuite is different from competitors because of its App Directory that let's users integrate all kinds of stuff into it including email marketing, surveys and RSS feeds.

Watched by: Jason Green, Emergence Capital. "Social media for small medium businesses."

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

Fun fact: Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes met Business Insider editor Julie Bort on a bike ride in Aspen, Colorado, when he rescued her from the side of the road after her bike chain broke. (Here's the full story.)

17 Enterprise Startups To Bet Your Career On