51 enterprise startups to bet your career on in 2017

Datadog

With the 2016 holiday in full swing and the year drawing to a close, our thoughts will soon drift to our hopes and goals for 2017.

For those who are dreaming of a new job at an up-and-coming young company, we've compiled this list to help.

All of these companies are "enterprise" startups, meaning they specialize in making tech for work and business use, which is a $3.4 trillion worldwide market.

All of them had a spectacular 2016, launching great new technology, getting a boatload of funding, or landing big partnerships, and generally setting themselves up for a successful 2017 and beyond.

Skymind: Silicon Valley's bet on artificial intelligence

Skymind

Company name: Skymind
Headquarters: San Francisco
Funding to date: $3.32 million in three rounds

Skymind is an early-stage company, but it's quickly establishing itself as one of Silicon Valley's premier sources of expertise on artificial intelligence in the enterprise.

For instance, Skymind cofounder Adam Gibson and top engineer Josh Patterson were tapped by famed tech publisher O'Reilly to write its guide to "deep learning," a core technology in building AI.

Skymind sells software and services based on Deeplearning4j, a popular tool that enterprise programmers are using to build systems to detect fraud and recognize images for business.

In September, Skymind raised $3 million from Y Combinator and the Chinese internet giant Tencent.

Pivotal: Helping big companies act like little companies

Glassdoor/Pivotal

Company name: Pivotal
Headquarters: San Francisco
Funding to date: $1.7 billion in three rounds

Pivotal is a startup spun off from the IT heavyweight EMC that now stands on its own.

While it sells the Pivotal Cloud Foundry application development platform, this startup's main product is education: It teaches making more software faster, so teams at big companies can deliver code at the same breakneck pace as those like Google or Facebook.

This year, Ford and Microsoft invested $253 million in Pivotal at a $2.8 billion valuation, even as a former Morgan Stanley banker came on as CFO.

GitLab: A programmer's secret weapon

GitLab

Company name: GitLab
Headquarters: San Francisco
Funding to date: $25.62 million in four rounds

While high-profile competitors like GitHub may get all the attention, GitLab has been quietly infiltrating the Fortune 500 via teams of customers at companies such as AT&T and IBM.

Like its competitors, GitLab helps teams of programmers manage their code and work together. But GitLab's focus on the enterprise market has set it apart.

GitLab has investors such as Ashton Kutcher and Joe Montana. In 2016, it raised a $20 million round of funding to work on getting its name out there in the ever growing software industry.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider