These 10 cloud computing startups are changing the world

The cloud market is growing at a remarkable pace as more enterprises realize the power of the cloud and its untapped potential. The mere concept of not investing in mainframes and data inventories was attractive enough for enterprises to shift to the cloud. And even though some remain skeptical, the booming cloud market is a testament to how quickly cloud has gone mainstream. There has been a recent surge in cloud computing IPOs. Several cloud startups like DocuSign, Elastic, and Dropbox went public in 2018. This trend can be traced back to the cloud’s snowballing popularity.

With growing innovation boosted by a breakneck competition in the cloud market, many use cases have popped up that explore new horizons making the cloud a much more vast and versatile infrastructure. With this take in mind, let’s go over some of the most impressive cloud computing startups that managed to come up with innovative products.

Stripe

Valued at a massive $20 billion, this cloud-based FinTech company allows small businesses to accept payments online by providing a free-to-use seven-line code that can be integrated into business websites. Stripe takes care of all the background processes that appear intimidating to small business owners and restrict them from doing business over the internet. This San Francisco-based startup takes an industrial cut of 2.9 percent over every transaction, which helps rake in revenue. By taking care of payment frauds and various security standards, it helps businesses of any size harness the unbounded power of the Internet without any hassle.

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Founded in 2010, Stripe has come a long way and its clientele includes big names like Amazon, Google, Spotify, Salesforce, and Uber. Stripe envisions a future where many businesses will go online and help increase the GDP of the internet. Currently, only 3 percent of the business in the world takes place online and Stripe wants to change that.

Slack

Corporate communication tools are more integral to enterprises than ever as businesses are spread across the globe with offices in different locations. Slack provides one such solution that is an elaborate set of cloud-based team collaboration tools. This workplace messaging app helps people collaborate and provides a channel based communication where a channel is a platform for people collaborating together on a particular project.

This startup, founded in 2009, has grown immensely and is used by around 500,000 companies. However, Microsoft Teams is a tough competitor for Slack. Since its launch in 2017, Microsoft Teams has been accepted by many enterprises as it’s a free service for companies with an Office 365 subscription. Although lagging, Teams is appealing to many enterprises. But Slack’s not scared of the competition as it is planning an IPO. Already valued at $7 billion, Slack is a powerful presence that is still growing.

Zoom Video Communications

Another cloud-based enterprise communication platform in this list, Zoom helps enterprises in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms. Zoom can also be used by schools to connect students with each other by helping them collaborate and work together in groups. Zoom allows users to have audio and video conferencing as well as wireless content sharing.

Zoom plans on going public as soon as this year. It has raised capital of $145 million to this date. With clients like Uber and GoDaddy, it seems to be going in the right direction.

Tanium

Tanium is a cloud-based security platform. Founded in 2007, Tanium is worth a massive $5 billion. Tanium is a solution that protects all endpoints in an enterprise network. Instead of individually protecting endpoints, Tanium sits in the communication layer of the organization network and provides deep insights into the network that in turn helps in risk detection and mitigation. Organizations can choose to take actions like uninstalling malicious software or changing settings throughout their network in a matter of seconds. In addition to that, enterprises can run compliance checks and audits to keep cyberattacks at bay.

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Procore

Based in Carpinteria, Calif., this startup provides cloud-based construction management software that helps provide a unifying solution for construction projects, which are known to have a lot of moving parts. Construction can be a very unpredictable task as the possibility of something going wrong is always there. Be it delay in deliveries, equipment issue, a lack of labor, or changing plans. Procore connects people, devices, and applications through a unified platform to help construction professionals deliver safely, within budget and on time by managing risks along the way.

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Procore has over 5,000 customers spread over 100 countries. And, as a one-of-a-kind solution, it seems to be headed for leadership in the construction industry.

Crowdstrike

Headquartered at Sunnyvale, Calif., this startup provides cloud-based next-generation endpoint protection. Crowdstrike Falcon uses AI and machine learning along with integrated threat detection to protect clients from cyberattacks. It is intended for cloud protection and it does so by correlating up to 1 trillion security events from across the world to detect and prevent virtually any kind of threat. Crowdstrike has been integrated with the AWS Security Hub, which shows how efficient Crowdstrike’s protection really is. Valued at $3 billion, Crowdstrike is planning on an IPO this year.

Elastic

With a successful IPO in October, Elastic has already become a popular company. Its unique search engine, Elasticsearch, is used by the likes of Uber, Tinder, and Netflix. Elasticsearch is a RESTful search and analytics engine and data store. Users can build upon Elasticsearch and search their own data. Elastic’s offerings, collectively known as Elastic Stack, consist of Kibana (a data visualization tool), Beats (a set of shipping plugins to transport data to Elasticsearch), and Logstash (an open source pipeline to perform ETL operations on data from various sources and direct that data to a repository of user’s choice).

Cloudflare

Cloudfare uses edge computing to help client websites load faster and protect them from bad traffic and threats. It acts as an intermediary between the client and the hosting server. It uses reverse proxy to make mirrors or cached version of websites on its own server to ensure faster loading times and better performance by eliminating latency.

With 155 datacenters across the globe, it stores customer websites as well as static resources and provides users with a copy from the datacenter closest to them. And, by sitting between the client and the server, it helps filter malicious traffic, spam, and bot attacks. Cloudflare also provides customers with application firewall and email obfuscation.

Medallia

As a customer experience management startup, Medallia helps organizations in increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Medallia Experience Cloud helps companies get insights into customer feedbacks. Clients can use the customer experience application to understand customer feedback that is gathered from several channels like email, in-app surveys, and social media. Medallia gathers those feedbacks to form comprehensive reports and visualizations that can help clients work on making the customer experience better.

Snowflake

Valued at $3.5 billion, Snowflake provides data warehouse-as-a-service. Snowflake’s software, which runs on AWS and Azure, allows users to store and query data from their preferred cloud storage in order to study patterns and trends in that data. The data held in snowflake can be used by a number of different applications, which allows users an opportunity to work on small portions of huge data efficiently.

Snowflake is being accepted by various enterprises because it provides users with efficient data handling at an impressive pay-by-the-second subscription that significantly cuts down cost.

Cloud computing: This is the future

Cloud computing is evolving every day as new startups come up with more innovative and unique use cases. In this fast-paced market, everyone is trying their best to make a mark. But at the same time, things can go south quite easily which is why there’s immense pressure on these startups to not just come up with out of the box ideas but to also keep delivering while making smart business decisions. The future is the cloud, and it will be exciting to witness the journey of all these groundbreaking startups.

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