10 Hot Tech Startups For October

Young Companies Surge Ahead

September's Hot Tech Startups highlighted a number of up-and-coming companies in the security and mobility space, to name a few. And, innovators kept a fast pace this month, moving young companies ahead in cloud services, big data, virtualization and more.

Venture funders followed the action with generous investments.

Continue on and see which startups are heating up for October.

Metacloud

CEO: Steve Curry

Metacloud came out of stealth mode at the OpenStack Design Summit Monday to trumpet its fully managed, private cloud service for enterprises.

The company said its private cloud service includes high availability, automated scalability, high performance, network optimization and simplified management.

The Pasadena, Calif.-based company was funded by Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture capital firm Storm Ventures, the details of which have not been released.

Cloudian

CEO: Hiroshi Ohta

Cloudian, of Foster City, Calif., offers an Amazon S3-compatible cloud object storage platform letting solution providers and businesses build scalable cloud storage products.

Cloudian supports cloud computing environments such as Citrix Cloud Platform and OpenStack, as well as the tools and apps offered with Amazon S3.

The company is also distributing a free version of its technology, called Cloudian Community Edition, which provides the functionality of the full version but limits users to 100 TB of cloud-based storage.

Nakivo

CEO: Bruce Talley

Startup cloud storage technology developer Nakivo has unveiled technology that leverages Amazon Web Services to offer capacity to protect VMware virtual machines and their data.

With Nakivo Backup & Replication, SMB customers and channel partners can quickly back up VMware virtual machines and their data to the Amazon Cloud.

Nakivo's prices are well below industry standards, according to Sergei Serdyuk, director of product management at the Campbell, Calif.-based vendor.

Gridstore

CEO: Kelly Murphy

Cloud-based storage startup Gridstore is offering grid-based, scale-out storage, featuring its flagship product, The Grid, with Virtual Controller Technology.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company recently won $12.5 million in venture funding, led by GGV Capital and Onset Ventures, bringing total investment in the company to $15 million.

Gridstore says it sells its products exclusively through a network of technology solution resellers that provide IT solutions to both small and large organizations.

Lettuce

CEO: Raad Mobrem

Lettuce sells a simple order management system focused on SMBs. It uses a mobile sales app to allow businesses to capture, track and process orders on the go.

Venice, Calif.-based Lettuce had the useful idea of connecting SMB's disparate backend systems to allow them to run a fully functional order management system with simple setup and automated order fulfillment software.

Lettuce offers QuickBooks integration for its PC version and plans on integrating with other accounting systems in the near future.

The company recently received $2.1 million in funding from investors, led by CrossCut Ventures.

CodeLathe

CEO: Madhan Kanagavel

CodeLathe offers cloud storage software that businesses can use to build private storage clouds.

The Austin, Texas-based company's Tonido Cloud product lets customers use either their own storage infrastructure or cloud infrastructures such as OpenStack or Amazon S3 to provide remote file access, synchronization and sharing to their users either inside the office or remotely.

The private cloud storage service is based on CodeLathe's consumer-focused Tonido Personal Cloud software, which lets users access data on their home PCs via mobile devices.

The company is looking for solution providers, systems integrators and service providers, offering recurring revenue in addition to services revenue from selling the service, CodeLathe CEO Madhan Kanagavel told CRN.

Puppet Labs

CEO: Luke Kanies

Puppet Labs, of Portland, Ore., develops IT automation and software-defined infrastructure.

With the company's key products, Puppet and Puppet Enterprise, businesses can automate configuration management and infrastructure to enable customers to manage cloud infrastructure operations.

The company's IT automation software lets system administrators manage cloud computing operations at enterprise service levels, allowing cloud scaling from small numbers of on-premise nodes to tens of thousands of nodes in the cloud.

Message Bus

CEO: Jeremy LaTrasse

Cloud-based email messaging company Message Bus has received $11 million in venture funding, led by North Bridge Venture Partners.

Message Bus provides a cloud-based application service for delivering messaging to email and mobile channels. Message Bus uses messaging protocols or an API to facilitate service, cutting out the need for multiple messaging servers.

The company ensures secure, reliable messaging between senders and recipients and says it increases message deliverability rates and revenues.

Streak

Co-Founders Omar Ismail and Aleem Mawaani

Streak said its CRM service aims to allow customers to manage their business processes from their Gmail accounts.

The company introduced an API this month to make it easier to access the data stored in Streak by creating and editing boxes, setting up automated reminders, searching Streak data and receiving a news feed for updates to users' boxes and pipelines.

The company focuses on SMBs and is free, although paid services are expected to launch next spring.

Streak has raised $1.9 million from investors including Battery Ventures and others.

Metamarkets

CEO: Michael Driscoll

Metamarkets, of San Francisco, provides a real-time, cloud-based analytics platform to view data, support decisions and enhance operational awareness.

The Metamarkets analytics platform provides processing, querying and visualization of high-volume, high-frequency data.

Its components include Data Pipes, a customized Hadoop pipeline for parallel data processing; Druid, a distributed in-memory data engine that can parse data 1,000 times faster than conventional, disk-backed databases; and a cloud-based architecture that enables elastic scaling and lowered costs.

The company has received $23 million in venture funding from a variety of investors, including Khosla Ventures.