14 of the most promising seed-stage enterprise startups

Last year, when we published a blog post identifying the 10 coolest New York City enterprise startups, few, if any, of those companies were household names. Since I wrote that piece, the companies have gone on to raise more than $100 million combined, and at least one, if not two, have their sights on an initial public offering in the not-too-distant future.

As an enterprise technology growth accelerator, Work-Bench keeps a close eye on what seed-stage enterprise startups are up to. Below, we’ve rounded up 14 of the most promising enterprise startups that have raised less than $5 million in funding.

While many of these startups might not be household names yet, these pre-Series A startups are the hotshot up-and-comers of enterprise tech and are already doing business with some of the largest companies in the world. Expect great things from these companies, in addition to the likelihood of large funding rounds ahead.

Here are the 14 most promising enterprise startups we’ve seen in the past year (in alphabetical order):

1. Amplitude. Backed by Y Combinator and a $2 million seed round, Amplitude is a mobile analytics startup used by the likes of Nokia, CrunchBase, Yik Yak, and Coursera. With such a promising list of customers, we’re excited to see if Amplitude has what it takes to take on Mixpanel.
2. Backtrace I/O. Backtrace I/O is a recent addition to NYC’s growing IT infrastructure ecosystem. The company has raised $1.1 million and offers a crash analytics platform with tremendous detail and speed.
3. Clearbit. Alex MacCaw, previously an engineer at Stripe and Twitter, has been launching a suite of business intelligence application programming interfaces (APIs) at Clearbit over the past year. The startup has already raised a $2 million seed round from backers, including top-tier investors at Fuel Capital, BoxGroup, and First Round Capital.
4. Conjur. Conjur is a startup that’s bringing security to the world of DevOps. They aid enterprises in their transitions to the cloud by offering access control on a cloud-native security platform, and have raised $2.6 million in seed funding to do so.
5. Do. Do is looking to deconstruct the negative connotations surrounding meetings, offering software that allows you to set agendas, track follow-ups, and define outcomes. With $2.4 million and an impressive list of seed investors, including New Enterprise Associates and world-renowned rapper Nas, Do is a startup to look out for in 2015.
6. Graphistry. Graphistry was first hatched in the labs of University of California, Berkeley, and it has since evolved to become a tool that creates high-density data visualizations on any web-enabled device.
7. Immunio. With a $2.7 million seed round from Bloomberg Beta and others, Montreal-based security startup Immunio aims to protect web applications from SQL injections, cross-site scripting, and other attacks.
8. Kentik. This San Francisco-based startup, previously known as CloudHelix, launched out of stealth this summer with a fully automated, cloud-based solution for network visibility, DDoS detection, and infrastructure optimization. Competing with Arbor Networks, ExtraHop, and SevOne, Kentik is building a new set of tools, helmed by a veteran group of networking and data leaders.
9. Pachyderm. Coming off of a $2 million seed round from Data Collective, Foundation Capital, and other top-tier seed and angel investors, Pachyderm is aiming to build the modern-day containerized version of Hadoop.
10. Sapho. This San Francisco-based startup founded by former IT execs from CBS Interactive consolidates the variety of enterprise application updates that employees receive into one customized stream. As Sapho has a $3 million seed round from SoftTech VC, Bloomberg Beta, and others under its belt, we expect to hear great things in the near future.
11. Scout RFP. This Chicago-based startup centralizes and automates the request for proposal (RFP) process, offering proposal templates, a bidding platform, and more. Backers like Google Ventures and New Enterprise Associates have pooled together $2.8 million in seed stage capital to support the cloud-based software startup, which counts Motorola Solutions, Subway, and Tory Burch in its customer base.
12. StackStorm. After spending time at Clarus Systems, Nexenta Systems, and VMware, co-founders Dmitri Zimine and Evan Powell founded the open-source StackStorm to automate DevOps. It can be used to streamline tools like Puppet, Chef, and SaltStack and is compatible with a variety of cloud infrastructure, such as Heroku and Amazon Web Services.
13. Tutum. This New York City-based startup, clocking in at a $2.65 million seed round, is a containers-as-a-service provider that simplifies the building, deployment, monitoring, and scaling of containers from all application platforms.
14. Unitive. This San Francisco startup is focused on measuring subconscious bias in job postings and educates employees about behaviors that unintentionally narrow the candidate pool. Its ultimate goal: to help enterprises build diverse, innovative teams through its interviewing platform.

Note: Work-Bench has no affiliation with any of these startups.

Mickey Graham is the communications manager at Work-Bench.

Originally published at venturebeat.com on August 8, 2015.