Startup: Mattermost
VC: Eric Anderson, principal of Scale Venture Partners, and Joseph Jacks, founder and general partner of OSS Capital
Relationship: Jacks is an investor.
Total raised: $20.12 million
What it does: Mattermost is an open source chat app for organizations. People can securely send messages via the web, phone or their computers. Companies like Uber have built their internal chat apps off of Mattermost, moving away from closed-sourced rivals like Slack.
Why it's hot in 2019: "This is an explosive growth company that in one way is a commercial OSS alternative to Slack but really a modern DevOps optimized communications and messaging chat platform for the enterprise that can run anywhere," Jacks said.
"Developers love Slack, but some companies don't. They mostly don't love that data is not in their control. Mattermost is an open-core alternative that developers can extend and run on-premises or wherever they want," Anderson said.