BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Gartner’s Top 25 Enterprise Software Startups To Watch In 2020

This article is more than 3 years old.

  • Despite a down year for enterprise software spending, revenue from cloud-based enterprise apps will grow 6.8% this year according to Gartner.
  • There are 15,761 startups who either compete in or rely on enterprise software technologies and solutions as a core part of their business models today 1,949 of which have received pre-seed or seed funding.
  • Crunchbase includes 3,196 companies in their Enterprise Software Startups Hub, who together have seen $58B in investment since the inception of the Startups Hub. 
  • Most active investors in enterprise software startups include Y Combinator, Techstars, Accel, 500 Startups, Battery Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

2020 is the crucible every enterprise software vendor needs to prove how resilient their apps & platforms are, showing prospects why moving workloads and apps to the cloud need to happen now. Global enterprise application software spending will reach $196B in 2020, a 4.7% drop from 2019 according to Gartner. Despite Covid-19 driving an economic downturn, software spending on cloud-based enterprise apps will increase by 6.8%. In comparison, spending on on-premises software will decline by 15.2% in 2020 based on Gartner's latest forecast analysis.

Factoring in how quickly and permanently millions of workers had to become productive working from home, Gartner also increased its forecast of the percentage of new cloud-based enterprise software purchases up from 75% in 2021 to 95%. All categories of enterprise software spending will shrink this year according to Gartner. The one bright spot is CRM. Gartner expects that category of enterprise software to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.15% between 2019 and 2024.

The 25 Best Enterprise Software Startups to Watch In 2020

Based on a methodology that equally weighs a startup's ability to attract new customers, current and projected revenue growth, ability to adapt their solutions to growing industries and position in their chosen markets, the following are the 25 best enterprise software startups to watch in 2020:

  • ASAPP - Customer care and sales agents use the ASAPP platform to know the right thing to say and the right action to take, in real time, as the customer conversation transpires on phone calls and digital messages. ASAPP’s machine learning models are continuously learning and predicting from every customer interaction, effectively turning every agent int a company’s best agent without the need for manual programming or extensive training. Many of the world’s largest companies in telecom, financial services and travel have realized dramatic improvements to both efficiency and effectiveness in how their agents serve customers today using ASAPP’s machine learning-based solutions.
  • Blue Hexagon - Blue Hexagon is a deep learning innovator of Cyber AI You Can Trust™ to stop cyber adversaries and malware at sub-second speed, before the infiltration. The company’s real-time deep learning platform delivers the world’s highest detection efficacy for zero-day and known threats and real-time orchestration and blocking controls, to protect enterprise network, cloud and email. Blue Hexagon deep learning models do not require baselining and eliminate learning delays, sandboxes and rules or signatures. Blue Hexagon is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA and backed by Benchmark and Altimeter Capital.
  • ClickUp - ClickUp’s cloud-based project management platform is designed to increase team productivity and is noteworthy in how effective it enables team members to use the same app to plan, organize and collaborate on projects. The platform also supports offers, docs, reminders, goals, calendars and inbox tools, thereby enabling team members to stay in sync and enhance their productivity. ClickUp has raised a total of $37.5M in funding over 3 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jun 24, 2020 from a Series A round.
  • Cresta - Cresta was founded with the goal of using AI to transform how users learn high-value skills. Cresta brings together industry-leading AI experts, decades of contact center and sales expertise, proven leadership and top-tier investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock Partners to help their customers achieve their most challenging customer service goals. The company's artificial intelligence assistant surfaces the right information at the right time from sales agents and augments the rest of the team by increasing their conversion rate and efficiency, enabling organizations to double the productivity of their sales team.
  • Discuss.io - The company's services provide on-demand market research to companies that assist decision-makers to focus on specific areas including product development and optimization, brand and segment exploration, testing for advertising, package design and web concepts, enabling clients to find global consumers, conduct interviews and capture and share insights across their organization. The following video explains how Discuss.io works:

  • Drift - Drift is a conversation-driven marketing and sales platform. With its quickly evolving set of tools and playbooks, Drift unlocks the insights buried in conversations to accelerate business success. Customers use Drift to provide a modern buying experience for potential customers, generate more qualified leads and dramatically accelerate the sales cycle. Drift excels at building chatbots that automate customer interactions at scale. Drift’s customers speak highly of the company’s expertise in enabling Account-Based Marketing (ABM). They also produce some of the best content in marketing technology today, with their recent post, Everything You Need to Know About Neuromarketing (With Examples from Brands That Are Really Good at It) being a thorough overview of a fascinating topic.
  • Fireflies.ai - The company's platform acts as an executive assistant that automatically transcribes and takes bullet notes from users’ phones calls and meetings, enabling clients to receive the most valuable insights from any call. What makes Fireflies.ai noteworthy is how accurately the platform records, transcribes and enables collaboration. The startup is concentrating on the verticals of sales calls, recruiter interviews, customer success meetings, management meetings and user interviews.
  • Fivetran - Fivetran provides fully automated connectors that sync data from cloud applications, databases, event logs and more into data warehouses. Their product is designed from the ground up to automatically normalize complex data sources, recover from failures without human intervention and leverage the advanced capabilities of analytical databases such as Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery and Databricks. The following video provides an overview of how Fivetran provides value to its customers:

  1. HYP3R - HYP3R is an award-winning location-based marketing platform that unlocks the power of geosocial data. The company’s mission is to enable forward-thinking marketers to analyze consumer and competitive behavior on-location, engage customers in a useful way and build an actionable CRM to acquire high-value customers more efficiently.

  • Kaleo Software - Kaleo Software automatically turns documents and experts into searchable FAQs so finding anything is as easy as asking for it. Instead of creating ‘yet another place’ to find answers, Kaleo integrates into popular business applications like SharePoint, ServiceNow and Slack to deliver information when and where employees need it. Kaleo Answer Management captures and delivers knowledge in Q&A format. It finds common questions and automatically creates bite-sized answers that employees will actually use. Employees won't have to search for information and experts won't have to keep answering the same questions. Kaleo has raised a total of $8.8M in funding over 3 rounds. The following diagam explains how Kaleo defines Answer Management:

  • LeadGenius - LeadGenus’ mission is to enable B2B sales and marketing organizations to connect with their prospects via unique and personalized data sets. Over 80% of B2B data remains undiscovered or underutilized. LeadGenius is an Intelligent Data Service vendor that can uncover hard to find B2B data and personalize it to a specific business. LeadGenius sources vertical or international data at scale using a proprietary blend of technology automation and human experts. LeadGenius is backed by some of the most prominent investors in the Silicon Valley, including Sierra Ventures, Lumia Capital, Javelin Venture Partners and SJF Ventures.
  • LogDNA - LogDNA provides detailed insights into production environments on its intuitive, well-designed log management platform. It enables engineering and DevOps professionals to easily and quickly gather all systems and application logs into one intuitive platform to get back to focusing on what is most important: building great products. LogDNA enables petabytes of data from disparate locations (public cloud, private cloud, on-premise, hybrid, IoT and PoS) to be parsed and searched quickly. Intuitive to use and built on Kubernetes, LogDNA combines a strong focus on providing the absolute best developer experience with the needs of the modern enterprise. Making logs easily and quickly actionable is the core of LogDNA's business. The following video explains why LogDNA is one of the most interesting enterprise startups to watch this year:


  • Moveworks - Moveworks is a cloud-based AI platform purpose-built for large enterprises that solves one, big, frustrating problem: Resolving employees'​ IT support issues. Instead of tracking issues, Moveworks uses advanced AI to solve them, instantly and automatically—with no human intervention. Moveworks has many of the world’s most recognizable brands as our customers including AutoDesk, Broadcom, Medallia, Nutanix, Slack and many others . From hyper-growth startups to the Fortune 500, these companies rely on Moveworks to keep their employees productive and their businesses running smoothly. Moveworks is backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners and is headquartered in Mountain View, California.
  • Nova Health Labs - Nova Health Labs (fka Cancer Blueprint Inc.), an enterprise software and services company focused on reducing human errors and burnout of oncology care teams by automating administrative and communication workflows. Their intelligent communications navigator provides automated voicemail transcription, analysis and intelligent triage to get the right information to patients at or closer to the point of need. Nova also extracts patient-reported outcomes that provide care teams with critical insights to personalize care delivery and coordination.
  • Observe.AI - Observe.AI is one of the emerging leaders in AI-powered Speech Analytics and Quality Management for contact centers that helps to coach agents into top performance levels serving customers. With its Voice AI Platform, which leverages the latest Speech and Natural Language Processing technologies, organizations quality check 100% of calls, ensure compliance and offer targeted coaching. Observe.AI is trusted by more than 100 customers and partners including, TripAdvisor, Microsoft, ERCBPO, Talkdesk and more. Backed by Scale Venture Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, Y Combinator and Emergent Ventures, Observe.AI's headquarters is located in San Francisco with offices in Dallas and Bangalore. Dick Costolo of 01 Advisors provides an overview of Observe.AI’s technology and unique strengths, positioning them to disrupt the $300B Contact Center industry:


  • Onna - Onna is a knowledge integration platform for organizations that connects to emerging apps, such as JIRA, Confluence and Slack. Its platform is a central point for enterprises’ common information platforms including Confluence, Gmail, Zendesk, Slack, Drive, or Dropbox. The startup helps organizations collect and preserve data in a defensible manner for Preservation, Knowledge Management, eDiscovery, GDPR, Enterprise Search and Information Governance. Their advanced search queries together with their recommendation system make the job of finding data an easy task. Information overload and inefficiency affect companies at an individual and organization-wide level. A central point for information enables cross-functional alignment among teams and also helps users with contract management, compliance, eDiscovery and more.
  • Rubikloud - Rubikloud is changing retail with intelligent decision automation using AI. Based in Toronto, Canada, the startup’s cloud-native AI platform and two flagship AI applications (Promotion Manager & Customer LifeCycle Manager) automate and improve mass promotional planning and loyalty driven marketing for large retailers and Consumer Packaged Goods (CPQ) providers. Rubikcloud believes that AI should deliver business operational improvements and an immediate financial impact. Today the startup has clients with retail brands operating in North America, Europe and Asia. Operating with over 100 staff, Rubikloud has offices in Toronto, Texas, London and Hong Kong. Rubikloud has raised a total of $45.5M in funding over 3 rounds.
  • Synack - Synack is noteworthy for its crowdsourced security testing platform intended to deliver smarter penetration testing to security teams who need a scalable, efficient way to test their attack surfaces on a continuous cadence and get actionable results. The company's crowdsourced penetration test is powered by the world's most skilled and trusted ethical hackers and augmented by AI-enabled technology to give customers the best of human intelligence and machine intelligence.
  • Unbounce - Unbounce’s mission is to remove the pain felt by marketers that have to rely in internal IT/Software departments in order to get their marketing tasks done. Unbounce lets you build, publish and test your marketing promotion landing pages with no IT support needed! The Unbounce product is a 100% web-based Software as a Service (SaaS) that enables marketers to manage their own campaigns without seeking help from IT. Using our template library you can build click through, lead gen, sales letter and video landing pages in minutes. Unbounce provides marketers the easiest way to create, publish & A/B test desktop and mobile-responsive landing pages, independent of IT.
  • Urbint -Urbint is an artificial intelligence company for infrastructure and utility safety. It creates AI-powered solutions that enable utilities and infrastructure operators to maximize risk reduction on every dollar spent and deploy the right resources to the right place at the right time. The company's technology leverages proprietary Models of the World and machine learning to enable risk-driven decision making, enhancing safety, reliability and affordability - all while reducing emissions. Urbint predicts and prevents threats to critical infrastructure and the workers who maintain it to make communities safer and more resilient. The company pinpoints risk in the construction, servicing, replacement and protection of infrastructure. Urbint has raised a total of $35M in funding over 3 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jun 18, 2020 from a Series B round.
  • Vantage Point - Vantage Point's immersive training and HCM platform leverages Virtual Reality (VR) and focuses on Sexual Harassment and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) training. Vantage Point was founded under the belief that while technology can cause apathy, immersive technology can drive empathy and fundamentally make the world more human. Vantage Point believes that the heart of all we do is human. The way we make the world more human is by using technology to teach and inspire people to become the very best versions of themselves they always hoped to be. Today Vantage Point is actively developing the platform and the products to train people on EQ-driven and Soft Skills that matter, with the ultimate goal of enabling humans to unlock their full potential. Vantage Point is used by the top Fortune 500s, Global Law Firms, Startups and more. Vantage Point is a female led company with executive leadership including the former Chief Software Architect of SAP SuccessFactors.
  • Wise Systems - Wise Systems builds autonomous dispatch and routing software that uses machine learning to continuously improve fleet efficiency and customer service across last-mile operations in food, beverage, courier, energy, field service and other markets. Used by some of the world’s largest brands, Wise Systems customers typically see 10-15% mileage reductions, significant increases in fleet utilization and up to 80% decreases in late deliveries. The Wise Systems platform applies software-based logic to all orders and makes intelligent, data-driven decisions to optimize both fleet performance and customer service — processing millions of data points and making thousands of real-time decisions.
  • Workboard - The WorkBoard Enterprise Results Management solution helps organizations align Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and FAST goals, automate business reviews and execute for growth. It’s a data-driven, digital approach to defining, aligning and managing strategic outcomes so organizations can be more competitive in less time.
  • Zebrium - Zebrium uses machine learning to catch software incidents and show IT and cybersecurity teams the root cause. Designed to be used with any application, the Zebrium Autonomous Monitoring platform is known for its ease of use and quick set-up with customers, who also say the system often delivers initial results within hours of being installed. Unlike traditional monitoring and log management tools that require complex configuration and tuning to detect incidents, Zebrium’s approach to using unsupervised machine learning requires no manual configuration or human training. Here’s a video that explains how their Autonomous Monitoring platform works:

  • Zeitworks - Zeitworks is developing a SaaS platform that leverages machine learning to discover, analyze and improve customers' business processes — without interrupting users or requiring system integrations. all experienced the pain of traditional process improvement projects in their careers. Using proprietary technology being developed by the company, the solution discovers and measures business process execution step-by-step through the paths workers take in the course of everyday work. The latest funding round came from Madrona Venture Group for $4.5M on June 11, 2020.

Follow me on LinkedInCheck out my website