Work-Bench calculated the percentage using its database of female-founded companies and information from financial data company PitchBook Data Inc., which shows a total of approximately 18,500 venture capital-backed business-to-business software startups in the U.S. Women have been historically underrepresented in the technology side of the software industry. U.S. Department of Labor data from 2019 shows that 18.1% of all software developers in the U.S. are women, and those women on average earn 88.7% of what their male counterparts earn. Things aren't easier for women who branch off to start their own enterprise software businesses, experts say. A combination of implicit biases, discrepancies in networking connections and a cycle that leaves women largely outside the venture-capital sphere makes it harder for female-led companies to get off the ground--perpetuating a stubborn gender gap in one of the country's most male-dominated industries. "Of course it's hurt me," Idit Levine, the founder and chief executive of Solo.io, said about being a woman in the enterprise software space.

The big data stack is crumbling as Hadoop gets replaced by new tools natively integrated with cloud native workload schedulers. As old systems shed, new ones powering the Systems Of Intelligence revolution are emerging. The race is on for stream processing as new stream native solutions like Kafka Streams and Twitter Herron go up against multi-purpose batch systems with stream bolt-ons like Spark. Open source has been all the rage in machine learning, but deployment and model/data collaboration are still a major challenge that commercial vendors like Algorithmia, Dataiku, and Pachyderm are working to solve with a cloud native and serverless bent.

After a lackluster year for enterprise technology venture capital investments, 2017 kicked off with a record breaking quarter for enterprise technology startups. Following 4 straight quarters of decreasing investment, investors poured a record-breaking $5 billion dollars into enterprise technology startups in the first quarter of 2017 alone – a nearly 80% increase from the previous quarter – across a record number of 237 deals. These enterprise startups – solving problems for world's largest companies around data & analytics, cloud-native infrastructure, cybersecurity, and AI-powered business applications for the future workplace – are building businesses by capturing some of the close to $3.5 trillion that the Global 1000 and Fortune 500 spend every year on software and technology. Coming on the heels of Cisco's massive $3.7B acquisition of AppDynamics right before their public offering earlier this year – and MuleSoft's 45 percent pop on their first day of trading two weeks ago – enterprise is clearly in vogue. With Alteryx's IPO last week, there's still a robust lineup of enterprise exits coming down the pipeline, including Presido, Okta, and Yext, who have all filed S-1s in preparation of an IPO, and speculation from many more including Cloudera, DocuSign, Domo, and Tenable Network Security.