Annasha, Author at Your Tech Story

Virtusa, a company founded by a group of graduated engineer friends.

Founded in 1996 in Sri Lanka, Virtusa is an Information Technology company that mainly provides IT consulting and outsourcing services. Their main clients are software vendors and large enterprises. Virtusa is an American company and its headquarters are based in Massachusetts, United States. Kris Canekeratne, Tushara Canekeratne, John Gillis, and Sandy Gillis are the founders of the company. Virtusa offers services worldwide and has offices in several countries including India, Sri Lanka, the UK, Germany, Australia, Malaysia, UAE, Qatar, etc. The maximum number of offices of Virtusa is in US and India.

About Virtusa

When Virtusa was founded back in 1996, Kris Canekeratne became the CEO of the company whose valuation today has crossed billions. He took the company public in 2007 but currently it is listed as a private company as it was recently acquired by Baring Private Equity Asia for $2 billion. The company currently has more than 30,000 employees and some of its biggest competitors in the IT sector are Wipro, TCS, Infosys, and Cognizant. All these companies have a very strong market in India along with Virtusa and that raises the competition even more. The company is also known for its community support program that focuses mainly on education. In all these years, Company has established partnerships with many famous companies like Adobe, Azure, Google Cloud, PEGA, etc.

Founding History of Company

The co-founders of Virtusa belonged to a common friends circle and they were all graduated engineers when came up with an idea to found Virtusa. They thought that the IT sector was ready for a radical transformation as the primitive methods and the way IT systems operated were becoming inefficient. So, they decided to come up with something to move the entire system off-premise, i.e., online models. Initially, they invested from their pockets, and after several maxed-out credit cards, they founded Virtusa.

The main goal behind the company was to help big enterprises with their IT legacy systems by adding some real value to them and not just reducing cost. Kris Canekeratne said that while their competitors were invested in cost arbitrage (providing the same services from lower-cost geographies), Virtusa emphasized engineering arbitrage (providing companies with all the sustainable benefits of software engineering and cost reduction as a part of it). The initial days were undoubtedly challenging because Virtusa approached the clients with a new perspective and it took time to educate the market on the business value they are offering.

Recent Events

Virtusa started making good profits and expanded rapidly after the early years and the post-dot-com bubble burst. In 2009, Virtusa made a very big acquisition for $7.3 million as it bought Insource, a technology consulting company focused on the insurance and healthcare sector. In 2010, the company acquired ConVista Consulting, LLC, a very influential company in the finance sector followed by acquiring another financial service consulting firm, Alas Consulting, LLC. Virtusa acquired OSB Consulting LLC in 2013, a company that specialized in financial services and insurance domains. Some of the other companies that Virtusa acquired in recent years are TradeTech Consulting, eTouch Systems Corp, and Apparatus, Inc. In 2015, Company also acquired a 53% stake in Polaris Consulting & Services Limited, India and the deal was closed for $270 million.

Santosh Thomas – CEO of Virtusa

Santosh Thomas became the CEO of Virtusa in 2021 as Kris Canekeratne stepped away. Thomas has very rich experience in managing large enterprises and also helping them grow and expand from the early stages. Thomas has been around for several years and has witnessed how to lay down strategies so that a company can survive during market transformation. Before joining the company, Thomas was a part of Cognizant’s Executive Committee. Thomas was born and raised in India and holds a degree in marketing and finance.

Annasha

Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more

Cision – A media software company that merged from a 154-year old Swedish press agency.

Cision is a public relations and media technology company incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Its history roots back to 1867 when a Swedish press agency called Svenska Telegrambyrån was formed. Its headquarters is currently based in Chicago, Illinois and it provides worldwide services to customers. Cision currently has Abel Clark as its CEO who leads 6,300 employees of the company to achieve better PR and marketing strategies. Recently, Company has also won the Best Feature Set (Cision Communications Cloud) 2021 and Best Customer Support awards by TrustRadius.

About Cision

Though Cision is famous as a web-based PR and media software company, the company also owns other online publicity and media service brands. These include PRNewswire, Canada Newswire, Bulletin Intelligence, PRWeb, etc. Apart from its offices in Canada and US, the company also operates in Europe and Asia. The PR services that are provided to the clients are either through a cloud-based model or SaaS. The customers of Cision include commercial businesses, government bodies, non-profit organizations, and educational institutions.

Founding Story of Cision

Svenska Telegrambyrån, a Swedish press agency marks the founding date of Cision in 1867. After this press agency was founded, Henry Romeike in 1881 founded the first clipping bureau in London. In 1892, Svenska Telegrambyrån established its advertising department along with a press clipping service which became famous as Pressurklipp. Between 1932 and 1934, Bacon’s Clipping Bureau was founded for the production of media books and guides on public relations.

Bacon eventually started launching many new services that included a directory for the contact information of every editor and reporter and press release mailing services. In 1972, Bacon along with Romeike & Curtice Ltd collaborated and launched a joint enterprise called Bacon’s Information International. In 1995, K-III Communications acquired Bacon’s Information and later changed its name to Primedia Inc.

A couple of years after the acquisition, Bacon partnered with MediaMap and announced that the companies will combine their media databases and PR software. By this time a company called Sifo Group AB bought Pressurklip and also acquired Romeike Group to become the largest media monitoring company globally (1999). After acquiring Romeike Group, the company changed its name to Observer AB which after two years acquired Bacon’s Information.

After all the global leaders of media and PR came under the same brand name, it acquired a series of companies in the early 2000s. The companies include Chicago News, MediaPulse, Media Clips Inc, Multivision, and many more. In 2007, Observer AB and Bacon’s Information were rebranded as Cision and in the same year, their campaign management software was launched as CisionPoint.

Recent Days

After 2007, all the operations of Observer AB were carried out under the name Cision/Cision AB. In 2011, the company sold its Finish subsidiary, Oy Cision Finland AB to M-Brain Group. By this time every industry witnessed the growing popularity of digital marketing and how social platforms were used to grow. So, Cision acquired a social media analytics company called Visible Technologies in 2014. Later that year, Cision AB merged with another public relations company, Vocus and they agreed upon the deal that the joined entity will be known as Cision. After this merger, Company relocated its headquarters to Chicago.

In 2015, Company acquired a UK-based company called Gorkana that also offered monitoring and analysis services. Cision also acquired PRNewswire from UBM Plc in December 2015 for $841 million. In 2017, the company went public via a reverse merger but again in 2020, it became a private company when Platinum Equity acquired Cision for $2.7 billion. Latest, Compay acquired Brandwatch for $450 million in February 2021.

Abel Clark – CEO of Cision

Abel Clark joined Cision directly as the CEO of the company in 2020. He is a very experienced industrial person who served as the CEO and Chairman of TruSight before joining Cision. Abel also has past working experience with Thomson Reuters as the Global Managing Director. He has high experience in leading management teams, simplifying business, and providing strategic growth solutions. Abel has an engineering degree from the University of Southampton.

Annasha

Hans Robertson, got the idea of Verkada when fifty iPads were stolen from his company.

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Verkada offers cloud-based consumer security solutions for businesses and organizations. Filip Kaliszan, James Ren, and Benjamin Bercovitz are the three Stanford graduates who co-founded Verkada along with Hans Robertson. Hans has co-founded another company before Verkada and served as the COO of the same. Currently, Filip Kaliszan is the CEO of the company and Hans Robertson is the Executive Chairman. Verkada was founded only five years ago and within a small time, it has become the talk of the physical security industry.

About Verkada Inc

Verkada is a physical security company that builds cameras, access control systems, environmental sensors, and alarms. The company builds cloud-based software platforms to access high-end hardware security products and make buildings safer. Verkada’s headquarters are based in San Mateo, California, and have customers across the globe. Their customers increased by nineteen folds between 2017 and 2018.

It has also received many awards and recognitions including Top Startups (LinkedIn), AI 50 Most Promising AI Firms (Forbes 2020), Enterprise Tech 30, etc. In January 2021, the company also became one of the 100 Best Places to Work in the Bay Area 2021 (Built-in). Last year the company crossed the $1 billion mark valuation after its Series C funding round.

Founding Idea

As it is said that every great idea emerges problem the problem, the story of Verkada is also somewhat similar. Before Verkada was founded, Hans was busy with his company Meraki (now Cisco Meraki). One day he found that fifty iPads were stolen from his company and that the video cameras in the security system were also not working for months. He realized the need for high-end security cameras in the market integrated with cloud-based software. So, Hans along with the other three co-founders decided to build a company to solve this problem. The goal was to keep data secure yet at the same time use AI to train the cameras for taking clearer photos, especially during suspicious situations.

Towards the Success

They started working on the product right away and launched beta testing in 2017 with two camera models. The company had to struggle very hard especially during the seed and Series A funding round because only a few could see the vision and potential behind the idea. Investors started showing interest in Verkada after it appeared in the Forbes 2019 list of Next Billion-Dollar Startups. It also became one of the top companies in the AI category (Forbes). After these two big features, the company successfully raised $40 million in Series B funding and the valuation of the company became $540 million.
In January 2020, the Series C funding round of Verkada took place (led by Felicis Ventures) in which it raised $80 million. The total funding received till Series C summed up to $139 million and the valuation of the company became $1.6 billion. Verkada became a billion-dollar company only after three years of launching its first product. Later in 2020 the company also launched its first access control device. The idea behind this new product is to integrate security cameras and lock in a single platform. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company also decided to distribute free surveillance kits to important organizations (like healthcare and medical businesses).

Recent Events

In October 2020, news about the Verkada breach broke out in the news as the whole world witnessed the compromise of its security systems. A group of tech-savvy hackers infiltrated the camera systems of Verkada everywhere from hospitals to jails. This included 150,000 cameras in active surveillance. The hackers not only broke into the live surveillance feeds but also gained access to the archives of Verkada cameras. Later the hackers claimed that they founder Verkada’s super admin password publicly available on the internet.

Filip Kaliszan – CEO of Verkada Inc

Filip Kaliszan is a Standford graduate who completed both his bachelor’s and masters in computer science. He was also a computer science research assistant at the university for several months. In 2007, he founded CourseRank Inc which came under Chegg after three years. In 2010 Filip joined Chegg as the Director of Product Management and also worked at Guidebook Inc until co-founding Verkada.

Annasha

2U, a company providing educational services in the era of online learning.

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2U is an American company founded in 2008 for providing educational services. The founders of the company are John Katzman, Jeremy Johnson, and Christopher J. Paucek. The main idea behind founding 2U is to provide proper online degree and non-degree programs. Its headquarters is based in Lanham, Maryland, US and it is currently serving users on a global scale. 2U mainly provided a SaaS platform to its clients (educational institutions) and along with coursework design and infrastructure support.

About 2U

2U has always focussed on providing top-quality online education and services by establishing contracts with top-tier partners. Recently, the company has acquired edX (an American MOOCs provider that was created by Harvard and MIT) which has led to its exposure to a broader audience base and hence more opportunity for growth. 2U to date has collaborated with more than 230 top-class universities to create approximately 3,500 digital programs. The company has more than 40 million global learners who are benefiting from the services of 2U. Recently, the company has also announced a partnership with the University of Singapore intending to expand online professional education.

Early Days

In 2008, the co-founder of The Princeton Review, John Katzman founded 2U originally naming it 2tor after his pet dog. He decided to bring two other important members on board who were Christopher Paucek who was the former CEO of Hooked on Phonics and Jeremy Johnson, a tech entrepreneur. These three together became the co-founders of 2U.

When they started the company, Paucek became the CEO of the business and he is continuing to be so even today. The co-founders saw this business sector as a good opportunity and during that time there were very few top-tier universities that provided online instruction. In 2009, the company rolled out its first online teaching degree in collaboration with the University of Southern California (USC). Later, the company again collaborated with USC to launch an online degree in social work.

In 2011 two new universities partnered with 2U, namely, Georgetown University’s School of Nursing and Health and Kenan-Flagler Business School (University of North Carolina). The latter started offering an online MBA degree through 2U. In 2012, John Katzman left the 2U team to launch Noodle Partners (a company in the education management sector).

Success and Growth

As the number of universities partnered with 2U kept increasing every day, the company became more famous. This eventually led the company to raise $10 million in venture capital in 2013 and went public in the next year by offering 9.2 million shares. In the same year, two new members joined the board of the company, Sallie Krawcheck, and Earl Lewis. By the end of 2014 schools like Northwestern University and the University of California, Berkeley signed up with 2U for offering online degrees. In 2015, Yale University partnered with 2U to offer a full-time, online master of medical science degree. By the end of the year, more than 12,000 students enrolled in the 2U platform.

In 2017, as a part of 2U’s strategy, it started acquiring education companies. It included GetSmarter and Trilogy Education. In 2018, the company partnered with Harvard University to offer the Harvard Business Analytics Program (HBAP) for experienced professionals. It also tied up with the University of London to offer its first undergraduate program. The company witnessed a large growth in its gross revenue during 2020 because of the shifting of education to online learning. To expand 2U more in the online marketplace, it acquired edX in June 2021 for $800 million in cash.

About the Founders

John Katzman is a famous personality in the American EdTech sector who has established many companies to assist students with their careers. He attended Princeton University and later co-founded The Princeton Review and served as its CEO until 2007. He is currently the CEO of The Noodle Companies.

Jeremy Johnson apart from co-founding 2U also co-founded Andela and currently serving as its CEO. He was featured in Forbes 30 under 30 for two years consecutively.

Christopher Paucek is the co-founder and current CEO of 2U. He received several highly-rated CEO awards from Glassdoor. In 1993, he co-founded his first company, Cerebellum Corporation, and also served as the CEO of Smarterville Inc before co-founding 2U.

Annasha

Ragy Thomas started coding in his spare time to build a famous software company.

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Ragy Thomas, an Indian-born American entrepreneur founded Sprinklr, a software company in 2009. The company’s headquarters is based in New York City and has more than 2,400 employees. Earlier in 2021, Sprinklr got listed on the New York Stock Exchange and started trading as a public company. Sprinklr specializes in SaaS customer management experience (CME) platform and combines different applications for social media marketing and monitoring, content management, collaboration, etc. Many multinational conglomerates like Nike, Cisco, Microsoft have signed up over time for the services of Sprinklr.

About Sprinklr

Ragy founded Sprinklr from his spare bedroom in 2009 and officially launched the company in 2010. He launched the company after successfully landing his first customer but in no time many big companies signed up for Sprinklr’s platform. The idea behind Sprinklr’s platform for managing customer experience on the modern channel is something the companies will look up to during the 21st century. Thus, it became very popular in a little time. Over the years, Ragy has brought experienced executives onboard from companies like BMC, Salesforce, Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, etc. Sprinklr currently has offices in 25 countries and two other headquarters in London and Singapore respectively.

Early Days

Before Ragy founded Sprinklr, he had years of experience in the IT sector. When he moved to America, Ragy started working in IT consulting for AT&T and Bell Labs. But soon there was the dot-com bubble burst and he decided to spin out the company’s email marketing unit that he was working for. The new business (after spin-off) acquired Bigfoot Interactive and took its brand name which was later acquired by Alliance Data System in 2005. During this time he completed his MBA in a part-time program from New York University.

Eventually, Ragy witnessed the landscape of business changing as online marketing shifted to social media from emails. So, in his spare time, he started to code social media publishing tools and finally was able to build a dashboard for all social platforms. This marked his entrepreneurial journey and he named the company Sprinklr. During the first couple of years, Ragy self-funded the business and after he was able to land some big clients like Cisco and Dell, his brand gained popularity.

Success

In 2012, Sprinklr received its first funding from external sources, and eventually, the numbers kept rising. After a couple of years, Sprinklr raised $40 million in a funding round after which the company’s valuation became $500 million. It also acquired the Dachis Group to stretch the abilities of the Sprinklr platform. In 2014, Sprinklr acquired two more companies, namely, TBG Digital and a brand advocacy company called Branderati. Next year, the company raised another $46 million in Series E funding, and by this time the company valuation crossed $1 billion. It also launched a brand new product called Experience Cloud platform where companies can manage interaction for 23 different social media and channels. Sprinklr acquired two more companies, NewBrand and Booshaka.

In 2016, the company raised $105 million in a funding round leading its valuation to $1.8 billion. The company decided to launch new products for its Experience Cloud platform and thus expanded from social media management to customer experience management. In 2018, the company released another new product called Sprinklr Intuition (an AI-based solution) for the automatic collection and analysis of data from social media platforms. Next year, it released another AI-based product called Product Insights which can segregate various customer comments and reviews related to design, features, etc. In 2020, another funding led the company’s valuation increase to $2.7 billion.

Ragy Thomas – Founder and CEO of Sprinklr

Ragy Thomas was born and raised in India but his parents moved to Nigeria due to work purposes when he was very young. Later, he again shifted to India and attended Pondicherry Engineering College, and started working at TCS. Later, he moved to New Jersey and started working in the IT consulting sector. Currently, Ragy is the CEO of his company Sprinklr and is also present in the Board of Directors.

Annasha

Pluralsight, Story of company that started from classroom training to a famous online platform.

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Pluralsight is an online platform that offers video courses and certification to gain knowledge that will help one stay updated in the 21st century. From various courses on software development to gaining creative knowledge, Pluralsight has made everything available. Aaron Skonnard, Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, and Bill Williams founded Pluralsight in 2004 as a classroom training company. But, to keep up with the time it evolved eventually to an online platform similar to Coursera and Udemy. The company’s headquarters is based in Utah, US and it is owned by Vista Equity Partners.

About Pluralsight

Back when the company was founded, Pluralsight used to send instructors to a business or training event. But today, with the help of an online learning platform, it is making the training courses available for everyone. Pluralsight uses a subscription-based model and focuses mainly on training tech-based professionals like software and security developers, IT professionals, product managers, etc.

Pluralsight has split its training approach into two paths, skills and flow. In the skill path, the platform lets the users learn and adapt new skills, upgrade skills according to needs, etc. In the flow path, a person can compare between old and new codes, fix bugs, use data to measure each team member’s contribution, etc. The minimum cost of the Pluralsight platform starts from $29 per month.

Brief history

The company started as a classroom training service in 2004 but after three years shifted its focus to online video training. Pluralsight started making huge profits in 2011 and it is also in the top 20 list of Utah companies. Inc 5000 also named it as one of the fastest-growing private companies and one of the top education companies. In 2012, the company went into a partnership with Microsoft such that the courses of the company were available for the MSDN subscribers. Pluralsight also launched a free programming coding boot camp that focused on offering coding classes to kids who are 10 and above. The company also provided a free one-year subscription to its training library for the Utah K-12 teachers.

In 2017, Pluralsight ranked #20 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list and also made it into the list of Great Place To Work’s 2017 Best Workplaces (for small and medium-sized companies). Next year, Pluralsight filed for its IPO and began trading publicly but in December 2020 it was acquired by a private equity firm called Vista Equity Partners. The deal was closed by $3.5 billion. In the past decade, Pluralsight has successfully landed many corporate clients, and the majority of them are Fortune 500 companies.

Funding

When Pluralsight was started, it was a self-funded venture as each of the four founders contributed $5000. For a very long time, the company didn’t receive any external funding until December 2012 when the Series A funding round was conducted. In the first funding round, Pluralsight raised $27.5 million from Insight Venture Partners and received an additional $2.5 million later. In 2014, Pluralsight raised another $135 million in Series B funding when some new investors like ICONIQ Capital and Sorenson Capital joined in. During that time, Pluralsight became the first Utah-based company ever to receive that much amount of funding. After the Series C funding round in 2016, Pluralsight became a billion-dollar company.

Acquisitions

Pluralsight started acquiring a series of companies from 2013 starting with e-learning and education businesses. It acquired PeepCode in July 2013 followed by TrainSignal and Tekpub in the same year. In 2014, it acquired Digital-Tutors expanding Pluralsight’s training courses to media and design. Later in the same year, it acquired an online skill assessment platform called Smarterer. Some of the other companies it acquired in the last few years are Train Simple, GitPrime, Next Tech, etc.

About Aaron Skonnard – CEO and co-founder

Aaron started to code from a very young age when his father bought him an Apple II computer. He completed his studies in Computer Science from Brigham Young University and worked at various companies like 3M, Intel, and Axiom Technologies. He also published a few books and invested in start-ups that emerged in Utah.

Annasha

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