The 10 Hottest Cloud Startups Of 2019 (So Far)
The 10 coolest cloud startups of 2019 so far include companies focused on open-source and enterprise software to a data analytics firm about to be acquired by Google for over $2 billion.
Red Hot In Cloud
Cloud startups continue to attract venture capital funding and the attention of the top cloud computing platform providers amid a digital transformation march that’s expected to push public cloud service revenue from $214.3 billion this year to $331.2 billion by 2022, according to research firm Gartner.
CRN rounded up some of the hottest cloud startups of the year so far—from a two-year-old open-source and enterprise software company that emerged from stealth mode in December, to a data analytics company about to be scooped up by Google for $2.6 billion, to a cloud-based workplace messaging company that had one of the most successful tech company debuts in public trading this year.
CloudCheckr
CEO: Tim McKinnon
CloudCheckr is a cloud management platform provider that specializes in cloud cost management, cloud security and compliance with one-dashboard management across Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. The company grew its revenue by more than 50 percent in the first quarter and plans to almost double its staff by the end of the year at its Rochester, N.Y., headquarters and offices in Seattle and London. In June, CloudCheckr added a new high-security environment for financial services, public sector, health care and other regulated industries that have stringent compliance requirements and want to use the cloud.
Cloudflare
CEO: Matthew Prince
San Francisco-based internet performance and security company Cloudflare landed a $150 million funding round in March to help support its growth, extend its product range and continue its international expansion after reports last fall that it was planning an initial public offering. Its software platform, which enables websites to load faster with greater security without added hardware, software or changing lines of code, is used by more than 16 million domains, websites, application programming interfaces and mobile applications, up from 8 million in the prior year. Cloudflare has increased its network to 175 data centers in 75-plus countries globally and its network capacity to 30 terabytes per second. It recently debuted its “partner program 2.0” under new channel chief Matthew Harrell, previously Google Cloud’s channel business head for the western U.S. and Latin America.
Druva
CEO: Jaspreet Singh
Cloud data protection and management startup Druva raised $130 million last month, making it a unicorn in the tech world with a valuation exceeding $1 billion and bringing its total funding to $328 million. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company’s cloud-native, Software-as-a-Service platform is built on Amazon Web Services. It provides all-in-one backup, disaster recovery, archival and analytics solutions that deploy in one click and provide 360-degree visibility and control across all environments. Flex, Hitachi, Live Nation, Marriott and Pfizer are among its Fortune 500 customers.
Logz.io
CEO: Tomer Levy
Logz.io’s machine data analytics platform, which is based on the ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) Stack and Grafana open-source tools, includes artificial intelligence-powered analytics features such as built-in alerting and crowdsourced machine-learning capabilities. It’s now available on Microsoft Azure as a fully hosted and managed ELK-as-a-service offering. Tel Aviv-based Logz.io, which has a U.S. presence in Boston, also is partnered with Amazon Web Services and Accenture. It raised $52 million in Series D funding in May to build a new open-source experience for developers, increase its global presence and invest in its partner ecosystem. Logz.io has more than 700 customers, including Bleacher Report, British Airways, Schneider Electric, Symantec and Unity.
Looker
CEO: Frank Bien
Looker’s cloud-based unified platform for business intelligence, data applications and embedded analytics caught the eye of Google, which in June said it plans to buy the Santa Cruz, Calif., startup for $2.6 billion to help fuel Google Cloud’s multi-cloud and enterprise growth.
The companies have more than 350 mutual customers that use Looker and Google Cloud’s BigQuery data warehouse together to derive insight from their data, including Buzzfeed, Hearst, King, Sunrun, WPP Essence and Yahoo.
This year Looker added a new Looker for Sales Analytics application to its data platform to deliver insight to sales organizations.
The company has raised $280.5 million in multiple funding rounds, including $103 million in December.
Matillion
CEO: Matthew Scullion
Big data software developer Matillion scored a $35 million funding round last month—for a total of $60 million raised since 2016. Based in Manchester, England, and Denver, Matillion provides data transformation software for cloud data warehouses. It plans to double the size of its engineering team to extend the capabilities of its flagship Matillion ETL—its extract, load and transform solution that performs data integration within Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery and Snowflake -- in addition to increasing its customer support operations and partner program. Companies using Matillion’s software include Accenture, Bose, Fox, General Electric, Siemens, Splunk, Vistaprint and Zapier.
Slack Technologies
CEO: Stewart Butterfield
San Francisco-based Slack Technologies had one of the most successful tech company debuts in public trading this year. The cloud-based workplace messaging company, whose software allows customers’ employees to chat and collaborate on projects, decided to forego an initial public offering in favor of a direct listing and wound up with a $19.5 billion market cap after its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange last month.
The emerging growth company has free and paid subscription plans. As of April 30, it had 645 paid customers that accounted for about 43 percent of its revenue in the prior three months. It had more than 95,000-plus paid customers and more than 10 million active daily users. Slack reported $400.6 million in revenue in fiscal year 2019, an increase of 82 percent, but its $138.9 million loss leaves profitability elusive for now.
Snowflake
CEO: Frank Slootman
Fast-growing Snowflake’s cloud-native data warehouse enables seamless and secure data integration throughout organizations and across platforms. Its software has been running on Amazon Web Services’ cloud platform since 2015 and Microsoft Azure for the last year, and the company last month added the third top cloud provider. Snowflake on Google Cloud is scheduled to launch in preview this fall and be generally available early next year. Snowflake Microsoft Azure Government platform for federal government customers also launched last month.
The San Mateo, Calif.-based company tapped Frank Slootman as its new CEO in May to lead it through its next phase of growth.
Snowflake has raised $928.9 million since its founding in 2012, including a $450 million round last fall, when it was valued at $3.5 billion.
Solo.io
CEO: Idit Levine
Solo.io develops open-source and enterprise software that helps enterprises adopt and operate cloud-native technologies including microservices, serverless and service mesh. The nearly two-year-old Cambridge, Mass., company in May unveiled a collaboration with Microsoft for the service mesh interface specification (SMI) for service meshes running on Kubernetes. It also announced the initial reference implementations of the SMI in the Service Mesh Hub, the first industry hub dedicated to service mesh that it also unveiled that month, and SuperGloo, an open-source project for service mesh orchestration released in 2018.
Striim
CEO: Ali Kutay
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Striim has developed an enterprise-grade, end-to-end data integration and intelligence platform that collects data from a variety of sources—including databases, message queues, sensors and log files—and delivers them in real time to cloud and on-premises endpoints with sub-second latency. In April, it announced partnerships to simplify and speed loading of real-time data to Snowflake and offer a database migration service to facilitate moving data into databases running on Google Cloud Platform. It’s also partnered with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.