26 enterprise startups to bet your career on in 2015

Company name: Mixpanel
Headquarters: San Francisco
Investment raised to date: $77 million

Mixpanel grew hot in 2013 by helping companies figure out what website visitors were doing, and has been growing like crazy ever since.

Today, it counts nearly 3,000 companies as customers, including Uber and Airbnb, and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, early Yelp and PayPal exec Max Levchin, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and Yammer founder David Sacks. In December, it raised a $65 million round in that valued the company at $865 million.

Company name: Slack
Headquarters: San Francisco
Investment raised to date: $180 Million

Slack, a chat room for coworkers, is one of the fastest-growing business applications ever, going from launch to a value of $1 billion in a jaw-dropping 9 months. It now has over 365,000 users (including teams at Business Insider).

Prior to Slack, CEO Stewart Butterfield was a co-founder of Flickr, sold to Yahoo in 2005 for about $25 million.

Company name: Zenefits
Headquarters: San Francisco
Investment raised to date: $83.6 million

Two-year-old Zenefits has become the hottest employer in the Valley. It's causing chaos in the insurance and HR software industry by giving away cloud human resources software for free, making money as an insurance broker instead.

It's on track to grow its user base 1,600% this year and is so hot that "PayPal Mafia" angel investor David Sacks (who sold his last company, Yammer, to Microsoft for $1.2 billion) not only invested in Zenefits but signed on to work as its COO.

Company name: DigitalOcean
Headquarters: New York
Investment raised to date: $90.2 million

Cloud-hosting startup DigitalOcean has grown extraordinarily fast in 2014. In 2010, they had about 100 computers on the web and by January 2015 had grown to more 132,000 computers, making it the third-biggest web-hosting company, according to a site that tracks such things, Netcraft. They have 380,000 customers.

Two of the cofounders are brothers who met their third cofounder by a help wanted ad on Craigslist.

Company name: Couchbase
Headquarters: Mountain View, California
Investment raised to date: $116 million

Couchbase makes a kind of database called noSQL that is particularly good at storing the kind of data used in big-data and cloud-computing applications. As those technologies grow more popular, Couchbase has been riding the wave, doubling its revenues in 2014, and landing many multimillion deals, it says.

Its customers are AOL, Cisco, eBay, PayPal, Disney, Nielsen, Nordstrom, Wells Fargo, and many others.

Company name: Docker
Headquarters: San Francisco
Investment raised to date: $55 million

In less than two years, Docker went from a tiny side project built by Solomon Hykes and a couple of his friends to a worldwide phenom, with names like Amazon, Microsoft, VMware, Dell, HP, and Red Hat knocking on his door, begging to to be his partner. 

Docker is in a relatively new area called "container" technology, which makes it easier for programmers and companies to launch and runs apps in the cloud. Hykes nervously showed it during a developer conference and it took off from there.

Docker has now been downloaded over 100 million times and is used by companies like eBay, Baidu, Yelp, and Spotify. And competitors are starting to sprout up to challenge it, including Google.

Company name: CoreOS
Headquarters: San Francisco
Investment raised to date: $8 million

Alex Polvi launched CoreOS in 2013 to make computer software for huge cloud-data centers. (He sold his first startup, Cloudkick, for about $40 million when he was 25.)

In 2014, CoreOS made waves by taking on its former close partner, Docker, and released a competing technology called Rocket.

Now there's an all-out battle on for control of this new hot new tech for developers called "containers," and CoreOS is right in the middle.

Company name: Nutanix
Headquarters: San Jose, California
Investment raised to date: $312.2 million

Nutanix makes a device that has radically changed the enterprise storage market. To add more storage, you just plug together more of these devices. They include computers and software that makes them all work together like one big disk drive. It's an almost painless way to deal with growing amounts of data.

Investors can't pour money on this company fast enough. A year ago it raised $101 million and was valued over $1 billion. In December it raised another $140 million, valued at $2 billion. Next stop: IPO.

Company name: Huddle
Headquarters: London
Investment raised to date: $89.2 million

Huddle is London's hottest enterprise startup, a cloud service that competes with Box and lets workers share documents and work together. In December it raised $51 million, which, by UK standards, was considered a massive sum.

It also just hired a new CEO, with its charismatic founder CEO Alastair Mitchell moving into the CMO role. While Huddle insists it's focused on growth, not going public, all signs point to an IPO sooner rather than later.

Company name: Interana
Headquarters: Menlo Park, California
Investment raised to date: $28.2 million

Interana was founded by two former Facebookers who created some of Facebook most popular data-analysis tools, Bobby Johnson and Lior Abraham. They are famous in the big-data world for creating the open-source tools Scribe and Haystack.

When the time came to launch their own startup, Johnson persuaded his wife, Ann Johnson, a former electrical engineer at Intel, to be their CEO.

Their mission is to do for every enterprise what Facebook did for friendships: analyze billions of events in seconds to bring you the relevant info.

They just raised $20 million from investors like AME Cloud Ventures (Jerry Yang), Harris Barton, and Cloudera’s Mike Olson, among others.

Company name: HasMetrics
Headquarters: Seattle
Investment raised to date: Bootstrapped

Adam Herscher's deeply personal story about leaving a prestigious, high-paying job at Microsoft to found a startup called HasMetrics went viral in the fall. But he had good reason.

He and cofounder Sean Andersen are working on a technology that could turn customer service from a painful overhead expense into something that helps the company generate new products and land new customers.

Although not yet out of stealth yet, we understand the company already has some alpha testers and so far, so good.

Company name: Illumio
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, California
Investment raised to date: $42.5 million

Illumio is a computer-security startup with a product so radical it raised $42.5 million from a who's who of investors before it even came out of stealth mode.

In October it finally launched, showing the world a new way to secure data as it moves from device to cloud.

In November it landed Microsoft chairman John Thompson as a board member.

Thompson is an icon in the computer-security world, having previously led Symantec for 10 years. For the past five years, he's been CEO of a cloud startup called Virtual Instruments.

Company name: Tidemark
Headquarters: Redwood City, California
Investment raised to date: $93.4 million

Tidemark is a closely watched company tackling the relatively new field of "big data for finance geeks." It makes an app that lets business managers type in questions in ordinary language ("What was the worst-performing items in the forth quarter?") and the app delivers charts and graphs to a tablet or smartphone.

It was founded by Christian Gheorghe, whose rags-to-riches story is an inspiration. Tidemark is his fourth startup. He sold all of his previous startups and is well known in the enterprise-software world.

Company name: Anaplan
Headquarters: San Francisco
Investment raised to date: $144.4 million

Anaplan sells cloud financial-analysis software that takes on SAP and makes Excel obsolete for financial planning.

In May it raised $100 million on a $1 billion valuation after reporting phenomenal growth: from generating about $10 million in all of 2012, to $10 million per quarter in 2013, to about $10 million per month as of January 2014.

Human-resources cloud company Workday was one of the investors in the round, as was Salesforce.

Company name: Qualtrics
Headquarters: Provo, Utah
Investment raised to date: $220 million

In September, Qualtrics raised a whopping $150 million second round of venture investment and was worth over $1 billion.

It was a moment of pure victory for CEO Ryan Smith. A couple of years ago, Smith had turned down a $500 million acquisition offer. Qualtrics had bootstrapped its way into a profitable $50 million company at the time and he wanted to grow the company himself.

Since then, revenues have grown to "over $100 million," he told Business Insider.

Company name: Pluribus Networks
Headquarters: Palo Alto, California
Investment raised to date: $92.8 million

Pluribus is a startup in the software-defined networking field, a new way to build corporate networks. It just landed a hefty $50 million in venture investment, making it one of the best-funded SDN startups ever.

There was a rush to buy SDN startups in 2012 and 2013.

When Pluribus went shopping for another round of capital, Valley VCs showed little interest, thinking the gold rush on SDN was over. So CEO Kumar Srikantan and board member Jerry Yang called up customers and resellers of the equipment, particularly in China and they ponied up big time.

When your customers and sales partners want to be investors, that's a good sign.

Company name: Puppet Labs
Headquarters: Portland, Oregon
Investment raised to date: $85.5 million

Puppet Labs is one a handful of companies leading a trend called "devops." That's a movement to let developers control how they launch and run the applications they build for companies, rather than relying on IT departments to do it.

Puppet Labs offers software that automates many IT tasks. Its founder CEO, Luke Kanies, created the software after he had a career as a system administrator and knew the pain of the job firsthand.

Although Kaines is now running a multimillion-dollar company, he's still a humble, hardworking guy. Cisco, Google, and other big names have invested in his company, including a new $40 million round in June.

Company name: Chef
Headquarters: Seattle
Investment raised to date: $65 million

Chef is another closely watched startup in the field called "devops," which helps companies launch applications more efficiently.

Chef makes a popular open-source tool for automating tasks that IT administrators do, letting developers reclaim control over how their apps launch and run.

Chef is growing so fast it plans to double in size in 2015, from 200 employees to 400 by the end of 2015 at its new Seattle headquarters.

Company name: CloudFlare
Headquarters: San Francisco
Investment raised to date: $72.1 million

CloudFlare is another startup that made this list because of its mind-boggling growth in 2014. It offers cloud-based computer security and content-delivery services.

It was worth over $1 billion at the end of 2013 and its growth continued to astound through 2014.

As of August, the company was growing 450% annually, adding about 5,000 new clients a day, Matthew Prince, its programmer and lawyer turned founder, told us.

Company name: SkyHigh Networks
Headquarters: Cupertino, California
Investment raised to date: $66.5 million

Skyhigh Networks launched its service in February 2013 and investors were tripping over themselves to invest. It raised $60 million between May 2013 and June 2013.

Skyhigh offers a service that lets IT administrators uncover and secure all the cloud services its employees are using. About a year after launch it had over 200 enterprises customers.

It helps that CEO cofounder CEO Rajiv Gupta and engineering leader and cofounder Sekhar Sarukkai have done two previous startups together, successfully selling both of them.

Company name: Centrify
Headquarters: Santa Clara, California
Investment raised to date: $94 million

In May, enterprise security startup Centrify nabbed a $42 million venture investment from Samsung Ventures and others. Centrify makes enterprise security software and a cloud service that manages employee passwords.

At the end of 2015, Centrify reported a banner year: 5,000 customers worldwide, 400 employees, and many new partnerships.

If there's one thing that all the security breaches of 2014 taught us, it's that passwords are important.

Company name: OpenDNS
Headquarters: San Francisco
Investment raised to date: $51.3 million

Last year was a year of sweet retribution for OpenDNS's young CEO founder, David Ulevitch. When the company was two years old, his investors ousted him from the CEO job. He stuck it out at the company, bought them out, and got his company back.

In 2014, he raised $35 million investment from his new investors, including Cisco and other big names.

OpenDNS is best known for its service that helps computers securely connect to the internet. But it's grabbing attention for its ability to watch the whole internet, see where the bad guys have infected the web, and predicts where the bad guys will strike next.

Company name: DataGravity
Headquarters: Nashua, NH
Investment raised to date: $92 million

The cofounders of DataGravity sold their first startup, EqualLogic, to Dell in 2008 for $1.4 billion.

DataGravity is run CEO Paula Long, one of the most successful female engineers in the tech industry.

Her team invented a new kind of smart computer-storage system. Not only can it store, retrieve, and protect files, but it can also show you insights about your business, such as who are the experts at the company on certain topics.

It raised $42 million before it came out of stealth and another $50 million in December.

Company name: Jasper Technologies
Headquarters: Mountain View, California
Investment raised to date: $205.3 million

Jasper offers a cloud service for the up-and-coming technology called the Internet of Things. IoT is when ordinary objects get a computer chip and join the internet.

Since launching in 2004, Jasper has landed more than 1,600 enterprise and lays claim to customers like Air Liquide, Audi, Ford, Garmin, GE, GM, many more. In 2014, it raised $50 million on a $1 billion valuation, The Wall Street Journal reported.

It is rumored to be looking at an IPO, maybe as soon as later this year.

Company name: Lynda.com
Headquarters: Carpinteria, California
Investment raised to date: $289 Million

Lynda.com offers online training videos that teach tech skills, business skills, design, and more. It counts more than half the Fortune 500 as customers.

For a monthly fee of $25-$38 a month, you get unlimited access to nearly 6,000 training videos.

Lynda.com earned $150 million in revenue in 2014 and has been profitable since 1997. The company just raised a massive $186 million earlier this month, the largest ed-tech financing deal in the last six years, The New York Times reported. This is on top the $103 million it raised in its first-ever venture investment just a year earlier.

The company gets its name from cofounder and executive chairman Lynda Weinman, who worked as an instructor at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, before launching her company.

Company name: Xamarin
Headquarters: San Francisco
Investment raised to date: $82 million

Xamarin lets Microsoft developers easily move their apps over to iOS and Android. In 2013, Microsoft announced a landmark partnership with Xamarin and its rock-star open-source developer Miguel de Icaza.

The two had a historically rocky history. In 2000, de Icaza brought Microsoft's popular web-development language (.Net) to the company's hated rival operating system, Linux.

Flash forward about 15 years and Xamarin has collected a following of over 900,000 developers in 70 countries and has an excellent relationship with Microsoft.

De Icaza even used an iPhone on stage during Microsoft's 2014 developers' conference.

That partnership helped Xamarin land a $54 million round of venture investment last summer.

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