We’ve covered a lot of enterprise software in 2025. And while the AI boom has certainly shaken up the industry, we’ve been impressed at these companies’ ability to adapt and provide continued value to their customers—whether it’s leveraging AI or providing tooling to keep it in check.
Here are ten software companies to keep an eye on in 2026:
Gremlin
Focus: Zero Trust AI Reliability Testing
Overview: Gremlin helps engineers build system and business resilience through controlled experiments that validate online systems behave in expected ways. By simulating real-world failures, teams can test and improve the robustness and reliability of their applications as they continue to scale and change at the pace of AI.
Espresso AI
Focus: Cost Optimization for Databases
Overview: Espresso AI leverages LLMs and machine learning techniques from Google to consistently save companies 30–70% on their Snowflake and Databricks bills.
Mezmo
Focus: Observability for Agentic Workflows
Overview: While most observability vendors are still building dashboards, this company is looking to the future and feeding AI agents active telemetry to speed up automatic root cause analysis.
groundcover
Focus: eBPF-driven observability
Overview: groundcover was built from the ground up with eBPF at its core, and their Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) architecture saves customers money and is better for security. They also recently launched an AI-driven migration tool to help customers get off of Datadog, who may be looking for a more modern and cost-effective solution.
Exaforce
Focus: AI SOC
Overview: Exaforce leverages multi-model AI that transforms threat detection, triage, investigation, threat hunting, and response, enabling organizations to realize an AI-powered SOC without the traditional operational overhead.
StackHawk
Focus: Application Security
Overview: StackHawk is reimagining AppSec for AI-driven development by combining scalable runtime testing with complete attack surface discovery from source code.
Causely
Focus: AI SRE
Overview: Causely is taking a fundamentally different approach to reliability in modern systems. Instead of reacting to symptoms after they spread, Causely maintains a live causality graph that reflects how services, dependencies, and performance constraints relate to one another as the environment evolves, in order to enable proactive reliability.
Kentik
Focus: Network Intelligence
Overview: Kentik pioneered the evolution from Network Monitoring to Network Observability, and again from Network Observability to Network Intelligence. Their platform provides Fortune 500 companies with advanced visibility into network performance and traffic analytics, enabling organizations to ensure optimal service delivery.
Spacelift
Focus: Infrastructure-as-Code
Overview: Spacelift facilitates infrastructure as code with a collaboration platform that automates deployment workflows, enhancing efficiency and scalability for DevOps teams.
Finout
Focus: FinOps
Overview: Finout offers tools that help companies understand and manage their cloud spending, providing insights that are crucial for optimizing expenses and enhancing financial efficiency.
Conclusion
As we progress into 2026, these ten companies stand out for their innovative approaches and potential to redefine the software landscape. Keeping an eye on their advancements will be crucial for industry professionals, investors, and anyone interested in the future of enterprise software.