Every year we survey the field of startups selling their wares to businesses to find the ones we think are sure-fire winners.
These are companies with great technology, great leadership, massive investor backing, or tons of partnerships and industry attention. Or all the above.
Enterprise has become a hot area for startups in the last year or two. We actually had difficulty narrowing our list down to these select few.
Mixpanel: Watching your website
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.
Slack: Insanely popular chat app for work
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.
Zenefits: Hottest employer in the Valley
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.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider