The tablet and smartphone have invaded the workplace and are changing everything about the way we work.
Office-bound employees are now free to roam and work on their personal devices. Road warriors and field workers now have a device as powerful as a PC that fits in their pockets.
A lot of attention is given to startups that create mobile apps for consumers (from Flipboard to Snapchat) but the companies on this list are focusing on a different, and huge, market: enterprises. Businesses will spend a whopping $340 billion on mobile products by 2017, says ABI Research.
We created this list by asking several enterprise venture capitalists to name the mobile startups they were most excited about, inside and outside their own investments. We also threw in a few picks of our own.
Clari: apps built from other cloud apps
Clari is a platform for enterprise developers for writing mobile apps.
It's still in beta but eventually it will helps them write beautiful apps that can easily tap into a lot of different cloud services like Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Chatter, Salesforce.com
Recommended by: A number of VCs named it as hot. Jim Goetz, Sequoia.
Why it's hot:Goetz says, "Mobile-first enterprise app and cloud service bringing consumer grade design to business applications. The team's had $1B+ in successful exits and has really strong customer traction pre-release.
Relationship: Investor.
Expensify: Easy expense reports
Expensify is an app that does your expense reports.
Snap a picture of your receipt and it inputs that info, so you don't have to type it all in by hand.
Recommended by: A VC that didn't want to be named.
Why it's hot: The Valley has been buzzing about Expensify since 2008, when its alpha product won a prize at a TechCrunch conference. In 2009, the entire Expensify team went to Istanbul for a month and wrote an award-winning Salesforce.com Expensify application.
Relationship: No relation, just thinks the company is cool.
Workspot
Workspot lets enterprises instantly and securely give employees access corporate apps on a mobile devices.
It has even issued a challenge: Give them 60 seconds and they can get any enterprise app running on a mobile device.
Recommended by: Jerry Chen, Greylock Partners
Why it's hot: Chen says, "They are building enterprise app access for a mobile-first world. They do the important job of securing mobile access to legacy enterprise apps in addition to email and newer apps."
Relation: No relation, just thinks the company is cool.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider