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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

Datto

Austin McChord, Started by making the device in the parent’s basement to get the “Unicorn” status.

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Austin McChord, a software programmer, created Datto in 2007 in Connecticut. In 2017, the company was merged with Autotask Corporation and it became a subsidiary of Vista Equity Partners. Based in the software sector, Datto specializes in cybersecurity and data backup. Currently, the company has approximately 1,600 members and is led by Tim Weller (CEO of Datto). The company is known for developing both hardware and software products required for data recovery purposes. Datto started expanding to international markets in 2013 and currently, it has customers across the globe.

About Datto

Datto is a leading provider of cloud-based software and security products that are delivered by managed service providers. Datto’s solutions in various domains help its network of MSP Partners serve more than a million businesses worldwide. The products developed by Datto help the MSPs to protect both small and medium-sized businesses against threats.

Datto offers subscription-based pricing models so that there are multiple choices for different types of customers. But, the main focus of Datto is to enable MSP growth. When Austin McChord established Datto he used to sell self-made data backup devices. From that to becoming a unicorn, Datto has grown massively in a few years.

Datto
Image source: techtalk.needonsite.com

The Backstory of the Company

The idea of building a data recovery company came to Austin’s mind when he first developed a backup device in his parent’s basement. He used a LEGO brick to complete the first iteration of the product. After successfully building the backup device, Austin went ahead with the plan of founding Datto and thus started selling hand-made data backup devices. He landed his first customer in 2008 and eventually he was able to build a system that would allow data synchronization between two companies. Later, he successfully built a version of Zenith Infotech.

The sales started increasing slowly and by the end of 2009, the company made $70,000 in monthly sales. In 2010, Datto released a new product but unfortunately, it led to the crash of old computer systems. So, a replacement product was built from scratch to replace the new one and it was called SIRIS. The sales of the company were pretty much stagnant during this period and the company finally rolled out SIRIS as a free upgrade. In 2011, the sales started increasing rapidly and hit $9 million and the next year it increased to $25 million.

Success and Expansion

The funding round of the company started in 2013. In the first round of venture capital financing, Datto raised $25 million. This round was led by General Catalyst Partners. By this time also the company was focusing on various small and medium-sized businesses with clients such as Susan G. Komen for the Cure and several NFL teams. In 2014, Datto purchased a cloud-to-cloud backup company called Backupify. In 2015, the company’s series B funding round was led by Technology Crossover Ventures and it was able to raise $75 million. In the same year, the company also gained the “unicorn” status and became the only company in Connecticut to earn it. After the series B funding round, the company expanded to the Australian and New Zealand markets.

The acquisitions continued as in early 2017 the company acquired Open Mesh. Later in that year, the company was acquired by Vista Equity Partners and the deal was closed for approximately $1.5 billion. The company then merged with Autotask Corporation and Austin became the CEO of the merged company. But he stepped down from his position in 2018 and his place was taken by Tim Weller. In 2020, Datto became a public company and sold 22 million shares to raise $594 million in its IPO.

Austin McChord – Founder of Datto

Austin McChord is a computer engineer and an entrepreneur who became famous after founding Datto. He initially pursued electrical engineering at the Rochester University of Technology. When he was 21-year old, he developed a data backup device from scratch in his father’s basement. Initially, when the company was landing its first few customers, he received a buyout offer for $100 million but turned it down. Instead, he tried to raise some funding and strengthen the foundation of the company.

Netskope

Netskope, Indian Co-Founders who make a huge contribution to the success of the company.

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Founded in 2012, Netskope is an American software company based in Santa Clara, California, United States. Netskope provides a computer security platform and offers cloud-native solutions for enterprises such that the companies can protect their sensitive data and defend their application and system against various cyber threats. Netskope is considered a leading company in its sector because of its Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB). The founders of the company are Sanjay Beri (current CEO), Lebin Cheng, Ravi Ithal, and Krishna Narayanaswamy. Apart from its headquarters that is based in Santa Clara, the company also has a software development facility in Bangalore, India. 

About Netskope

When the team of Netskope was formed, it brought in distinguished engineers from the security and networking field. Some of its early members are ex-employees of Cisco, Juniper Networks, Palo Alto Networks, and VMWare. The company currently has more than 1,000 employees and it has some of the biggest multinational conglomerates as its clients (more than 25% of Fortune 100 customers). 

Netskope has expanded to various international markets including India, Singapore, Melbourne, London, etc. In the 21st century, Netskope is one of the fastest-growing SASE companies and the main idea behind building the company was to give people the power to access the cloud on their devices,

Netskope
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Founding History of Netskope

Before co-founding Netskope, Sanjay Beri was the VP of the Access & Security business at Juniper Networks. Since Sanjay worked at a very reputed company he made several connections throughout the year. So, for some time he took time and spoke to several CEOs of other companies and finally in 2012 co-founded Netskope. He started the company with initial venture capital of $21 million approximately. During the first six months, an office was set up in Palo Alto from where Netskope operated. When they established the company, the first thing that Netskope put their focus on was hiring the best talents. 

In October 2013, the company launched its first product which was security software available openly. The company also formed an advisory team and brought Enrique Salem, former Symantec Chairman onboard. In the funding round of 2014, the company raised $35 million followed by raising another $75 million in 2015. The latter funding round was led by ICONIQ Capital. The company announced that the latest fundings would be invested to expand in New Zealand and Australia. 

Funding and Acquisition

In 2016, the first two patents of Netskope were finally issued in its name for security and network-delivered services. Next year, the company conducted another funding round which was bigger than all the funding rounds held before that. Netskope was able to raise $100 million in the funding round and it was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. In the same year, the company acquired Sift Security, a software business that mainly focused on next-generation cloud infrastructure security. Cloud Hunter of Sift Security was renamed as Netskope’s Security Cloud after the acquisition. In 2018, another patent was issued to Netskope for context-aware data loss prevention. By the end of 2018, the company successfully raised another $168.7 million. 

Recent Days

In 2019, the company brought a new CFO of Netskope, Drew Del Matto (former Citrix and Fortinet executive). Earlier in 2020, Netskope conducted another funding round and raised $340 million. This funding round was led by Sequoia Capital Global Equities and the total funding summed up to $740 million. In February 2020, the company launched Netskope Private Access Solution, and the same year the company’s total valuation became $3 billion (tripled within fifteen months). The company has made Forbes Cloud 100 list because of its advanced cloud services that include protection against cyber threats. The company has already entered into a partnership with Cybersecurity and Exclusive Networks. 

Sanjay Beri – Co-founder and CEO

Sanjay pursued computer engineering from the University of Waterloo followed by completing his master’s in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Though Sanjay came on the radar after co-founding Netskope, his first startup was Ingrian Networks which was eventually acquired by SafeNet. Some of the companies that he worked at before building his own company were Microsoft, McAfee, and Juniper Networks. 

LivePerson

When nobody answers Rob LoCascio’s question leads to the foundation of an international conglomerate.

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LivePerson is a company established in the internet and computer software sector in 1995. Robert LoCascio (famous as Rob LoCascio) founded the company to redefine conversation among people with the help of AI (Artificial Intelligence). The company’s headquarters are based in New York City and it is currently working in a remote mode so there are no other offices worldwide. LivePerson is a publicly-traded company and it has customers all across the world. LivePerson has two main products, namely, The Conversational Cloud and LP Insights.

About The Company

The main goal of LivePerson is to make the life of normal people and various brands much easier with the help of conservational AI. More than 20 years after the company’s establishment, LivePerson started offering its AI-based product. The main idea behind this conversational AI was to offer customers the technology to create AI-powered chatbots. This would help the brand answer various questions of the consumers thus taking pressure off the human service staff.

LivePerson has more than 18,000 active clients spread across the world and some of them include HSBC, Orange, and GM Financial. In 2020, LivePerson made it into the Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies list. It was Robert LoCascio who successfully invented the live chat technology for websites back in 1995.

Idea Behind LivePerson

The idea to build LivePerson and provide people with conversational AI struck Rob’s mind when he first started using the internet. Well, he had a query about a product and he dropped a question on its website. He noticed that nobody answered his question so he had to go the conventional way of dialing the number and waiting for the person on the other side to respond. After this experience, he thought that although the main idea behind the internet was to connect people in reality he had a sore experience. Rob proceeded with the idea and built an international conglomerate, LivePerson.

LivePerson
Image source: miro.medium.com

Acquisitions

LivePerson has a big list of acquisitions and started in 2000. LivePerson’s first acquisition was HumanClick, a company that offered real-time customer service applications. In July 2006 it acquired Proficient Systems followed by Kasamba Inc in 2007. It acquired a web analytics and optimization platform called NuConomy in 2010. After a couple of years, in 2012, LivePerson acquired three companies in the same year. They are Amadesa (a web marketing company), Look.io (mobile chat provider), and Engage Pty Ltd (cloud-based customer contact solutions). In 2014, LivePerson acquired NextGraph, Synchronite, and Contact At Once. LivePerson’s latest acquisitions are Tenfold, a customer experience integration platform, and VoiceBase, a voice analytics platform.

Success Of LivePerson

After establishing the company in 1995, Rob took the company public in 2000. It was one of the last companies that became public before the dot-com bubble burst. It took almost ten years for the company to rebound and they survived the most difficult times. In 2011, the company was named Fortune’s 100 Fastest Growing Companies and Forbes 25 Fastest-Growing Tech Companies. Currently, the company is focusing to scale its voice AI innovation and that is why it acquired Tenfold and VoiceBase. In November 2021, the company was named to Inc’s first annual Best-led companies list.

About Rob LoCascio – Founder and CEO

Rob LoCascio, both founder and current CEO of LivePerson is one of the longest-standing founding CEOs in the tech industry. It was Rob who more than two decades ago made this innovative invention that helps initiate an authentic conversation between a company and its customers. He opened the door of massive opportunities for brands so that they can provide quality customer support. Apart from being a famous entrepreneur, Rob is also a philanthropist.

Rob completed his education at Loyola University Maryland and started working for Elders IXL. But, the company laid off employees after six months and Rob lost his job. After losing that job he was determined to open his business and never work for someone else. In 1991, Rob founded Sybarite Media Inc but it was shut down in 1995, the very year he founded LivePerson.

Mimecast

Mimecast, the cloud-based email management to protect our sensitive information.

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Mimecast is a publicly-traded company in the IT sector specializing in cybersecurity, information security, and email and file archiving. Peter Bauer and Neil Murray founded the company in 2003 and currently, Peteris is serving as the CEO of the company while Neil is in the position of CTO. The headquarters of the company is based in London, England. Though Mimecast offers a wide range of products to its customers, it mainly specializes in cloud-based email management for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Email 365. Mimecast became a public company in November 2015.

About Mimecast

The main goal of Mimecast is to eradicate the risks that we face daily on your email system. It also helps in reducing the cost that is required to protect our sensitive information by moving the workload to the cloud. In a single subscription-based model, Mimecast provides comprehensive email security along with archiving and service continuity.

Currently, Mimecast has 12 offices in several continents. It has more than 40,600 customers on a worldwide basis and approximately 1,700 employees to make better products and offer consistent service. The major investors of the company are Index Ventures, Dawn Capital, and Insight Venture Partners. Recently, the company has hired a new Public Sector and Channel Director to strengthen its operation in South Africa.

Mimecast
Image source: businesstech.co.za

History of the Company

Both Peter Bauer and Neil Murray came from an experienced and entrepreneurial background. They previously founded FAB Technology and Pro-Solutions respectively. Before founding Mimecast, Peter was trained as a Microsoft systems engineer and gained experience working with corporate messaging systems. The company designed the MIME protocol for formatting multimedia e-mail. Nathaniel Borenstein was the chief scientist behind the design of this protocol. After the company was founded in 2003, it expanded overseas establishing offices in London, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Munich, Israel, and many more.

The idea behind founding Mimecast was quite simple as the product was developed to make it easy for users to embrace email. In October 2015, the company filed for its IPO and the next month it started trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. In the past few years, Mimecast has acquired several companies starting with Ataata, a startup specializing in cybersecurity. In 2018, the company acquired another cybersecurity firm called Solebit. It acquired a company called DMARC Analyzer in 2019 and last year it acquired Segasec.

Business Strategies

In an interview, Peter Bauer said that the M&A strategies of the company are mainly focused on advanced technologies and new talents. They mainly target buying start-ups that can provide the company with new opportunities and capabilities. It is more like harnessing the power of any new technology and giving it a proper shape using the funds of Mimecast. The company didn’t acquire any businesses for the first fourteen years, instead, they chose to build an organic platform with strong architecture. Mimecast plans for months before acquiring so that they understand the workflow of the organization well and if their technology can bring new capabilities for its customers.

Peter Bauer – Co-Founder and CEO

The CEO and co-founder of Mimecast, Peter Bauer is also a Board Member of the company. He has significant contributions to Mimecast’s SaaS strategy. He along with Neil Murray has developed the pure cloud delivery mechanism for an easy and secured user experience. Peter originally belongs from South Africa and during the 1990s he was trained as a Microsoft system engineer. He moved to the UK from South Africa where he founded Mimecast.

In 2011, he moved to Boston to help in expanding the operations of Mimecast to South Africa. In an interview, he mentioned that though their potential plans got delayed due to the crisis of COVID-19, the employees improved their communications significantly during work from home. And, it helped in uplifting the working environment of the company.

MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy – A Powerful Business Intelligence And Data Analytics Company.

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MicroStrategy is one of the leading providers of enterprise software globally. The company was founded in 1989 in Wilmington, Delaware. The founders of the company are Michael J. Saylor, Thomas Spahr, and Sanju Bansal. It is a publicly-traded company listed on New York Stock Exchange. MicroStrategy’s main focus is on developing software and that analyzes both internal and external data and helps businesses make better decisions. The company’s headquarters is based in Virginia and it has nearly 3,200 employees.

About MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy has become a very dominating company in the business analytics sector as it has successfully built a simple UI design combined with high system performance and a universal approach. MicroStrategy has 4,000 customers spread across 26 countries for whom it provides a consistent and high-quality analytics platform. The major competitors of MicroStrategy in the market are IBM Cognos, Oracle’s BI Platform, and SAP AG Business Objects. The main goal of the company is to make sure that an enterprise has access to all its data and the platform functions optimally for the user end.

History Of The Company

Michael Saylor with a consulting contract from DuPont started MicroStrategy in 1989. He received $250,000 as start-up capital and office space in Delaware to start his work. Saylor went to MIT and while he was in college he met Sanju Bansal who joined the company shortly as a co-founder. While they were in college, both of them took a class in systems dynamics theory. Based on the idea of that subject MicroStrategy developed data mining and business intelligence software using nonlinear mathematics. After three years, the company landed its first major client, McDonald’s, and signed a contract of $10 million.

Between 1990 and 1996 the company was able to increase revenue by 100% each year. With the rapid growth, the company decided to move from Delaware to Virginia with its 50 employees. In June 1998 it applied for an IPO and became a public company. MicroStrategy eventually started focusing on its research and development division hence founded Alarm.com as part of its R&D unit.

MicroStrategy
Image source: solutionsreview.com

Economic Downfall And Lawsuit

In 2000, the company decided to restate its financial years for the preceding two years after doing a review of its accounting. When the company became a public entity its stock price rose from $7 per share to $333 per share within a year. But it started falling ($120 per share) and it was due to the burst of the dot-com bubble. The same year, MicroStrategy went through another turmoil as the US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against the company and its executives. The charges were mostly of fraud and the matter was settled later in December where each of those officials paid $350,000 in fines.

Recent Days Of MicroStrategy

In 2009, the company decided to sell Alarm.com for $27.7 million. The deal was finalized with a venture capital firm ABS Capital Partners. The same year the company introduced OLAP services and eventually started developing business intelligence software applications for iPhone and iPad. In the last decade, the company also expanded the range of its services as it launched a cloud-based service, MicroStrategy Cloud in 2011. In 2014, the company collaborated with Facebook and introduced a new feature on its platform called PRIME (Parallel Relational In-Memory Engine).

The company was going through a rough financial state in 2014 and decided to lay off 770 employees. Saylor also requested the company to reduce his salary to $1 from $875,000. In 2015, the company launched MicroStrategy 10 and after three years released the next version. Last year, the company released MicroStrategy 2020 which included a new design for its Hyperintelligence analytics tool.

Michael J. Saylor – Co-Founder And CEO

Michael J. Saylor is a famous American entrepreneur who is famous for co-founding MicroStrategy. He is also an author and the sole trustee of Saylor Academy. He went to MIT with a scholarship. He also joined the Theta Delta Chi fraternity where he met Sanju Bansal. In 1999 he was featured in MIT Technology Review as an “Innovator Under 35.”

Varonis Systems

Varonis Systems – A Software Company That Started To Mainly Protect Unstructured Data.

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In 2005, Yaki Faitelson and Ohad Korkus founded Varonis Systems to help organizations track, visualize, and protect their unstructured data. Varonis Systems is based in New York City, US and it has R&D offices in Herzliya, Israel. Varonis offers services globally and it has approximately 1,700 employees and more than 7,000 customers.

Though Varonis is a computer software company working to protect the unstructured data of its clients, it works a bit differently than other conventional cybersecurity firms. With the help of various platforms and data-tracking technology of Varonis, organizations can keep a real-time awareness of how every employee is accessing and using data to stop any malicious attacks.

About Varonis Systems

Since data is at the center of every organization, Varonis builds advanced platforms to help clients protect their unstructured data. In every organization, multiple malicious attacks that compromise sensitive data take place both from an external and internal source. To protect data, Varonis performs User Behavior Analytics (UBA) to identify any abnormal behavior before a cyberattack. The principle working pattern of Veronis is to extract the metadata from an organization’s IT infrastructure and then use the necessary information to map relationships among employees, data, etc.

Varonis has multiple types of products as per the need of a customer. Some of them are DatAlert (UBA and Data Security), DatAdvanatge (Data Governance and Data Protection), DatAnywhere (Enterprise File Sync and Sharing), etc. In 2008, the company made it to the list of Fast 50 Reader Favourites. Earlier this year, the company was awarded a Cyber Catalyst designation for its data security platform.

Varonis Systems
Image source: tadviser.com

The Idea Behind Founding Varonis

A big idea doesn’t emerge out of thin air. Whenever we are trying to find a solution to fix our problem, we hardly have any idea that how many people can benefit from an effective solution. The idea to establish Varonis Systems always emerged as a solution when the two founders were trying to find a solution to protect data. In 2003, an oil and gas company almost faced a disaster when they took high-resolution images of the ocean floor. But, one day the photographs suddenly disappeared from their server and no experts were able to discover what took place.

Unable to understand if the data was deleted by an accident or deliberately, the security experts saw an opportunity in the software industry. With every passing data, data is becoming more valuable to an individual, an enterprise, a nation, and to the whole world. So, security and systems experts (who previously worked at NetVision and NetApp), Yaki Faitelson, and Ohad Korkus founded Varonis Systems in 2005. They wanted to give organizations more visibility to their data and protect sensitive information.

History Of The Company

Varonis offers multiple ways for an organization to protect its data from both the employees of the company and external sources. The company mainly addresses issues like file activity tracking, access control, and information rights management. Varonis enables a company to track the behavior of an employee in the data server and if there is any abnormal behavior the system will be alerted. The co-founders created a system such that it would be able to extract metadata in the file systems.

While they were developing the product, they brought Dr. Jacob Goldberger, statistical modeling and machine learning expert onboard. He mainly helped the team to develop the algorithms that would provide the user data link. In 2005, these three people filed a patent and it was approved in 2006. The same year, Veronis released its first product, DatAdvanatge so that enterprises can monitor their file activity, data access rights, user behavior, etc. After a few years, the company added the IDU Classification Framework so that the system was able to search for various keywords and phrases. The main investors of the company are Accel Partners, Evergreen Venture Partners, Gitano Venture Capital, and EMC.

Yaki Faitelson – CEO Of Veronis Systems

Yaki Faitelson is the co-founder and current CEO of Veronis Systems. He is also the Chairman of the Board. Before co-founding Veronis Systems, Yaki served at many leadership positions in the global professional services and systems integration divisions of NetVision and Network Appliance.