These are the coolest startups in Australia: Gartner

Four Australian and New Zealand companies have featured in Gartner's annual 'Cool Vendors' list for 2017.

Gartner defines a cool vendor as a small company offering innovative, impactful and intriguing technology, and singled out 330 startups for this year's list.

Sydney-based Hyper Anna was recognised in the category for AI for Banking and Investment Services.

Hyper Anna provides artificial intelligence for analytics and counts IAG, Westpac and Microsoft as customers. The company last year secured $1.25 million in funding from Westpac’s venture capital arm, Reinventure and AirTree Ventures.

Joviam, also based in Sydney, appeared as one of Gartner's cool vendors in cloud infrastructure. The company claims to offer significantly lower costs than "most other cloud providers".

The "secret sauce" is a fully redundant, hyperconverged architecture based on a customised hypervisor and backed by Infiniband. Joviam is hosted in Equinix SY3 in Sydney and SV2 in San Francisco.

Sydney-based Reekoh was named as a cool vendor in the internet of things space. The company targets enterprise customers and system integrators with its secure and scalable toolset for device and data management.

DoView is the one Kiwi firm on the list. The company, which has offices in Wellington and Wairarapa, landed a spot in the Project Portfolio Management category.

"Gartner's 2017 Cool Vendors reflect the need to stand out from the crowd, the ability to keep pace in fast-changing digital scenarios and the aptitude to solve problems that have persisted over many years," said Daryl Plummer, vice president and Gartner Fellow.

"Being a Cool Vendor in 2017 is all about both standing out and fitting in. In many cases, the Cool Vendors that stand out do so because they offer a major disruptive capability or opportunity."