The 18 hottest enterprise startups of 2017

We are half-way through 2017 and it's time to take stock of the hottest startups so far this year.

For that we turned to Pitchbook, the website that tracks financial investments. Pitchbook sifted through its vast database to uncover the 383 startups that received funding so far in 2017 and that sell products or services to businesses, aka enterprise startups.

We chose a metric called a "valuation step up" to decide which of these startups were the hottest. A valuation step up indicates the increase in worth that investors ascribe to a particular startup. We measured between the valuation at the previous round of investment and right before the startup secured a new round (in wonky speak: post-money to pre-money).

Not all rounds are step ups. Sometimes they are down rounds.

Of the 383 rounds we looked at, 169 of them saw an increase in valuation. The median step up for the early stage startups was 1.73 times the previous valuation; for later stage, 1.39 times and all of the companies on this list had step-ups well above those medians.