These 13 startups have raised millions - but no one knows what they do

Amount raised: $10 million

Investors: 14 angel investors including Al Gore, Sheryl Sandberg, and Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman

What we know: With high-profile investors already behind it, Globality wants to change way companies do business around the globe by "Combining A.I. with domain expertise."

In an interview with TechCrunch, its co-founder Joel Hyatt was both extremely vague and ambitious about its plans to change the world's economic structure. "We’re going to facilitate global trade on the part of far more companies than are currently involved in exporting both goods and services, which are critical to the U.S. economy and critical to the GDP. The vast 90 percent of export comes from one percent of companies, these large industrial conglomerates and international service firms," Hyatt told TechCrunch.

Amount raised: $10 million

Investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures

What we know: Dremio is founded by two former MapR employees who want to "enable organizations to unlock the value of their data." The duo developed the Apache Drill open-source project and hope Dremio will continue to develop opensource software, according to Venture Beat.

Amount raised: $10.9 million

Investors: Firstmark Capital, High Line Venture Partners, Slow Ventures

What we know: The only New York-based company to make the list, Hyperscience wants to bring artificial intelligence to enterprises. Not much is known about the company, but it's supposed to get smarter with each enterprise customer over time, says one of its investors. Its "about us" page on its website lists only random stats, like the average age of its employees is 31.7 and two people like tennis on the team.

Amount raised: $11.9 million

Investors: A Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel

What we know: Forward Networks is a little more... forward... with its mission. The company says on its site that it's working to build a "game-changing networking solution with the goal of revolutionizing the way network operators and eingeers build and maintain large-scale networks." It's still in a private closed beta, but out of the stealth companies on this list, this one might be a little closer to launch.

Amount raised: $12.6 million

Investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners

What we know: Another data center company, MosaixSoft pledges on its website to give enterprises the "software infrastructure that harnesses innovation for application programmers while extending enterprise control and operational effectiveness" they deserve. What that looks like is unknown, but the company has been hard at work since 2013 on the idea.

Amount raised: $14.4 million

Investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners

What we know: Cisco's CTO and VP of Mobility left the company in 2014 to become CEO of Mist Sytems. The only hint on its website and in its job postings is that the company wants to work on transforming the indoor Wi-Fi experience for mobile devices.

Amount raised: $15.2 million

Investors: Unknown

What we know: Founded in early 2012, Symbolic IO's website offers a bold description of its work. "Symbolic IO has developed technology that creates a fundamental change in compute technologies that will forever transform how information is stored, shared, and transported; limitless by performance, limitless by scale," the company says. It was founded by Hewlett-Packard's former storage CTO Brian Ignomirello.

Amount raised: $16 million

Investors: Unknown

What we know: Click Diagnostics is trying to develop a device that can molecularly test diseases in the field, rather than requiring cumbersome machines, according to its application to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. "Click’s disruptive technology has tremendous potential in developing nations to change the paradigm of care for prominent and widespread infectious diseases (e.g. Tuberculosis and drug-resistant TB) and pandemics (e.g. Swine flu, avian flue, Ebola). Since the Click device is an easy to use, portable, rapid, disposable, and instrument-free diagnostic tool, it can easily be used in remote villages, small towns and large cities alike," the company describes.

Amount raised: $19.7 million

Investors: Undisclosed

What we know: Founded in 2012, Pi-Coral describes its mission as "to address the challenges of data at scale, and in particular data storage at scale." Its name probably stems from the only line on its website: "solutions for an ocean of data."

Amount raised: $22.1 million

Investors: Khosla Ventures and Bessemer Ventures

What we know: According to a company job description, Velo3D "develops and manufactures revolutionary metal laser sintering printing machines for 3D printing."

Amount raised: At least $25 million

Investors: General Catalyst Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures

What we know: Founded by Shishir Mehrotra, a former top YouTube executive, Krypton wants to challenge Microsoft Office by building a competitor for mobile devices. Backed by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Heman Taneja, a managing partner at General Catalyst, the startup is reportedly already valued at $400 million — even though no product has ben publicly released.

Amount raised: $27.7 million

Investors: Unknown

What we know: Tyto publicly describes itself as "a Silicon Valley company dedicated to creating and building devices and software for the connected home." Founded by a former Microsoft VP and Jawbone investor, Sam Jadallah, the company is based in Burlingame. The company has been awarded several patents for a series of deadbolt door locks and window frames, so it could be working on a connected home security or doorknob system.

Amount raised: $38.8 million

Investors: IDEA Fund Partners, Sierra Ventures

What we know: There's only one line on CNEX Lab's website: "Leading the evolution in big data storage." Cofounded by Yiren Huang, a chip engineer formerly of Huawei/Brocade/Cisco, and Alan Armstrong, formerly of semi-conductor company Marvell, the San Jose-based startup is the most well-funded company to still be in stealth, two years after its founding in 2013.