Some of the Best Startups of 2015 Benefit Businesses

In today's world, it's hard to keep track of all the startups springing into being, especially for time-strapped executives and small business owners. Here are four of this year's most interesting startups and how they could make your life easier as a business leader.

Meditate on Your Own Time

Over 1 million users in 150 different countries can't be wrong, and for stressed-out business owners or C-suite executives, time to meditate sounds like the right choice. Headspace, a mobile and web platform to encourage meditation whenever you want, was founded by Andy Puddicombe and Richard Pierson. The founders are keeping mum about individual investors, but the startup did receive $4 million in seed funding.

Slack Your Way to Better Productivity

Described by Business Insider as one of the fastest-growing enterprise apps ever, Slack is a communications tool rapidly gaining popularity with enterprise businesses everywhere. And with a tag line of "Be less busy," the communication app promises to help enterprise staff save time and be more productive, targeting workplace clients with features like group chatrooms, file sharing, and private message features. Poised to grow even more in 2016, Slack launched with a whopping $180 million investment from several well-known tech funding giants including Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures.

Millennials Get News with Mic

As millennials move into the world of entrepreneurship and move up the ranks of business, it's apparent they're very different from the generations that came before them, and their desires are changing the face of everything from at-work perks (game rooms, anyone?) to how we consume information. The founders of Mic, a three-year-old media company are meeting this demand with a website dedicated to presenting the news from the millennial perspective, a view they felt was lacking in today's news environment. Twenty-two million monthly readers agree with them.

Cut the Commuting Hassle

For anyone with a commute to work, especially those living and working in high traffic urban areas, Ride is one of the best startups of 2015. This ride-sharing app is aimed at employees, and matches users with co-workers (and neighbors) who have similar commutes. The idea is to cut vehicles on the road (and therefore traffic). For companies that sign up, Ride even offers a stable of cars to encourage carpooling among employees.

All of these startups focus on improving lives of people who own or work in a business. This may mean encouraging better emotional health through meditation, simplifying productivity issues, streamlining news in a millennial-friendly manner, or cutting commuter stress. Despite their difference business structures and visions, the founders of these startups are banking on one thing: making our work lives better is important to most of us.