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25 Enterprise Startups To Bet Your Career On
Enterprise tech has gone from a yawn to an excited scream over the past year.
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Businesses that sell to other businesses, with their steady revenues and more-predictable growth, are now the darling of tech investors.
That means they're good places for employees, too.
So if you're gunning for a new job with stock options that could make you a millionaire, consider this:
- VCs are throwing money at enterprise startups.
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- They would like to throw more money at them, if they could find more good ideas.
- In 2012, the enterprise IPO market was red-hot. Companies such as Splunk, Palo Alto Networks, and Workday had extremely successful opening days in spite of the Facebook IPO fiasco—or maybe because of it, as investors veered away from consumer Web plays.
- Some of the Valley's brightest minds are working on enterprise software.
So if you're thinking of making the jump, where should you go?
Company: FireEye
Location: Milpitas, Calif.
No. of Employees: 400
FireEye is a hot security startup for a whole bunch of reasons. It solves the hard security problem of protecting enterprises against previously unknown, so-called "zero-day" attacks. It just landed a $50 million round of financing on a $1.25 billion valuation, and hired an experienced CEO, Dave DeWalt.
DeWalt joined in November after turning down some 40 other job offers. He's had a string of leadership successes, including the turnaround of McAfee through its $7.68 billion sale to Intel. Wouldn't you want to work for a guy with that track record?
Company: Box
Location: Los Altos, Calif.
No. of Employees: Over 500
Box is a venture capital darling, run by its young and brilliant founder Aaron Levie. Box is widely expected to go public in 2014 and to be a big hit with investors when it does. Meanwhile, the money folks can't stop throwing millions at it. In 2012, it landed a massive $150 million Series E round.
The reason it's so hot? Box has turned its secure file-sharing service into a development platform that enterprises love.
Company: Okta
Location: San Francisco
No. of Employees: About 75
Okta was the first cloud startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz. That's significant because Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz pioneered the concept at their previous company, Opsware. Okta has been going gangbusters ever since.
Okta helps companies manage employee identifies in the cloud. This is such a hot area that big guys Salesforce and Oracle now want in. (Okta's founder and CEO, Todd McKinnon, cut his teeth running the engineering department for Salesforce.com.)
The competition has helped Okta up its game. In 2012, it signed on 140 new enterprise customers.
Company: Coupa
Location: San Mateo, Calif.
No. of Employees: About 200
Coupa is a cloud service that helps companies track spending and buy the day-to-day stuff they need.
It suffered a heart-stopping moment in 2012 when SAP bought its biggest competitor, Ariba, for $4.3 billion. But that didn't slow it down.
Revenues have grown by more than 100 percent four years running. It ranked No. 115 on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500, and is scoring big customers like Coca-Cola.
Company: Puppet Labs
Location: Portland, Ore.
No. of Employees: 110
Puppet Labs offers software that helps IT departments automate tasks to run a big data center. It's become wildly popular, with 3.5 million downloads in the last 12 months alone, its founder and CEO Luke Kanies told Business Insider.
More than 200 users voluntarily contribute to the open source software, too.
The big companies are watching. VMware just invested $30 million last month.
Company: HootSuite
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia
No. of Employees: Over 300
While other Twitter management tools have withered and died, HootSuite has grown and grown. It's now a full-fledged social media marketing tool.
It had a killer 2012 complete with a $20 million venture round, passing the 5 million user mark and the acquisition of competitor Seesmic, its fifth acquisition in two years.
Company: Lithium
Location: Emeryville, Calif.
No. of Employees: Over 300
2012 brought an acquisition frenzy in Lithium's market, social-media analytics, with Salesforce.com buying Buddy Media and Oracle buying Vitrue.
Lithium wasn't left out of the party. SAP, a rival to Oracle and Salesforce, joined in a $53.4 million financing round.
Company: Acquia
Location: Burlington, Mass.
No. of Employees: Over 300
Drupal has become one of the most popular open source content management systems around and Acquia is its commercial side, run by Drupal's creator, Dries Buytaert. Drupal began as a hobby project form Buytaert's dorm-room couch and it now powers over a million websites including the White House, NASA, and Twitter.
Acquia just landed a big $30 million round after a stellar year that included doubling revenue, hiring 100 people, and growing partners to 550 worldwide.
Company: SugarCRM
Location: Cupertino, Calif.
No. of Employees: Over 350
SugarCRM was practically guaranteed to be successful when it lured open-source legend Larry Augustin to become CEO in 2009. Flash forward to 2012: The open-source customer-relationship management company is killing it.
It landed a $30 million round—its fifth round of financing—and hit a milestone of 11 million downloads. It has more than 7,000 business customers and more than 1 million users.
(Augustin is also on the board of another hot startup on this list, Appcelerator.)
Company: GoodData
Location: San Francisco
No. of Employees: Over 230
Whenever Valley pundits start talking about hot big-data startups, GoodData is on the tip of their tongues.
And rightly so. It was founded by Roman Stanek, known for founding NetBeans and Systinet, and its angel investors include Esther Dyson, a famed technology analyst and conference organizer. In 2009, VC legends Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz ponied up seed money to back it. Every year since then, GoodData has landed multimillion-dollar funding rounds, including a big $30 million last summer.
In 2012 it increased revenue five-fold, closing 40 six-figure deals last year. It tripled its customers to 8,000, including GE, Pandora, and Time Warner Cable.
Company: Cloudera
Location: Palo Alto, Calif.
No. of Employees: Over 300
As enterprises adopt the big-data technology known as Hadoop, they increasingly turn to Cloudera to help them. And Cloudera, cofounded by top data scientists at Facebook and Yahoo, is raking it in. It's signing up big customers, serving half the Fortune 50. And it has over 400 partners, adding 150 in the past six months including biggies like Oracle.
It landed a big $65 million round in December, including investment from the CIA's venture arm, In-Q-Tel, to fuel more growth.
Company: Pure Storage
Location: Mountain View, Calif.
No. of Employees: About 100
Pure Storage sells enterprise storage systems made entirely out of flash memory, the kind used in smartphones and thumb drives.
It's management team and board of directors is full of Valley stars including CEO Scott Dietzen (from WebLogic and Zimbra); board member Mike Volpi, a VC and former Cisco exec; and board member Aneel Bhusri, whose own startup Workday had a killer IPO in 2012.
It landed $40 million in venture capital in 2012.
Company: 10gen
Location: New York
No. of Employees: About 200
10gen, the MongoDB database company, almost couldn't help but be successful. It was founded by Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz from tech they built in their DoubleClick days when they needed a better database to run the ad network. DoubleClick was sold to Google for $3.1 billion and the two turned around and launched 10gen.
2012 was epic for 10gen. MongoDB hit more than 3.8 million downloads, 15,000 MongoDB User Group (MUG) members, 10,000 attendees at MongoDB global events and now has more than 500 commercial customers like Cisco, Craigslist, Disney, Foursquare, Salesforce.com.
10gen landed a big $42 million round in 2012 plus investments of undisclosed size by the CIA's venture arm, In-Q-Tel, Red Hat and Intel.
Disclosure: 10gen founders Dwight Merriman and Kevin Ryan are cofounders and board members of Business Insider.
Company: Nebula
Location: Palo Alto, Calif.
No. of Employees: About 75
There's a very important cloud computing technology called OpenStack that came from NASA, a project called Nebula. One of the people who created Nebula, Joshua McKenty, went on to found another hot startup, Piston Cloud Computing.
And Nebula was founded by NASA's CTO, Chris Kemp, along with experienced entrepreneur Steve O’Hara (who talked Kemp into leaving NASA). O'Hara lined up famous angel Andy Bechtolsheim (seed investor for Sun Microsystems and Google) to invest and off they went.
Nebula landed a $25 million round from Kleiner Perkins and a long list of notable others like Sun CEO Scott McNealy and Google chairman Eric Schmidt's fund, Innovation Endeavors.
Company: Big Switch Networks
Location: Palo Alto, Calif.
No. of Employees: Over 50
The young software-defined networking market is already on fire. The biggest player, Nicira, set it ablaze when VMware bought it for a shocking $1.26 billion in July. Another, Contrail, was snapped up last month for $176 million by Juniper, just two days after it launched.
Big Switch was considered the No. 2 SDN player behind Nicira. Now that its rival has been swallowed up, excitement over its future remains high. Its first SDN product came to market in November after it landed a $25 million financing round.
Company: PagerDuty
Location: San Francisco
No. of Employees: about 20
PagerDuty helps IT departments respond to outages and problems faster, better. It was founded in 2009 by three Amazon IT pros who used to carry pagers themselves for Amazon back in the day: Alex Solomon, Baskar Puvanathasan, Andrew Miklas.
They grew company the old fashioned way by signing up customers like Microsoft, National Instruments, Electronic Arts, Adobe, Rackspace, Etsy, Square, and Github.
They finally took their first found of venture funding in last month, $10.7 million led by Andreessen Horowitz and famous angel Maynard Webb.
Company: Plumgrid
Location: Sunnyvale, Calif.
No. of Employees: About 30
Like Big Switch, Plumgrid is also a startup in the software-defined networking market. It's being watched for different reasons.
SDN technology is a threat to Cisco, and Plumgrid was formed by a group of ex-Cisco execs. But they're trying to make existing networking hardware work with SDN tech, not be replaced by it. So their tech could actually be great for Cisco and its many, many customers who don't want to rip out their current Cisco setups.
Plumgrid is technically still in stealth, so its products aren't available yet. It snagged a large first round of $10.7 million in 2012 from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and US Venture Partners.
Company: GitHub
Location: San Francisco
No. of Employees: About 150
When four-year old GitHub raised an unprecedented $100 million in its first-ever venture-capital financing from Andreessen Horowitz last summer, it set a record as its largest investment to date.
GitHub didn't need the money. It had grown from a hobby project into a successful open-source software company with over 3 million users without outside investment. But it now can supercharge its growth.
GitHub has become one of the coolest startups in San Francisco, complete with one of the coolest offices we've ever seen. (See for yourself.)
Company: Atlassian
Location: Sydney, San Francisco, and Amsterdam
No. of Employees: about 500
Atlassian is a direct competitor to GitHub with a similar history. It had a record-breaking first investment—$60 million from Accel Partners in 2010 after bootstrapping for years. It also has a super-cool culture and a fabulous San Francisco office.
Atlassian is actually headquartered in Sydney, Australia, and has been so successful that its young cofounders are now some of the richest men in the country.
For employees, Atlassian's multiple offices are their own draw: It moves workers from country to country in a "secondment" program of temporary assignments. If you've ever wondered what it's like to live in, say, Amsterdam, this company can put you there.
Atlassian is clearly gearing up for an IPO, too.
Company: Appcelerator
Location: Mountain View, Calif.
No. of Employees: about 160
Appcelerator offers a popular mobile-app-development cloud service. It has an enormous following of more than 400,000 developers and hosts some 50,208 applications deployed on 111 million devices. That's about 10% of the world's smartphones.
As we previously reported, Microsoft could be trying to acquire the company. Even if that doesn't happen, Appcelerator is well funded to grow huge and go public.
In 2012, it nabbed $19 million. Its also got a nice partnership with Intel and Samsung to support their nascent mobile OS, Tizen.
Company: Joyent
Location: San Francisco
No. of Employees: About 100
When a company has a really huge data center and needs to use cloud tech to make it more efficient, it comes to Joyent. Joyent's tech costs "pennies on the dollar" compared to clouds built with tech from VMware, founder and CTO Jason Hoffman says.
Hoffman left a successful career as an oncologist to start Joyent and it's really paid off. Famous angel Peter Thiel was an early investor—long before he became a Facebook billionaire.
Since then, Intel has invested, as has Dell and EMC. In January, Joyent got an $85 million boost, too.
Company: Pertino
Location: Cupertino, Calif.
No. of Employees: About 30
Pertino is technically still in stealth mode (at least for a few more days) but we know it's got technology that's going to wow the network industry. It could completely change the way small and midsized companies use the Internet to connect with their business apps and co-workers.
Better still, it's got an A-list set of founders and managers. CEO Craig Elliot spent 10 years at Apple and then was CEO of Packeteer until Blue Coat bought it in 2008 for $268 million. Cofounder Scott Hankins, also from Packeteer, invented the Pertino tech and dragged Elliot out of retirement to invest in and run the company.
From there, a bunch of other big enterprise names opened their checkbooks. Its series A was nearly $9 million.
Company: Shape Security
Location: Mountain View, Calif.
No. of Employees: About 15
Shape is still in stealth mode and has been somewhat tight-lipped about its technology, but we know that the tech will make it harder for hackers to trick people into visiting malware-laced websites.
The company has a whole bunch of Valley tech bigwigs excited enough to invest. It recently raised $20 million. Its investors include Venrock, the venture-capital arm of the Rockefeller family; Kleiner Perkins; Eric Schmidt's TomorrowVentures; and executives at Dropbox, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Shape was cofounded by ex-Googler Sumit Agarwal, who was head of Google’s mobile product management.
Company: Calxeda
Location: Austin, Texas
No. of Employees: Over 100
Calxeda makes ARM-based servers. In other words, the chip that powers your smartphone powers computer servers in the data center, and this tech could forever alter the $55 billion server market.
Calxeda is part of a cadre of companies joining Facebook's amazing plan to build a new kind of server, too.
Plus it's poaching big names in the server industry like Gopal Hegde, who joined Cisco from Intel to help develop its successful server line.
Calxeda landed $55 million in November, and from investors like ARM Holdings (the company that provides designs for ARM chips), and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen's investment firm, Vulcan.
Company: Dyn
Location: Manchester, New Hampshire
No. of Employees: about 250
Dyn is almost single-handedly turning Manchester, New Hampshire into a tech-startup hotspot. Dyn is an old-fashioned success story. Its young founders bootstrapped their company into success, not taking any VC money for 11 years.
They recently took a $38 million investment from North Bridge Venture Partners. Some of the cash will go to the founders, who are madly investing in other startups in the area.
Some 2,000 enterprise customers use its DNS and email service, including Bitly, Twitter, Rovio and Salesforce.com.
Dyn is also known for its super cool offices and a fantastic culture filled with rock concerts and parties. (See for yourself.)
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