Bettercloud
founder: David politis (ceo) Equity raised: $47 million Estimated 2017 revenue: $21 million Lead investors: accel, flybridge capital partners
What it does: makes software that lets it departments manage employees’ cloud-based applications. at first, bettercloud focused only on google’s productivity suite. but in 2015, ceo politis decided to blow up the business and start over. politis rebuilt it to manage any software used in business, from slack to Zendesk. bettercloud laid off much of its customer-facing staff and spent $35 million retooling over two years.