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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

Mindtree

Mindtree – An 22-year Old Indian IT Company That Operates Under Larsen & Toubro.

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Mindtree is a publicly-traded company that is established in the IT industry. It was founded in 1999 by a group of 10 people. Most of them were Indian IT professionals while three of them invested through an entity incorporated in Mauritius. Mindtree provides various IT services including outsourcing and consulting. The company’s headquarters is based in Bangalore, India and it is currently a part of L&T Group. Debashis Chatterjee is the present MD and CEO of the company.

About Mindtree

Mindtree is an Indian IT company offering services on a global scale. It has hired more than 23,000 people over the past two decades who serve more than 300 active clients. Mindtree has business across 18 countries and the major areas that the company deals with are e-commerce, cloud computing, data analytics, digital transformation, resource planning, etc. The company offers services in various sectors like banking, insurance, consumer packed goods, manufacturing, entertainment, hospitality, etc. Mindtree has five overseas subsidiaries located in China, the UK, the US, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Mindtree
Image source: financialexpress.com

Founding History Of The Company

Mindtree was officially incorporated on 5th August 1999. The group of 10 IT professionals started the company with an initial investment of Rs 169 million. The company raised this amount by subscription of equity shares during the first round of funding. Mindtree received the initial funding from LSO Investment (P) Limited, Walden Software Investments Limited, Amalgamated Holdings Limited, and Vaitarna Holdings Private Limited. In 2001, Mindtree conducted the second round of funding where it raised another Rs 590 million from existing and new (Capital Group and Franklin Templeton) investors.

In 2006, the company filed for its IPO and became a public company. It was listed on both the Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange. After the company became public, it rebranded itself with a new logo and brand identity. The company eventually started planning its expansion in various Indian states like Chennai and Bhubaneshwar. It also acquired two companies in the early 2000s, namely, ASAP and ARPSL (software division) and Linc Software Services Private Limited. It also established a partnership with Volvo Information Technology for IT outsourcing.

Expansion And Growth

In 2008, the company changed its name from Mindtree Consulting Limited to Mindtree Limited. In 2009, the company signed an agreement with the world’s largest private equity firm, Carlyle Group. The agreement was such that Mindtree would provide its IT infrastructure management and services that would help in monitoring Carlyle’s IT production servers. Later in 2010, the company also launched security services so that businesses can solidify their security and compliance strategies. In 2011, Mindtree was recognized as a top outsourcing company in India. It also won the Marathon Awards South Asia 2010 for its Assist Technologies Program. Mindtree also won the prestigious Corporate Governance Award in 2012. It also became one of the top five companies at an international level for R&D services providers.

In 2012, Mindtree established its first delivery center in the US (Gainesville, Florida). And once it started expanding overseas after five years it has established offices in 17 countries. In 2015 and 2016, Mindtree acquired a few companies outside India that helped it strengthen its American and European markets. In 2015, it acquired three companies, namely, Discoverture Solutions LLC, Bluefin Solutions Limited, and Relational Solutions Inc. IN 2016, it acquired a USA-based company called Magnet 360. In 2019, Larsen & Toubro, one of the biggest Indian conglomerates took control over Mindtree, and currently, it owns a 61.08% stake in the company.

Debashis Chatterjee – CEO

Debasish Chatterjee hails from a very rich industrial background as he has 30 years of working experience in various fields including IT, relationship management, strategic alliance, etc. Before joining Mindtree, he worked at Cognizant as the President of Global Delivery and Digital Systems and Technology. He also has working experience at TCS, Mahindra & Mahindra, and IBM. He completed his education at Jadavpur University.

SenseTime

SenseTime – A Chinese AI Unicorn That Came Up With Some Of The World’s Most Advanced Technologies.

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Based in Hong Kong, SenseTime is known as the world’s most valuable AI (artificial intelligence) company. It was founded in 2014 and within 7 years it has gained unicorn status and developed some of the advanced AI algorithms. A computer science professor, Tang Xiao’ou, and a computer scientist, Xu Li co-founded the company with others. It started as an academic project and by 2019 its valuation became $4.5 billion. It has landed some of the biggest conglomerates as its clients including Alibaba, Honda, Qualcomm, and Weibo.

About The SenseTime

It is almost hard to believe that a young seven-year-old company develops such advanced Ai-based technologies that it is one of the finest in the world. The company develops AI technology including image and facial recognition, object detection, medical image analysis, video analysis, remote sensing, etc. Its products are used in several different industries from entertainment to healthcare.

When the company was founded in 2014, it developed DeepID, a facial recognition algorithm that was the first of its kind to detect accuracy better than human eyes. SenseTime is working with the Chinese government on a project to make the country economically autonomous by 2025. Currently, SenseTime is a privately-held company.

SenseTime
Image source: wire19.com

Early History

In October 2014, Tang Xiao’ou and Xu Li co-founded SenseTime and in the founded year it unveiled the best algorithm for better detection accuracy than human eyes. This algorithm is called DeepID and it is even ahead of Facebook. The company also presented and published several papers on computer vision and they were accepted into the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

Within one year of its establishment, a total of 9 papers were accepted. In 2016, the company enrolled itself in the ImagineNet competition and it bagged the first price in several fields including object detection, video object detection, and scene analysis. The number of papers accepted in the CVPR Conference also rose to 16 by the end of the year.

Success Of SenseTime

In 2017, SenseTime broke all of the records of past company’s in the AI industry in terms of the highest rounds of financing. The number of publications kept on increasing and by the year-end, it surpassed both Google and Facebook with 43 publications. It was in the same year that SenseTime raised $410 million in the Series B funding. SenseTime started collaborating with several companies and government bodies of China. For example, in October 2017 it started a joint venture with Qualcomm followed by collaborating with Shanghai Municipal Government, and Honda by the end of the year.

In 2018, the company declared a collaboration with MIT for advanced research in the field of AI but after a couple of years, the program was canceled by MIT. In April 2018, a non-profit AI lab called HKAI Lab was founded to make Hong Kong a global AI hub. SenseTime founded this lab jointly with Alibaba and the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation. SenseTime was also named as China’s National Open Innovation Platform for Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence on Intelligent Vision in September 2018.

Recent Days

Since 2014, SenseTime has tried to develop more advanced AI technologies that are equally focused on the research and development side of the company apart from the business part. In 2019, it became the first company in the world to join MIT’s Quest for Intelligence Campaign. The company is planning to go public as it filed IPO this year on the Hong Kong exchange. Though the company has given the world’s largest computer vision model, the profit curve is not very impressive. SenseTime heavily invests in R&D (60% of funding) and plans to expand to more and more industries both in domestic and overseas countries.

About The Founders

Tang Xiao’ou, apart from being the co-founder of SenseTime is also an information engineering professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is an alumnus of MIT and worked at Microsoft Research Area for four years. In 2009, he received the best paper award at CVPR Conference.

Xu Li is the co-founder and current CEO of SenseTime. He studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong followed by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He has published more than 50 academic works in the field of computer vision and won many awards.

Qihoo 360

Qihoo 360 – Story Of The Biggest Cybersecurity Company In China.

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The Chinese internet security company, Qihoo 360 was born in 2005 in London. The headquarters of the company is based in Beijing, China, and its products and services are used all over the world. Zhou Hongyi is the co-founder and the current CEO and Chairman of the company. He co-founded the company with Qi Xiangdong who is the present director of Qihoo 360. The company is famous for its antivirus software, 360 Safeguard, and its web browser, 360 Secure Browser. This antivirus software is available for both PCs and mobile phones. Qihoo 360 is a privately held company and it has more than 4,000 employees.

About Qihoo 360

Qihoo 360 is the largest provider of cybersecurity and mobile security software in China. The company is known for its widely used products like 360 Total Security, 360 Mobile Security, enterprise security browsers, etc. The company also works closely with the government for national security products. The company has crossed more than 500 million daily active users for its software products. Apart from the software products, the company provides services like security consulting, security maintenance, security training, etc. Qihoo 360 has more than 10,000 patents for its original and core technology.

Qihoo 360
Image source: blogspot.com

Early History Of Qihoo 360

Back in 2005, when the company was founded, it was mainly known for its anti-virus software product. After operating for six years as a private company, it decided to file its IPO in 2011. When the company filed its IPO it raised $175 million and it marked a date in history for being the largest IPO of a Chinese company in the US. So, in March 2011, Qihoo 360 got listed on the New York Stock Exchange as QIHU.

After Qihoo 360 started operating as a public company, it eventually expanded its business and entered the smartphone market in 2012. In a joint venture with Haier, a Chinese electronics company, it released a new product line Battleship (phone). On the first day of releasing the new phone, the company received over 200,000 pre-orders.

Later in 2012, the company released a search engine so.com and it became a competitor of Baidu, China’s one of the most prominent search engines. With this new search engine, China captured around 10% of the total search engine market. In 2013, the company released another search engine called leidian.com to strengthen its presence in the mobile market. As the sales started increasing, Qihoo decided to set up a venture capital fund in Silicon Valley in 2014.

Privatization Of The Company

In 2015, the company announced that it is being acquired by a group of investors and will enter into a privatization agreement valued at $9.3 billion. For privatization of the company in NYSE, the funding came from mortgaging the building of the company and also a $3 billion loan from China Merchant Bank. Qihoo 360 officially became a private company in July 2016. Getting delisted in the US also became an opportunity for the company to grow in its domestic market and also become a key member of the national security of the nation. After the privatization of the Company, China International Capital Corporation (CICC) estimated that the value of the company will increase six-folds than its US value.

Recent Days

After Qihoo 360 became a private company, it decided to go public in China by means of a reverse merger. Qihoo 360 made the deal of reverse merger with a public company called SJEC Corp. The deal was to make Qihoo the dominant entity while SJEC survives as the subsidiary of the company. The reverse merger was completed in February 2018 which led Zhou Hongyi to hold 12.14& shares of Qihoo 360 and 51.56% shares of the two shareholding firms.

Zhou Hongyi – Founder and CEO

Zhou Hongyi is a famous Chinese entrepreneur and billionaire. Famous for co-founding Qihoo 360, he ranked number 45 on the Forbes China Rich List in 2018. Zhou is one of the first internet entrepreneurs in China who was responsible for changing the internet landscape of the nation.

Wise

Wise – A Multimillion-Dollar Fintech Company That Emerged Out Of A Sudden Plan.

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Wise is a young fintech company based in Shoreditch, England. Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus founded the company in 2011. Earlier in 2021, Wise went public through a direct listing on London Stock Exchange and it was valued at $11 billion. The journey of Wise refers to one of those stories when two people meeting at a party started talking about their life problems. From figuring out a viable solution to making millions in revenue, Wise has achieved massive success in ten years. The company also received an impressive amount of funding since 2011 which could be because both the founders were already established in their professional careers.

The Idea Behind Wise

Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus both were living in London when they met in 2007. The two co-founders started a conversation at a party only to realize that they share a common problem. Both Kristi and Taavet send money back to their home countries and every month they need to convert the currency. Taavet used to convert his Estonian salary to pounds whereas Kristo converted his salary to Estonian kroon for paying his mortgage. So, initially, these two fellows devised a solution that was exclusively for both of them. Every month Kristo topped up Taavet’s bank account, setting the amounts according to the mid-market exchange rate while Taavet did the same for Kristo. This arrangement helped them make big savings but none of them decided to open up a company.

After Kristo and Taavet made arrangements for themselves the word traveled fast to other Estonian experts. Due to the huge amount of savings that came with the idea, they turned it into a business without any plan of doing it in 2007. In 2011, they officially established this money-exchange forum and it was called TransferWise. The business started flying only after 15 fifteen minutes of TechCrunch publishing an article. Kristo said that the transactions never stopped.

Wise
Image source: www.gavi.org

Executing The Plan

When Kristo and Taavet came up with this idea of overseas transfer, they were both working at different companies. In 2011 they decided to quit their jobs and for the first year, they self-funded the company. The company eventually started attracting many investors that also include the famous billionaire, Peter Thiel. Today, the company processes transactions for more than ten million active customers who save around $1.5 billion every year that goes as bank fees. The first year when Wise operated, the total amount from the transactions summed up to €10 million. The company gained popularity so fast that after a year it was named “East London’s 20 hottest tech startups.”

In 2012 the company was featured by several big magazines as one of the top startups in the country. Till 2013 the company also allowed its users to purchase bitcoin but due to pressure from banking providers, it was discontinued. The same year, a comparison site called Monito revealed that transactions in Wise are 83 cheaper on average as compared to big banks of the UK. In 2015, the company also made it to the top 10 on CNBC’s 2015 Disruptor 50 list. Later in 2015, Wise was named World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer. In February 2021, the company rebranded itself Wise from TransferWise. This rebranding wanted to reflect on the fact that the company has expanded its services as it goes beyond just international money transfers.

About The Founders

Kristo Käärmann is the famous co-founder of an extremely successful startup called Wise (earlier TransferWise). He studied mathematics and computer science and started his career as a consultant at PwC. Before co-founding Wise with Taavet Hinrikus, he worked at Deloitte for more than four years. He is also the current CEO of Wise, which filed its IPO in 2021.

Taavet Hinrikus is a famous entrepreneur and investor who started his career at Halo Interactive DDB. It worked at several companies before co-founding Wise that also includes being the Director of Strategy at Skype. After he and Kristo came up with the solution of overseas transfer, he spread the word on Skype which helps them gain a potential customer base before officially launching the company.

Tech Mahindra

Tech Mahindra – Story Of India’s Leading IT Consulting Company That Started 35 Years Ago.

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Founded in 1986, Tech Mahindra is one of the leading multinational tech companies born in India. It is a subsidiary of the Mahindra Group with its headquarters based in Pune, Maharashtra, India. Anand Mahindra is the founder of the company and he is also the present Chairman of the company. Currently, C.P. Gurnani is both the CEO and MD of Tech Mahindra.

Tech Mahindra is famous for providing IT and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services. It is a publicly-traded company and as of April 2020, its valuation is $5.2 billion. Tech Mahindra is a multinational company with customers across 90 countries. It has more than 125,000 employees and ranks fifth in the list of India’s top IT firms.

Early Days Of The Company

The origin of the Company dates back to the mid-1980s when Mahindra & Mahindra started a joint venture with British Telecom. This partnership was to start a technology outsourcing firm where British Telecom initially has a 30% stake in the Tech Mahindra company. In 2010, British Telecom decided to sell 5.5% of its stake in Tech Mahindra to Mahindra & Mahindra. The deal was closed for Rs 451 crore. After two years, British Telecom again sold 14.1% of its stake to the institutional investors for Rs 1,395 crore approximately. By the end of 2021, British Telecom was out of the joint venture as it sold the rest of its stake of Tech Mahindra to institutional investors.

In 2009, Satyam Computer Services faced a big scandal after which Tech Mahindra decided to bid for the company. It became one of the strong bidders as it beat Larsen & Toubro and emerged out with a 31% stake in the company. After the bidding, the Board of Directors of Satyam Computer was decided by Venturbay Consultants Private Limited. This company was a subsidiary of Tech Mahindra and it became the company with a controlling stake in Satyam Computer.

Tech Mahindra
Image source: brandfinance.com

Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Satyam

In 2012, Tech Mahindra merged with Mahindra Satyam and the merger created an IT company worth $2.5 billion. Both the first received a green signal from the Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange for the merger and after a year Andhra Pradesh High Court also approved. There were several technical approvals to be taken for this merger which were all completed in 2013. After the formation of this new organization, the executive team for the company was formed. Anand Mahindra led the company as its Chairman followed by Vineet Nayyar as Vice Chairman, and C.P. Gurnani as the CEO and Managing Director.

The merger was officially completed in June 2013 and it made Company the fifth largest software services company in India. After the merger took place, the company received approval for a scheme under which the shares of Mahindra Satyam could be swapped for Tech Mahindra. The share swapping was given a time limit of a month as from July, trading of Mahindra Satyam was suspended and the shareholders of this company were allocated shares of Tech Mahindra. This merger witnessed a high increase in profit (up by 27% in the first quarter as compared to that of the previous year).

Recent Days

In 2014, Tech Mahindra made a big acquisition as it bought Lightbridge Communication Corporation, the largest independent multinational telecom service company. Next year it acquired a Swiss IT firm called SOFGEN Holdings. It also purchased a controlling stake in an Italian automotive brand called Pininfarina S.p.A. In 2016, the company revealed its plan to acquire Target Group as it would boost its business in the banking sector.

After the merger of Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Satyam, the company focused on strengthening its international market, thus collaborating with various foreign brands. It also started a partnership with Huawei to sell its products and services across 44 countries. Earlier this year, Company started a joint venture with ThoughtSpot, a US-based analytics company.

About The Founder

Anand Gopal Mahindra is an Indian billionaire who was born into a family of industrialists. He completed his education at Harvard University followed by Harvard Business School. After graduating, he joined Mahindra Ugine Steel Company Ltd and eventually became the Chairman of Mahindra Group in 2016. He is a recipient of the prestigious Padma Bhushan Award.

Slack Technologies

Slack Technologies – A Company That Provides The Best Platform For Real-Time Work Collaboration.

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Slack Technologies is popular for its widely used platform, Slack which provides a platform for business communication and work organization. The software is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. Earlier in 2021, Salesforce announced that it would acquire Slack and the deal was closed for $27 billion approximately. The founders of Slack Technologies are Stewart Butterfield (present CEO), Eric Costello, Cal Henderson, and Serguei Mourachov.

Slack Technologies was founded in 2009 and currently, its headquarters is based in San Francisco, California. There are approximately 1,660 employees in the company and it has several offices across the world including India, Paris, London, Melbourne, Tokyo, etc. Slack is a publicly-traded company and got listed on New York Stock Exchange in 2019.

Origin Of Slack Technologies

Slack Technologies has become very popular especially because it reached a $1 billion valuations within less than a year. When Stewart Butterfield and his team created Slack they didn’t have in mind to create a platform for workspace communication. They initially wanted to create something new for the massively multiplayer online role-playing gaming market. But, instead, they end up building a platform that today is used by some biggest multinational conglomerates across the globe.

Slack Technologies
image source: javatpoint.com

Early Days

The story of Slack Technologies started in 2009 when they received angel funding of $1.5 million followed by Series A funding of $5 million. The main investors were Accel and Andreessen Horowitz. Back then, the company was known as Tiny Speck and it rolled out a computer game called Glitch as its first product. This game was launched in September 2011 but it was soon “unlaunched” for improving the gameplay. But, after withdrawing it from the market, Stewart Butterfield and other members of the team decided to close it down. The game was unable to attract a substantial audience that was required for its survival.

In 2013, the company started developing Slack as a commercial product which they developed earlier to ease the workflow among the employees. Initially, they didn’t understand the massive commercial potential of the platform but by the end of 2013, it rolled out and gained huge popularity. It raised $17 million in funding from the two existing investors and Social Capital. In 2014, the company renamed itself Slack Technologies and Slack was an acronym for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge. So, the tool that was developed for easing the work of team members while developing Glitch, turned into a billion-dollar asset.

Growth And Funding

The company received a huge amount of funding after it was launched in 2013. In 2014, it raised $42.75 million and $120 million in two different funding rounds. By the end of the year, the valuation of Slack Technologies became $1.2 billion. In 2015, Slack acquired a company called Screenhero that specialized in voice, screen, and video recording. Earlier that year, Slack signed an agreement with its investors to raise $160 million in a funding round. So, there were new investors onboard including Index Ventures, DST Global, and a few more. Next year, a few more investors joined in and Slack raised another $200 million.

In 2016, Slack made it into the first position on the Forbes Cloud 100 list. Investors found the growth of Slack very promising and thus the company also attracted the Vision Fund of SoftBank that invested more than $100 million in Slack. By the end of 2017, Slack’s valuation crossed $5 billion. In 2019, Slack became a public company through a direct listing and started in June 2019. With the acquisition of Slack earlier in 2021, Salesforce became its parent company.

Stewart Butterfield – CEO Of Slack Technologies

Stewart Butterfield is a famous Canadian billionaire who apart from co-founding Slack also created Flickr. Stewart belonged to a very poor household as he grew up without electricity for many years. His family moved to Victoria when he was a child and went to the University of Victoria. When Stewart was a teenager he made money by designing websites. He founded a couple of startups before founding the Tiny Speck that later became Slack Technologies.