The enterprise tech market is on fire: These 23 venture capitalists are picking the winners and shaping the future of work

Enterprise Tech VCs

From Dropbox's $9 billion valuation at its IPO to Salesforce's $6.8 billion acquisition of MuleSoft, 2018 has been a lucrative year for the movers and shakers in the enterprise tech business.

Once considered a less glamorous sideshow to flashy consumer internet companies, enterprise tech startups are enjoying a renewed surge in interest thanks to innovative new services powered by AI and cloud computing, and an expanding opportunity to tap into vast new markets.

Helping the rise of these startups is a class of venture capital investors with a deep understanding of the enterprise tech market's specialized branches and a keen eye for recognizing the winners. The best of these VCs bring a lot more than just a checkbook, providing invaluable advice and experience that can transform a company from an idea into a thriving business.

Business Insider scouted the field of VCs to round up the names most respected and sought after in the specialized world of enterprise technology.

Many of these investors saw big exits in the past 18 months. Others probably won't see their billions for years to come. But venture capital is a long-game, and this list highlights investors at all stages of the investment-to-exit process.

Taken together though, these 23 people are writing the checks that define the enterprise tech space and seriously impact the way we work for years to come. Here's who you need to know:

Sarah Guo, General Partner at Greylock Partners

Sarah Guo is a general partner at Greylock Partners where she focuses on cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, infrastructure and digital health. She was promoted to partner in May after five years at the firm.

As an early stage investor, Guo has led two series A, and she's the director of three different boards. One is Cleo, a digital health platform to manage parental leave, and the other is still in stealth mode. Her third board seat is at Obsidian Security, which was valued at $27 million in a $9.5 million funding round last summer.

Guo's also invested in Awake Security and the AI Fund, an incubator run by the renown Andrew Ng, which focuses on building artificial intelligence companies from the ground up.

Kristina Shen, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners

Kristina Shen is a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners where she focuses on cloud, machine learning, mobile and voice.

Shen, who co-authors the firm's annual State of the Cloud report, graduated from UC Berkeley before starting her career as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse. She joined Bessemer in 2013.

Shen was actively involved in Bessemer's investment the financial modeling company Adaptive Insights, which was acquired by Workday in mid-June for $1.55 billion. She was also involved in the firm's investment in the cloud communication platform Twilio, which went public in 2016.

Shen also led the investment in Glint, a real-time pulse survey and analytics platform which helps HR departments notice which employees are less engaged in their jobs.

Charles Hudson, Managing Partner at Precursor Ventures

Charles Hudson is managing partner at Precursor Ventures, a generalist firm with an affinity for business-to-business software that he founded three years ago.

Hudson, whose career has spanned a series of startups as well as a stint at Google, is currently the sole partner at the firm which invests in around 20 companies a year. With a focus on very early stage — or "pre-seed," startups — the firm's investments are usually around $250,000.

His investments range from software companies like Atipica, which uses artificial intelligence to find bias in recruiting data, to Dor, a piece of hardware that tracks and charts retail foot traffic.

In June, one of Hudson's investments Kit was acquired by Patreon and in 2017, his portfolio company Bizzy was acquired by SendGrid.

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