10 Hot Startups in the Channel

What did we learn from our analysis of hot startups in the channel? For one, the allure of Silicon Valley hasn’t faded.

The following 10 vendors, all tech startups founded no earlier than 2011, are making a splash in the partner community. Most are based in California, with a couple in suburban Boston.

Several are storage providers; others offer cloud migration, analytics, data-center services, security — or a combination of two or more of these hot services.

You’ll know the names (featured here in alphabetical order) of some of these, while others are companies you should know or soon will due to their growth and rapid up-and-coming presence in the channel and the industry as a whole.

Follow associate editor @JamesAndersonCP on Twitter.

Company: ClearSky Data

• Founded: 2014
• Headquarters: Boston
• Industry: Storage

• Twitter: @ClearSkyData 

ClearSky, which moves enterprise data to the cloud using a fully managed service, has said it hopes to compete against the likes of EMC and NetApp. We profiled the storage company in June of last year.

Company: Cohesity

• Founded: 2013
• Headquarters: Santa Clara, California
• Industry: Storage

• Twitter: @cohesity 

Cohesity recently joined Cisco’s Solution Partner Program and announced plans to expand into EMEA. It exited “stealth mode” in June of last year after garnering $70 million in venture capital. The company says it provides the first-ever hyperconverged secondary storage system.

Company: Datrium

• Founded: 2012
• Headquarters: Sunnyvale, California
• Industry: Storage

• Twitter: @DatriumStorage

Dubbed a “Cool Vendor in Storage” by Gartner this year, Datrium touts what it calls an open convergence infrastructure model. Former VMware CEO Diane Greene is one of the company’s major investors.

Company: Hedvig

• Founded: 2012
• Headquarters: Santa Clara, California
• Industry: Storage
• Twitter: @HedvigInc

Another Gartner “Cool Vendor,” Hedvig offers software-defined storage to improve scalability. The company announced in the spring of 2015 that it had raised $12.5 million in funding during three years in stealth mode.

Company: Illumio

• Founded: 2013
• Headquarters: Sunnyvale, California
• Industry: Data center and cloud security
• Twitter: @illumio

The adaptive security provider made the Forbes Cloud 100 list this year. Venture capital firms have helped the company with $142.5 million in funding since its inception in 2013. Co-founders Andrew Rubin and PJ Kirner both previously worked at Cymtec.

Company: Infinidat

• Founded: 2011
• Headquarters: Waltham, Massachusetts
• Industry: Storage
• Twitter: @INFINIDAT

Israeli inventor Moshe Yanai founded Infinidat after years of working at EMC. The big-data storage company has been growing its partner relationships, with resellers and distributors accounting for more than half of its revenue.

Company: KodaCloud

• Founded: 2014
• Headquarters: Campbell, California
• Industry: Enterprise Wi-Fi
• Twitter: @KodaCloud

KodaCloud uses cloud-service Wi-Fi that’s layered with AI, and partners with MSPs, IT outsourcers and resellers to help SMB customers.

Company: Paxata

Founded: 2012

Headquarters: Redwood City, California

Industry: Analytics software

Twitter: @Paxata

Description: Paxata offers a unified platform (based on Apache Spark and Hadoop) where IT and business leaders can view and process various data. The company most recently earned an investment from Intel Capital to the tune of $33.5 million.

Company: Velostrata

• Founded: 2014
• Headquarters: San Mateo, California
• Industry: Cloud migration
• Twitter: @velostrata

Description: Velostrata moves business applications to the public cloud, and can move development and testing workloads to and from the cloud. It announced in August that it had wrapped $17.5 million in Series B funding led by Intel Capital.

Company: ZeroStack

• Founded: 2014
• Headquarters: Mountain View, California
• Industry: Managed private cloud
• Twitter: @ZeroStackInc

Description: ZeroStack moves workloads from public clouds like AWS and VMware to an on-premises cloud, boasting reduced operational costs and quicker self-service application deployment. It completed a $16 million round of Series B funding in October.