10 Hot Tech Startups For July

Emerging Innovators

Venture funding is flowing into the hands of emerging tech leaders as they work feverishly to bring new and innovative products to market, with cloud computing acting as a spur to transform traditional categories from security and analytics to networking and Internet marketplaces.

Continue on and view the companies that are rising above the pack.

ownCloud

CEO: Markus Rex

Based on the popular ownCloud open-source community project, Lexington, Mass.-based ownCloud's software is pitched as an alternative to commercial cloud services like Dropbox and Amazon Cloud Drive.

The software acts as both a local file repository and a file proxy that lets users store files, photos, contacts and other content on a server of their choosing and access it from mobile devices, desktop computers and Web browsers. Written in PHP and JavaScript and developed on the MySQL database, ownCloud is available in a free Community Edition as well as commercial Business and Enterprise editions.

OwnCloud operates what it calls "a partner first policy" under which the company always involves solution providers and other partners that help customers with implementation and other infrastructure services, which sometimes host an ownCloud solution.

Keen

CEO: Kyle Wild

Keen is a brash startup providing analytics for mobile applications. ’Keen makes a kickass set of APIs that let mobile app developers collect, analyze, and visualize data,’ the company says on its Web site.

The San Francisco-based company seems to be backing up its boast, winning GigaOm’s Structure Launchpad competition for startups in June and attracting $750,000 in venture funding from investors including 500 Startups, SK Ventures and Data Collective.

Keen says it is developing analytics to become a cloud data warehouse and analysis platform to collect and massage the explosion of data being created by users of hundreds of thousands of mobile applications.

CliQr

CEO: Gaurav Manglik

CliQr Technologies has been making waves since coming out of stealth status in January with $1 million in seed funding from Google Ventures and Foundation Capital.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup recently unveiled a cloud application management platform called CloudCenter, which is designed to migrate and manage applications on private, public or hybrid clouds.

The startup uses orchestration software to allow different applications to work with different clouds without either having to be modified. In addition, a CloudCenter Manager application suite offers a cloud application management dashboard.

CrowdStrike

CEO: George Kurtz

Startup security company CrowdStrike launched in February with $26 million in funding led by investment firm Warburg Pincus.

CrowdStrike is developing a platform called CrowdRE to allow developers in the security community to work collaboratively to reverse engineer complex applications, thereby speeding up the process.

While it usually takes weeks or months to analyze complicated malware such as Flame or Stuxnet, CrowdRE was created to let dispersed security researchers and analysts conduct collaborative reverse engineering.

ProfitBricks

Achim Weiss, CEO

ProfitBricks, based in both Boston, Mass., and Berlin, Germany, is developing a new cloud infrastructure-as-a-service technology it says provides better performance at a lower cost than current cloud platform providers by allowing users to change their virtual servers and network infrastructure at any time.

With ProfitBricks' Data Center Designer, no pre-defined plans or configurations are required and users can scale their virtual data centers.

With ProfitBricks’ Live Vertical Scaling, users can set up their data centers to adapt to their infrastructure needs by adding processor cores without restarting their virtual servers and environments.

The startup says such flexibility and high-end capabilities have not been achieved by cloud-computing service providers before.

Plexxi

CEO: David Husak

Plexxi, a new player in software-defined networking (SDN), in June snapped up $20.1 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Northbridge Venture, reaching a total of about $48.5 million in venture capital investment.

Cambridge, Mass.-based Plexxi has remained tight lipped about its product development. The company said the following in a June blog: ’We’ve pulled back the covers a bit and revealed that we are working on an integrated hardware/software offering that allows data center operators to build and manage a network from the perspective of the needs of the application workloads, which we call affinity networking.’

The company promises to reveal more information at industry conferences, such as VMworld in August.

ComputeNext

CEO: Sundar Kannan

ComputeNext has been described as the Expedia of marketplace cloud brokering for users and providers of cloud services by allowing them to search, utilize and purchase compute resources.

ComputeNext provides access to an inventory of cloud infrastructure that lets users search and discover computing and storage as needed. Users of the marketplace can build the most efficient system available.

ComputeNext, by allowing the workload lifecycle to be managed via dashboard or API, lets users launch, run and scale their workloads across multiple cloud services.

Stormpath

CEO: Alex Salazar

In March, Stormpath, of San Mateo, Calif., said it had raised $1.5 million in funding for the development of an identity access control service for cloud and enterprise applications with a console and APIs to manage security both in the cloud and behind a firewall.

Stormpath Identity and Access Manager provides a user-security model that developers can use in any application so they can quickly deploy enterprise security practices, secure passwords, integrate to existing identity systems and develop access control.

Drawn To Scale

CEO: Bradford Stephens

Drawn To Scale, of Seattle, Wash., received $925,000 in venture funding in March from RTP Ventures, with participation by IA Ventures and SK Ventures.

The fledgling company says it is the developer of Spire, a database for real-time big data, which offers massive scalability, real-time queries, SQL and simplified management.

Spire is built on Hadoop, the open-source software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications. Drawn To Scale is seeking to speed up and simplify big data.

NuoDB

CEO: Barry Morris

Cambridge, Mass.-based startup NuoDB in July received $10 million in venture funding. The investment was led by Morgenthaler Ventures, with participation from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Longworth Venture Partners. The company’s flagship product is its Elastically Scalable Database, which is built to scale in the cloud with the full functionality of a relational database. NuoDB, which is currently in beta, says it has 700 customers thus far and plans to become generally available in the third quarter of this year.

A Look Back At Tech Startups

More Tech Startups:
10 Hot Tech Startups For May 2012
10 Hot Tech Startups For April 2012
10 Hot Tech Startups For March 2012