The unglamorous software that keeps 300,000 networks from falling over - and the Austin company that learned to rebuild trust after the most talked-about hack of the decade.
For nearly five decades, a quiet software company near Stuttgart has been helping big organizations tame the IT sprawl no one else wants to touch - and it just landed a Thoma Bravo backer to do more of it.
Inside the quiet French software company that has spent three decades making corporate IT support less painful - and is now betting on AI to do the boring parts.
The enterprise AI agent that answered phones before chatbots were cool - a 26-year-old New York company that became SoundHound's play for the voice-first future of customer service.
Vespper (YC F24) builds infrastructure that lets AI agents produce real Microsoft Word documents. Its product is a docx MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that turns raw agent output into clean, tracked, review-ready .docx files - aimed at regulated, legal, and compliance workflows where the final artifact has to be a Word doc with tracked changes, not a chat window. The two-person, Tel Aviv-based team originally launched an open-source, 24/7 AI on-call engineer for incident triage before pivoting into agent document infrastructure.

apiphani is a Boston-based, AI-native managed services company that keeps mission-critical enterprise applications - especially complex SAP and Oracle environments - running without downtime. Instead of the labor-arbitrage model used by large global systems integrators, apiphani pairs small teams of senior engineers with its proprietary observability platform, luumen, and its Deep Automation technology to detect and resolve issues before users notice them. Founded in 2018 and led by CEO Justin Folkers, the company reports 100% production uptime across its clients for more than two years and raised a $25M Series A led by Insight Partners in October 2025.

Fabrix.ai (formerly CloudFabrix) is a Pleasanton, California enterprise software company building an agentic operational intelligence platform. It lets organizations design, deploy, operate and observe AI agents across IT, network, security and business operations, anchored by a tri-fabric architecture of Data Fabric, AI Fabric and Automation Fabric. The company positions itself for the 'agentic AI era' with production-grade governance, explainability and human-in-the-loop controls.
Avanseus is a Singapore-based artificial intelligence company that builds predictive maintenance software for telecommunications and industrial IoT networks. Its flagship Cognitive Assistant for Networks uses a patented unsupervised learning algorithm to forecast network faults and degradations days in advance and to surface likely root causes, letting operators fix problems before customers feel them. Founded in 2015, the company was acquired by Accenture in February 2026 to strengthen Accenture's push toward autonomous telecom networks.
Cake is a New York-based startup that bundles the sprawling open-source AI stack into a single managed platform, so companies - especially in regulated industries like finance, insurance and healthcare - can deploy AI inside their own cloud without wiring together 100+ tools by hand. Founded in 2022 by Misha Herscu and Skyler Thomas and launched from stealth in December 2024 with a $13M seed led by Google's Gradient Ventures, Cake handles the integration, security, governance and cost-monitoring glue around open-source components like LangChain, Ray, MLflow and vector databases, all deployed inside a customer's own VPC so data never leaves.
Netenrich is a San Jose-based security and digital operations company that helps enterprises run modern security operations on Google SecOps. Its Resolution Intelligence Cloud platform combines agentic AI, big-data analytics, and human expertise to power Adaptive MDR, Cyber Risk Operations, and threat detection - shifting security teams from chasing alerts toward what the company calls autonomic security operations.
Riverbed Technology is a San Francisco-based IT software company that helps large enterprises see, optimize, and troubleshoot the digital experiences their people and customers depend on. Originally famous for the SteelHead WAN-optimization appliance, Riverbed has reinvented itself around AI-powered unified observability - stitching together network, application, and end-user telemetry, then layering predictive, generative, and agentic AI on top to spot problems and increasingly fix them automatically. Founded in 2002, taken private by Thoma Bravo in 2015 and again by Vector Capital in 2023, it serves thousands of global organizations across finance, government, healthcare, retail, and beyond.
ATAD Corp. is a Seoul-based technology company building an AI-driven multi-cloud operating platform that helps teams run AWS, Azure, and GCP environments from one place. Its flagship product, ODiiN, uses AI to forecast and self-heal infrastructure problems, claiming up to 80% cost savings and large productivity gains. Founded in 2023 by cloud and cybersecurity specialists, ATAD pairs cloud automation with a security stack built on AI, multi-factor authentication, and zero-knowledge proofs, and also runs Heiimdahl (a multi-LLM monitoring gateway) and Kraton (a blockchain-based decentralized VPN). The company has raised about $3.36M and holds a growing portfolio of patents in multi-cloud integration and secure data distribution.
Zelar (ZelarSoft) is a cloud-native engineering and consulting firm that helps banks, telcos, oil & gas, and government teams adopt Kubernetes, DevOps, and AI without the usual pain. Founded in 2018 and led by CEO Vasu Maganti, the company pairs hands-on services - cloud migration, SRE, security, and data engineering - with its own platforms: Klusternetes for self-service Kubernetes multi-tenancy, OpenOps for production-ready GKE stacks, and Cokpit for agentic AI DevOps. A Google Cloud Premier Partner with offices across the US, Canada, India, and the UAE, Zelar bets that most teams want cloud-native outcomes, not cloud-native homework.
MegazoneCloud is South Korea's largest managed cloud service provider (MSP) and the country's first cloud MSP unicorn. Spun out of Megazone in 2018, it became AWS's first official partner in Korea back in 2012 and is now the No.1 AWS premier consulting partner across Asia Pacific. With roughly 2,800 cloud specialists, it helps more than 5,000 customers - from large enterprises and game studios to startups and public institutions - migrate to, build on, and operate AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. The company is pivoting hard toward AI, packaging its work into the proprietary AIR platform (AIR Studio, AIR AIOps, AIR Build) to help organizations become 'AI-native.'
Striveworks is an Austin-based AI operations company whose Chariot platform helps organizations build, deploy, monitor, and retrain machine learning models in hours rather than months. Built for highly regulated and contested environments - especially U.S. national security and allied defense - Chariot pairs a fast MLOps workflow with end-to-end data and model lineage, giving customers governance and provenance over models that must keep working when conditions change.
BMC Software is a Houston-founded enterprise software company that builds the IT operations, service management, and mainframe automation tools that keep large organizations running. Founded in 1980 by three former Shell engineers, BMC has spent four decades turning the unglamorous work of keeping systems alive - monitoring, scheduling, patching, recovering - into automated, increasingly AI-driven products. Its flagship lines include Control-M (workload automation), the BMC AMI mainframe suite, and BMC Helix (service and operations management). Owned by KKR since 2018, BMC split into two focused companies, BMC and BMC Helix, in early 2025.
New Relic is a San Francisco-based, AI-powered observability platform that gives engineering teams a single place to see everything running in their software - from application code and infrastructure to logs, user experience, and AI models. Founded in 2008 by Lew Cirne, it helped popularize application performance monitoring (APM) and later coined much of the modern 'observability' category. After going public in 2014 and being taken private in a $6.5 billion deal in 2023, New Relic now serves thousands of companies with usage-based, consumption pricing and a strong bet on AI and agentic observability.
BigPanda is an AIOps platform that uses machine learning to correlate noisy IT alerts from hundreds of monitoring tools into actionable incidents, helping enterprise operations teams detect, triage and resolve outages faster. Founded in 2012 and based in Mountain View / Redwood City, it serves large enterprises including Intel, PayPal, Workday and Gap.
Selector is an AI-powered network and infrastructure observability platform founded by ex-Juniper Networks executives. It combines a network-specific large language model, knowledge graphs, and causal reasoning to ingest telemetry from across complex hybrid environments, cut alert noise, surface root cause, and reduce mean time to resolution for telecoms, cloud providers, and global enterprises.