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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

Afterpay

Afterpay – A Young Australian Fintech Startup To Secure More Than 7 Million Active Customers Internationally.

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Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen founded Afterpay in October 2014. It is a very young start-up that has its origin in Australia and eventually expanded to the UK, Canada, the US, and New Zealand. The company changed its name from Afterpay to Afterpay Limited in 2019 and currently Square Inc, an American digital payment company is planning to acquire it. It is a mutual agreement between the two companies the deal is planned to be settled by 2022 for $29 billion.

Afterpay limited is a fintech company and currently, it has over 7 million active customers with the majority of it in the US and Australia. Afterpay went public only after two years of its established and its stock price has increased rapidly in the last five years. In 2016, the company got listed in ASX with an IPO valued at $25 million. The business strategy of Afterpay is what makes it one of the most successful and youngest fintech companies today.

Founding Of Afterpay

Nick and Anthony founded Afterpay back in 2014 as a financial payment for shopping purposes. The product developed by the company allowed customers to pay in an installment-based system and thus approached the audience in a “buy first, pay later” approach. Afterpay offered several plans on how customers can repay the money in installments. With Afterpay, the retailers didn’t have any requirements to track the repayments of customers and in return, the company charged a small fee based on the transaction.

Before rolling out the platform, Compay fully built its digital strategy and also established a partnership with Touchcorp, a payment firm. Touchcorp was also one of the early investors of the company and supported the entire back end of Afterpay’s payment system. In 2017, both the companies were merged and a deal of $500 million was successfully closed with renaming the company Afterpay Touch.

Afterpay
Image source: www.uniquenewsonline.com

Success And Expansion

Afterpay was able to secure millions of customers in a very short time and the company’s valuation also started escalating. In 2016, the company decided to go public and thus got listed on the Australian Securities Exchange with an IPO of $25 million. By this time, Company established a very strong customer base and an efficient payment system. This brought Afterpay on the radar of investors and 2018 American venture capital firm Matrix Partners showed interest in the company.

Matrix Partners was willing to invest $19.4 million to help the company enter the US market. With this funding, Afterpay successfully entered the US market in mid-May of the same year with retailers like Urban Outfitters, Free People, and Anthropologie. After one year of entering the US market, Company raised a fresh fund of $317.2 million and it was invested exclusively in the company’s international growth. In mid-2019, Afterpay announced that it has crossed two million active customers in the US and has 6,500 merchants using their payment system. The same year, the company also entered into a partnership with Visa Inc and that hugely broadened the customer base of the company. Last year Company reported that from two million customers in 2019 it has crossed more than five million customers last year.

In August 2018, Company acquired a 90% stake in a UK-based company Clearpay. This company also offered the same service as Afterpay and the deal was closed for one million Afterpay shares. With this acquisition, Company entered the UK market and it landed 200,000 customers only in the first fifteen weeks. Last year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone witnessed a rising demand for online shopping. Afterpay, in order to capitalize on the e-commerce surge, showed its interest in expanding to other continents including Asia. Thus, the company is planning to acquire more Asian-based payment companies.

About The Founders

Nick Molnar, born in 1990, is the youngest self-made Australian billionaire. Nick went to the University of Sydney and has a bachelor’s degree in commerce. He is mainly famous as the co-founder of Afterpay and after the company is acquired by Square Inc he along with Anothony is to receive $2.7 billion in Square stock.

Anthony Eisen is the co-founder of Afterpay and also the current CEO of the company. He completed his education at the University of New South Wales. Eisen has more than 20 years of experiencing in leadership and investing in financial services and technology.

Rockwell Automation

Rockwell Automation – A Famous Fortune 500 Company That Expanded During World War I.

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Rockwell Automation is an American company that was founded in 1903. The company is headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and it is also a Fortune 500 company. It is a publicly-traded company that specializes in industrial automation and information technology. The founding story of the company dates back to the early 1900s and the formation of the Compression Rheostat Company. The founders of Rockwell Automation are Lynde Bradley and Dr. Stanton Allen. Rockwell Automation is operational in more than 100 countries and employs 23,000 people globally. In 2019, the annual global sales of the company reached $6.69 billion.

Founding Story Of Rockwell Automation

Lynde Bradley and Dr. Stanton Allen started the company with an initial investment of $1000 in 1903. After a year, the brother of Lynde Bradley, Harry Bradley joined the company. The same year, the company launched its first product which was a carbon disc compression-type motor controller. This crane controller was first demonstrated at the St. Louis World’s Fair. In 1909, the founders decided to rename the company to Allen-Bradley Company and the company started expanding rapidly during World War I. The company took up contract work from the government and some of the new products included automatic starters, circuit breakers, relays, and many other electric types of equipment.

After serving for years in collaboration with the government, it opened its first sales office in New York in 1914. After a couple of years, the company witnessed the unfortunate death of Stanton Allen. After this incident, Lynde Bradley became the President and Harry Bradley became the Vice President. The company made a progressive achievement in 1918 as it hired its first female worker, Julia Polczynski. During the 1920s, the company expanded its radio business and by the end of the decade reached a total sales of $3 million. The company suffered losses during the Great Depression and made lay-offs and reduced wages but eventually started offering stocks to compensate for the wages and it gave fruitful results.

Rockwell Automation
image source: cxoworldwide.com

During The 20th Century

During the 1900s, Lynde Bradley hugely invested in R&D so that the company can revolver the losses during the depression period. In 1942, Harry Bradley became the new President of the company as Lynde passed away and with his assets, The Lynde Bradley Foundation was established. Soon the company was again invested in producing wartime machinery during World War II. The rate of production was again escalated to unexpected levels as the company produced different types of electrical components and military equipment. To meet the production needs during the war, the plant facilities were expanded in a two-year expansion project.

The company eventually came under a new leadership team during the 1970s (Harry Bradley passed away in 1965) and entered the global market. In the early 1980s, the company introduced a new product line of programmable logic controllers. Allen-Bradley reached the $1 billion sales mark in 1985 and the same year Rockwell International decided to purchase the company for $1.65 billion. After this massive merger in the history of Wisconsin, the new business arm of the merged company was formed including Rockwell Software in 1994 and the Logix control platform in 1997. During this decade, the company also acquired several businesses including a power system business composed of Reliance Electric and Dodge.

Present Days

In 2001, Rockwell International was divided into companies namely, Rockwell Automation and Rockwell Collins. New executive members were brought on board and the company sold its Power Systems division to Baldor Electric Company for $1.8 billion. In 2007, the company acquired ICS Triplex, and recently it has acquired two new companies, Avnet Data Security and Kalypso L.P. In 2019, the company also launched its Digital Partner Program to contribute more significantly towards digital transformation.

Blake Moret – CEO And Chairman Of Rockwell Automation

Blake Moret joined Rockwell Automation in 1985 as a sales trainee. He has served in several leadership positions in the company since then. Before he became the CEO of the company in 2016, he was the Senior Vice President of Control Products and Solutions in the company. Currently, he also serves as the Chairman of the Board as well. Blake graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in mechanical engineering.

SoftBank Group

SoftBank Group – The Famous Multinational Conglomerate Founded By A Young Japanese Entrepreneur.

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Founded in 1981, SoftBank Group is one of the largest multinational conglomerates based in Japan. The company generates annual revenue of more than $50 billion and employs approximately 80,000 people worldwide. Masayoshi Son, a Japanese tech entrepreneur, founded the company when he was 24-year old. Currently, the headquarters of the company is located in Minato, Tokyo and it mainly focuses on investment management. The major sectors where SoftBank mainly invests are finance, energy, and tech. SoftBank Group is also responsible for running the world’s largest tech-based venture capital fund, Vision Fund where the main investors belong to the Middle Eastern countries.

Early Days Of SoftBank Group

SoftBank Group, today, is the second-largest publicly-traded company in Japan after Toyota. Back in 1981, when Masayoshi Son founded SoftBank, it operated as a software distributor. After a year, SoftBank entered into the publishing business and launched a couple of magazines about NEC and Sharp computers. By 1989, SoftBank became the largest magazine publisher in the computer and tech category. The company decided to go public in 1994 when the company was valued at $3 million. Next year, it acquired a publishing company. Ziff Davis for $2.1 billion and expanded its market to the US.

After buying Ziff Davis, the company bought COMDEX for $800 million and later sold it to Key3Media. Masayoshi Son made a huge investment in internet services during the 1990s and entered into a joint venture with Yahoo! In 1996. This partnership led to the creation of Yahoo! Japan, a very popular website in the country. SoftBank became a holding company in 1999 and in 2000 it invested a huge amount in Alibaba that turned into a big profit. In the 21st century, Son decided to expand the Asian market and started with an investment in multiple Korean companies that provides internet services.

SoftBank Group
Image source: wccftech.com

Expansion And Acquisition

Since Son was heavily investing in the internet and telecommunication market, SoftBank Group decided to acquire Vodafone Japan in 2005. This acquisition made SoftBank a very dominating company in Japan’s telecom operator’s business. After acquiring Vodafone Japan, SoftBank also acquired a 23% stake in Betfair and entered a collaboration with Tiffany & Co. In 2010, SoftBank acquired a 13.7% stake in Ustream. After a couple of years, the company announced that it is planning to acquire Sprint Nextel (70% stake) which during the final agreement became 78%. Later, the company acquired more shares and owned 80% of the company.

In 2013, the company acquired a 51% stake in Supercell and heavily invested in OlaCabs, Snapdeal, and Housing.com. The same year, it acquired a controlling stake in Aldeberan Robotics and renamed the company SoftBank Robotics. In 2015, Son decided to bring Nikesh Arora, a former Google Executive onboard and made him the Representative Director and President of SoftBank. Since SoftBank was investing in Korean companies, the company decided to invest $1 billion in Coupang, a Korean e-commerce website. In 2016, SoftBank announced the plans to acquire ARM Holdings for $32 billion which was the company’s largest deal in its history. The same year Son had a meeting with Former US President, Donald Trump after which SoftBank decided to invest $50 billion in the US market to create jobs.

Present Days

In 2021, SoftBank announced a huge profit of approximately $37 billion from its Vision Fund and the Korean e-commerce website, Coupang. The annual profit of SoftBank in the financial year 20-21 was the largest recorded profit in the industrial history of Japan. The company has planned a series of acquisitions in 2021 which includes the acquisition of stakes in AutoStore, Yanolja (a Korean hotel booking platform), etc. SoftBank has also decided to sell its T-Mobile US shares to Deutsche Telekom.

About The Founder

Masayoshi Son is a famous Japanese billionaire, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He received Japanese citizenship in 1990 and he was born on a Japanese island, Kyushu in 1957. Currently, Son is the second richest man in Japan and the 68th richest man across the world according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. At the age of sixteen, Son left for California and studied at the University of California, Berkeley. While he was a student, he was interested in technology and entrepreneurship and created his first electronic translator and sold it to Sharp Corporation.

Alteryx

Alteryx – An American-based Software Company That Develops Products For Data Science And Analytics.

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Founded in 1997, Alteryx was established as a software company in Irvine California. The products of Alteryx are used for making significant advancements in data science and analytics that help several organizations. The company offers a series of products as a part of its platform including Alteryx Connect, Alteryx Designer, Alteryx Promote, Analytics Hub, etc. It also hosts a cloud-based website which is called Alteryx Analytics Gallery. In the last two decades, Company has expanded worldwide with approximately 1,200 employees. Currently, the CEO of the company is Mark Anderson. Under his leadership, the company has acquired a lot of companies.

History Of Alteryx

The foundation history of Alteryx began with the establishment of SRC LLC in 1997. This company is the predecessor of Alteryx as the name of the company was changed in 2010 after its core product. Dean Stoecker, Duane Adams, and Ned Harding are the three founders of the company. When the company was newly launched, SRC was building a data engine that was the first of its kind to deliver demographic-based mapping with a very short reporting time. After one year, the company released Allocate, a new product 1998, It was a data engine that incorporated geographically organized US census data. This data engine allowed the users to analyze, manipulate, and map data.

The product line of the company eventually started growing as it rolled out another product, Solocast in the same year. This product was developed for the main purpose of customer segmentation analysis. After two years, a modified version of the Allocate software was developed as per a contract between SRC LLC and US Census Bureau. The bureau used the updated software to integrate on the CD-ROMs of Census Data. In 2006, the company developed a new product called Alteryx. This product had both spatial and non-spatial data environments for building various applications based on analytics.

Alteryx
Image source: medium.com

Expansion And Acquisitions

After the rollout of Alteryx, it became the core product of the company, and thus in 2010 SRC LLC changed its name to Alteryx. The funding received by Alteryx started escalating during this time as in 2011 the company raised $6 million from the Palo Alto investment arm of SAP Ventures. After two years it again raised $12 million from SAP Ventures and Toba Capital. The company conducted its Series B funding in 2014 where it was able to raise $60 million from existing investors and Insight Venture Partners. After this funding round, the company decided to expand its workspace by 30 percent.

In 2015, Alteryx raised another $85 million in a funding round led by ICONIQ Capital. The company announced that this fund will be used to expand internationally, improve their R&D facilities, and increase sales and marketing efforts. In 2016, Company was featured in the Forbes Cloud 100 list and a year after that it filed its IPO and went public. After the company started trading publicly, it made a series of acquisitions starting with a software company called Semanta in 2017. Later in 2017, Company acquired a data science startup, Yhat for $10.8 million. Some of the other companies acquired in the last few years are Alteryx ANZ, ClearStory Data, Feature Labs, etc.

Awards

The company has become one of the noticeable companies in the data science platform. In 2018, Gartner recognized Alteryx as a leader in the 2018 Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms. Gartner Peer Insights also named the company “The Best Business Intelligence and Analytics Software of 2017.” KeyBanc Capital Markets named the company a Top 20 AI All-Stars Technology and the former CEO and co-founder of the company Dean Stoecker received the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2017.

About The Founders

Dean Stoecker is famous as the co-founder and former CEO of Alteryx. He went to the University of Colorado followed by Pepperdine University to complete his MBA. In 2019, the net worth of Stoecker was $1.2 billion.

Duane Adams is one of the co-founders of the company and the Chief Advocacy Officer of Alteryx. One of her main goals in the company is to diversify the workforce and upskill the people of the company to keep up with the constantly evolving business world. Before co-founding Alteryx, she worked at Strategic Mapping, Donnelley, and VNU Business Media.

Ned Harding has recently retired from Alteryx. But, while he was a part of the company he served as the Vice President and CTO of the same. Before co-founding Alteryx, he worked at several companies as a software engineer.

Anaplan

Anaplan – A San Francisco-based Software Company Mainly Famous For Its Enterprise Management Products.

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Based in San Francisco, California, Anaplan is a software company that sells subscription-based products for enterprise management helps in decision making. The software developed by the company are cloud-based products that mainly focus on business planning and it also provides data for business analytics. The founders of the company are Guy Haddleton, Sue Haddleton, and Michael Gould. Anaplan was founded in 2006 and currently, it has established markets in 13 different countries and employs nearly 2,000 people. Anaplan has customers from very diverse industrial sectors like healthcare, telecom, retail, banking, etc. Some of the big customers of the company are DocuSign, Tata Steel, and Zillow.

History Of Anaplan

Anaplan was originally founded in Yorkshire England by the Haddletons and Gould. The company made significant expansion, acquisition, and growth in the last century. In 2010, four years after officially founding the company, it sold its first product. The same year it received its first capital funding and within the next two years, Anaplan was able to host another funding round. In 2012, Anaplam raised $11.2 million in its Series B funding round. The main investors were Granite Ventures and Shasta Ventures. Anaplan also hired Frederic Laluyaux as the new CEO of the company in the same year, but he resigned from the company in 2016.

The company eventually started its acquisition and in 2013 bought Vue Analytics, one of its resellers based in the UK. The monetary terms were not disclosed to the public. In 2013, the company again had another round of funding (Series C) in which it raised $33 million. Apart from Shasta and Granite Ventures, some other significant investors were Meritech and Salesforce.com. A year from its Series C funding, the company announced that it hosted Series D funding from which it raised $100 million and it made the total amount of investment to $150 million.

Anaplan
Image source: ggpht.com

Growth And Success

By 2014, the company was able to raise a handsome amount of money from the investor. So, the same year Anaplan rolled out its marketplace Anaplan Hub whose main goal was to assist customers to find pre-designed planning models. The platform also has an option such that it can allow customers to share their planning models as well. By the end of 2014, the company opened 11 offices in 7 different companies and it was still expanding to other international marketplaces.

In 2016, Anaplam conducted another round of funding and it received $90 million from it. After this funding round, the valuation of the company reached the $1 billion mark and it obtained unicorn status. The then CEO of the company, Frederic Laluyaux announced that it was the last private funding round of the company and an IPO was around the corner. Before going public, Anaplan hired James Budge as the new Chief Financial Officer of the company and after a year appointed Frank A. Calderoni as the new CEO.

With Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as the lead underwriters, Anaplam went public in 2018 and got listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The position of Simon Tucker changed from Chief Customer Officer to Chief Planning Officer and he was given the responsibility to reshape the company’s core business. Recently, Anaplan has acquired an Israeli company called Mintigo which specializes in sales analytics. Anaplan also appeared on the list of Deloitte Technology First 500.

Frank Calderoni – CEO Of Anaplan

Frank Calderoni is not only the CEO of the company but also the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Anaplan. Frank has experience in industry leadership for more than 30 years and he served in many other companies before joining Anaplan. Prior to joining Anaplan, Frank was the Executive Vice President, Operations, and CFO of Red Hat Inc, for two years. He also worked at Cisco Systems for 7 years and other companies like Adobe and SanDisk. In an interview, Frank said that Anaplan is full of opportunities and that is one of the main reasons he decided to join the company.

PTC Inc

PTC Inc – An American Technology Company Specializing In IoT And Augmented Reality.

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PTC Inc is a famous American software company that was founded in 1985. The main products and services of the company include the Internet of Things (IoT), Augmented Reality (AR), and collaboration software. The headquarters of the company is based in Boston, Massachusetts, US. A Russian immigrant and mathematician, Samuel P. Giesberg is the mastermind behind the foundation of PTC Inc. He worked as a software engineer at other companies before founding PTC. Today, this public multinational company has more than 6,000 employees spread across 30 countries.

The Initial Story Of PTC Inc

In May 1985, Samuel Giesberg officially launched PTC Inc and worked for developing a new CAD-CAM program. In the first few years, Samuel was looking for venture capitalists to market his new software. Initially, he was turned down by many venture capitalists but at last, he received a total fund of $4 million from Charles River Ventures and other firms. In 1988, the company launched its first product and by then half the funding money was invested. The first product of the company was the CAD-CAM program but PTC entered late in the market and was already surrounded by powerful rivals.

The CAD-CAM software technology entered the market in the 1960s and it was in the late 1980s that Samuel launched the new software. But, what he brought into the market has an added innovation in the already developed technology which left its rival surprised. For example, the CAD-CAM software in the market was able to make different changes in a 3D model but PTC’s software was able to predict the consequences of that change in the overall model. Thus, this new software became a breakthrough as it made the work of an engineer much easier. Within one year, PTC made a total sales of $11 million and a net income of more than $1.5 million.

PTC Inc
Image source: wikimedia.org

Business Growth

After the sales started escalating in the late 1980s, the company filed its first IPO and went public. Samuel also launched different versions of the mechanical software for various operating systems. Only after two years of launching the CAD-CAM software, PTC was controlling 10 percent of this software market. By the end of 1991, the total sales of the company reached $45 million. The CAD-CAM Pro/Engineer system was such a big hit that it attracted clients of big companies who were established in the industry. In 1992, this technology was named “Technology of the Year” by IndustryWeek. PTC also made into the list of Fortune 500 in 1995 and crossed $800 million in revenue.

In 1993 PTC’s market share increased to 20 percent and it landed big clients like Ford Motor and Caterpillar Inc. By this time the company also started increasing the number of employees and the annual revenue doubled within a year. In 1998, PTC acquired Comoutervision, where Samuel was a former employee, and Windchill Technology. In the early 2000s, PTC broadened the range of products as it developed lifecycle management software for products and services. PTC made both CAD-related and other acquisitions that include Polyplan Technologies, NetRegulus, Synapsis Technology, Mathsoft, CoCreate, NC Graphics, etc. Three years ago, the company landed a major investor, Rockwell Automation. It invested $1 billion in the company and acquired an 8.4 percent ownership stake.

About The Founder

Samuel Giesberg was a maths professor who fled to the US in 1974 with his 11-year old son. After he moved to a new country, he started working as a software engineer and soon he became a prodigy at Computervision (the company he worked for). Samuel’s brother Vladimir gave him the push to start his own company and also suggested landing some investors for financing the same. Samuel had ten years of experience in designing CAD-CAM software and thus decided to leap.