8 cloud computing startups to bet your career on in 2019

Valuation: Unknown
Total raised to date: $1.3 million
Year founded: 2011
HQ: Sunnyvale, CA

What it does: Zapier connects Web apps together to automate tasks such as automatically copying Gmail attachments into Dropbox and alerting you in Slack.

Why it's hot: This seven-year-old company has raised a total of $2.56 million. This year it revealed it has achieved a $35 million annualized revenue run rate. Oh, and by the way, at Zapier, you can work in pajamas from the comfort of your bedroom, if you really wanted to. This all-remote company even started a delocation package of $10,000 to move away from the pricey San Francisco Bay Area.

Valuation: $925 million
Total raised to date: $220.04 million
Year founded: 2011
HQ: San Francisco

What it does: Fastly calls itself an "edge cloud platform." It helps large websites work faster by moving data and apps closer to their users.

Why it's hot: Fastly has come on strong in this well-established market (also known as a Content Delivery Network) and already powers sites such as Airbnb, GitHub, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, and The New York Times.

It reportedly broke the $100 million revenue mark in 2017 and this year raised funding that included backing by the investment arm of telecom giant Deutsche Telekom.

Valuation: $1.1 billion
Total raised to date: $411 million
Year founded: 2013
HQ: San Jose, CA

What it does: Cohesity helps make storage back-ups less expensive, easier to manage, and easier to sift through for big data projects.

Why it's hot: Cohesity is the second act for its founder Mohit Aron, who had previously co-founded Nutanix. And its been growing like mad, so much so that in 2018, Cohesity landed a massive $250 million round of investment from Softbank's Vision Fund. It was only the second enterprise company to be backed by the massive fund.

Valuation: $1.9 billion
Total raised to date: $174.53 million
Year founded: 2012
HQ: San Francisco

What it does: HashiCorp offers what it calls "cloud infrastructure automation" software. It helps businesses ensure the clouds they use work consistently and securely for their applications' needs, especially if they use more than one cloud, be it Amazon, Microsoft, Google or something else.

Why it's hot: HashiCorp is a leader in bringing this idea of "multi-cloud" — using more than cloud — to everyone's attention. And that's where the industry is going. HashiCorp started as a passion project, but it became so popular and widespread that the creators quit their day jobs to launch a business that's now valued at $1.9 billion after only six years.

Valuation: $3.95 billion
Total raised to date: $922.95 million
Year founded: 2012
HQ: San Mateo, CA

What it does: Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse, which lets companies sift through massive amounts of data that they store in their favorite cloud to find answers to business questions.

Why it's hot: CEO Bob Muglia rose to fame in the tech industry as a top Microsoft exec. Under Muglia, Snowflake has raised massive amounts of venture funding and, in nine months, doubled its valuation to $3.5 billion.

Valuation: $278 million
Total raised to date: $89.52 million
Year founded: 2014
HQ: Palo Alto, CA

What it does: It offers a "data warehouse" device that it says is up to 140 times faster than old-school storage and is designed to handle everything from Internet of Things data, to "hybrid" cloud, where companies store some of their data themselves and some in the cloud.

Why it's hot: It emerged from stealth this year after four years of development, backed by $44 million in venture capital from some top tier VCs (like Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Google Ventures and Samsung Ventures), and with a handful of paying customers like Overstock.com.

Valuation: $80 million
Total raised to date: $22.75 million
Year founded: 2014
HQ: San Francisco

What it does: Mode runs a carrier-grade network which provides affordable, high-performance access to multi-cloud services, data centers, and remote offices.

Why it's hot: The company was formed by Cornell researchers Kevin Tang and Nithin Michael after they devised a mathematical way to watch and predict network traffic, something thought previously impossible. Not only did their research wow the academic world, but investors from NEA approached them and asked them to build a product.

Should they figure it out, it could upend and greatly reduce the costs of building corporate networks.

Valuation: $3.6 billion
Total raised to date: $230 million
Year founded: 2015
HQ: San Francisco

What it does: Samsara offers sensors and cloud software for Internet of Things applications.

Why it's hot: The company was founded by Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket, who previously founded cloud corporate network company Meraki, sold to Cisco for $1.2 billion.

IoT is fast becoming the next big wave in tech, where everyday objects get sensors and apps, and Samsara is one of the biggest IoT success stories so far. It claims 5,000 customers, from tiny shops to giant corporations.