2017 is almost here and it's once again time to predict which startups will take the tech industry by storm.
Who better to ask than the startup experts, the VCs that watch the industry, guide the startups, hear their pitches, and invest in them?
So we reached out to a handful of top VCs and asked them which young or growth-stage startups will boom in 2017.
We asked them to particularly focus on enterprise startups — those that sell services to businesses, as opposed to selling to consumers. Enterprise IT is a $3 trillion industry and startups are the ones that are turning it on its head.
They gave us this list that includes everything from technology that brings artificial intelligence to salespeople, to tech that is changing agriculture, financial, cyber security, and international shipping industries.
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Exabeam: rooting out internal hacker spies
Company name:Exabeam
VC: Sequoia's Carl Eschenbach
Relationship: No relation. VC just thinks it's cool.
Funding:$35 million
What it does: This is a security product that watches human behavior on the network to discover who is trying to hack or sabotage it. It can also be used in forensics after an attack.
Why it's hot:"The simplicity and user interface of Exabeam’s User Entity Behavior Analytics is a serious differentiator compared to the rest of the market. It’s amazing how easy it is to use. They have the ability to cut incident investigations down from what would be days or weeks to literally minutes because of their data science approach to finding the threats. 2017 will be a year where I expect Exabeam to really accelerate growth," Eschenbach says.
Viptela: a better way to manage networks
Company name:Viptela
VC: Sequoia's Carl Eschenbach
Relationship: VC is an investor.
Funding:$108.5 million
What it does: This is cloud software that helps companies manage their wide-area computer networks, the part that connects remote offices together via telecom providers.
Why it's hot:"Corporations spend upwards of 10% of their IT budgets on telecom costs. With Viptela’s software-defined WAN you can see upwards of 50% savings by replacing operationally complex MPLS networks. It’s not a matter of if people will deploy SD-WAN’s, it’s when and how fast. 2017 will be the year we see this acceleration," Eschenbach says.
Domino Data Lab: The Github for data science
Company name:Domino Data Lab
VC: Sequoia's Pat Grady
Relationship: VC is an investor.
Funding:$10.5 million
What it does: This is cloud software that helps data science teams collaborate, even across industries, share the analysis tools they create.
Why it's hot: "Domino is to data science as GitHub is to coding; it's a collaborative system of record. Over the last ten years, with the rise of software, GitHub became a household name. Over the next ten years, as data science makes software intelligent, Domino will become a household name," Grady says.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider