Annasha

Lightspeed – Leading Montreal-based Software Provider For e-Commerce Services.

Lightspeed Commerce, most commonly known as Lightspeed is a leading Montreal-based software provider for e-commerce purposes. Dax Dasilva is the founder of the company and founded this international conglomerate in 2005. Lightspeed, till now, offers its services and products mainly in the retail, restaurant, and hospitality businesses. Silva served as the CEO of the company for a long time until he stepped down in February 2022. The current CEO of the company is JP Chauvet who served as the President of Lightspeed and Dasilva took the position of Executive Chair. In the last 16 years, Lightspeed has expanded to various international grounds including New York, Silicon Valley, Amsterdam, Ghent, etc.

History

Founded in 2005, the main aim of the company was to offer point-of-sale and e-commerce software to various businesses. Though Lightspeed’s first focus was getting a good grip on the retail sector then it eventually expanded its customer base to other sectors. With the help of the commercial software offered by the company, the small and medium-sized industries got a chance to compete with the larger chains. Due to the smart data-driven decisions that Lightspeed helped its customers make, it grew rapidly and expanded on a global scale. After almost a decade of doing business with the retail industry, the company decided to enter the hospitality sector in 2014. By this time it opened offices in various locations including Washington, Berlin, New York City, Olympia, etc. Lightspeed is financially backed by Accel Partners and iNovia Capital.

In an investment round that took place in 2012, $30 million was raised by the company. By the end of 2013, the company’s report showed that it grew by 120% within a year in terms of annual transactions. Since it was growing at an impressive rate along with the funding it received, Lightspeed started making acquisitions. In 2013, Lightspeed acquired MerchantOS, a point of sale software developer followed by an HTML5 web-based product. By the end of 2013, the company had more than 15,000 store locations and its customers processed $7.5 billion.

Success

As Lightspeed continued to make several acquisitions, it added Advanced Analytics to the company’s retail feature roster in 2014. In September 2014, the company led a funding round where it raised $35 million and it was mainly hosted by iNovia Capital. During this time, the company was preparing itself to expand into the restaurant and hospitality business, especially through a Belgian startup POSIOS. By the end of the year, Lightspeed was serving more than 21,000 businesses and its annual transactions increased from $6 billion to $8.2 billion. As the number of clients kept on increasing in 2015 Lightspeed was serving global clients spread across 30 countries. The client base also increased from 21,000 to 23,000 in a year. In an investment round in 2015 that was led by Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and Investissement Québec along with existing investors, the company raised $61 million.

In October 2015, Lightspeed acquired an e-commerce software developer, SEOShop, and announced that it will be serving both brick and mortar and online retailers. SEOShop was further rebranded as Lightspeed eCom and then integrated with the company’s retail POS software. In 2017, there was a new venture capital funding round in which the company raised $160 million. In 2018, the company brought new members into the leadership and executive teams like Patrick Pichette and Paul McFeeters. Recently, the company has made three acquisitions, namely, Gastrofix (2020), ShopKeep (2020), and Vend (2021).

About the Founder

Dax Dasilva is originally from Vancouver but he emigrated with his family to Canada when he was a kid. He was interested in coding from a young age and then he attended the University of British Columbia to study computer science. But later, he decided to explore some creative opportunities. He is also a well-known advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and he came out as a gay at the age of fourteen. After founding Lightspeed, it became one of the fastest-growing tech startups in Canada.

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

Christopher Monroe and Jungsang Kim, Two Masterminds Behind Developing The World’s Most Powerful Technologies.

IonQ is the world’s most renowned quantum computing company that was founded by two professors. The company was established in 2015 and currently it is based in College Park, Maryland. IonQ’s most unique factor is the approach they are using to generate and carry out functionalities with quantum circuits. This approach is called ion trapping and with the help of this technology, the errors can be minimized with better calculations, something the world has never seen before. IonQ claims that accuracy is not the only factor why ion trapping is a better approach, it also improves scalability, coherence time, and predictability.

About IonQ

IonQ is developing quantum computing and taking it to a new level such that complex mathematical problems can be solved with a better approach. The true potential of a quantum computer is not yet unleashed but if one can develop a stable and powerful quantum computer, it can overdo the best supercomputers in the world. IonQ is using ion trapping technology to develop the best quantum computing.

In this technology, an atom is first converted into an ion followed by using a linear iron trap (specialized chip) to hold that ion in a 3D space. Electromagnetic force helps to hold the ion in place and is completely isolated from the environment. Linear chains are formed by holding several ions in the ion traps which helps in running the complex algorithms. IonQ has proved only in a few years that their concept is very powerful and offers the world the most powerful quantum computer. In March 2020, IonQ was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential Companies.

The Idea of Ion Trapping

Christopher Monroe, a professor at the University of Maryland, and Jungsang Kim, a professor from Duke University are the two masterminds behind developing one of the world’s most powerful technologies. They co-founded IonQ with the help of two partners at a venture firm, namely, Harry Weller and Andrew Schoen. IonQ was born as a result of rigorous research that these two professors carried out for 25 years. Their research field was quantum information science and today it has become a public company.

Monroe went into the quantum computing research field when he joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a Staff Researcher. During this time, Monroe worked with the famous Nobel-laureate physicist, David Wineland. Wineland’s team was working on the application of trapped ions to produce controllable qubits and controllable quantum logic gates. This was the initial stage for building a large-scale trapped-ion computer.

Founding IonQ

Monroe and Kim became acquaintances of each other through various research activities that were funded by Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). They were collaborating formally and wrote a review paper together whose title was Scaling the Ion Trap Quantum Processor. Their collaboration for research purposes eventually led to the founding of IonQ, especially after New Enterprise Associates showed interest in investing in the technology mentioned in that review paper. So, the company received initial funding of $2 million to commercialize the technology.

Eventually, the team was expanding and the company hired David Moehring as the new CEO of the company in 2016. In 2017, the company received $20 million in Series B funding and it was led by Google Ventures and the existing investor. Peter Chapman joined the company in 2019 directly as its new CEO followed by which the company made a deal to make the quantum computer public through AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Peter Chapman – CEO of IonQ

Peter Chapman is the CEO and President of IonQ as well as a member of the board. Before joining IonQ, Chapman was leading a team for Amazon Prime where his main work was being responsible for Prime’s 2-Day delivery. His position was Director of Engineering at Amazon. Chapman is a remarkable software engineer with more than 40 years of experience including several managerial positions and writing software from scratch as well. He went to MIT and worked there at Artificial Intelligence Lab. Chapman has also served as the President and CEO of Media Arc and eMusic.

Annasha

Sabre Corporation – A Famous Travel Tech Company That Was Originally A Part Of American Airlines.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Sabre Corporation is a very well-known tech company in the travel industry. It was established in 1960 by American Airlines but in 2000 it was spun off and became an independent entity. Currently, it is a publicly-traded company with its headquarters based in Southlake, Texas, United States. The main goal of the company is to make travelling easier for the customers and offer a personalized travel experience with the help of innovative technology. Sabre has expanded to the Asian market with offices established in Bangalore and Singapore. It also has an office in London, Poland, and a few other places.

Idea Behind Sabre

The idea behind founding Sabre dates back to 1953 when two legendary personas met on a flight. These two people are C.R. Smith, the then President of American Airlines, and Blair Smith, an IBM salesman. When they were travelling, they came up with the concept of the semi-automatic business research environment concept, i.e., Sabre. This new concept that they came up with was based on SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) which was the first-ever major system to use interactive real-time computing. This SAGE system was developed by IBM for military purposes. So, with the idea based on IBM’s existing concept, American Airlines founded Sabre Corporation in 1960.

Early Days

After the company was founded, Sabre installed its first reservation system in Briarcliff Manor in New York City. This reservation system was comprised of two IBM 7090 mainframe computers. This system was efficient was to processing 84,000 calls per day. In the next few years, Sabre Corporation was completely invested in building the nationwide network and by 1964 it became the largest commercial data processing (real-time) system across the globe. In 1965, the company was handling approximately 7,500 passenger reservations per hour. The Sabre system was relocated to a new centre in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1972, and the system was also upgraded to IBM System/360.

In 1976 Sabre’s journey started in eventually entering the travel sector as the system was installed for the first time in a travel agency. This was very beneficial for the customers because the travel agents would have instant access to flights. Within a year, 130 more locations installed the system for convenience. In 1984, Sabre introduced a new tool called BragainFinder and it was the first-ever automated low-fare searching solution for the industry. In the next year, another product was launched that gave the customers direct access to reserve hotels, airlines, etc. During the end of the decade, the company launched an online travel agency called Travelocity and started a joint venture with Abacus International.

Sabre in the 21st Century

Entering the 21st century, American Airlines spun off Sabre Corporation and became an independent company. Sabre acquired several companies in 2000, namely, Preview Travel, Dillion Communication Systems, Gradient Solutions, and GetThere. In 2001, the company’s airline hardware and communications business was acquired by Electronic Data Systems (EDS). This year it also established Sabre Pacific and acquired Site59 and David R. Bornemann Associates. Some of the other companies that it acquired in the next few years were Showtickets.com, Lastminute.com, Calidris, Flight Explorer, etc.

In 2007, Sabre Corporation was acquired by Texas Pacific Group and Silver Lake Partners. The acquisition continued and in 2012 the company launched Sabre Red App Centre. In 2014, the company went public on NASDAQ. The companies acquired by Sabre after it went public are Abacus International, Trust International, and Airpas Aviation.

Sean Menke – CEO of Sabre Corporation

Sean Menke became the CEO and President of Sabre Corporation in 2016. But currently, he is the CEO and the board member of the company since a new President was appointed. Sean joined the company in 2015 as the President of Sabre Travel Network. Before joining Sabre Corporation, he also played his role as the CEO of Frontier Airlines and Pinnacle Airlines. Sean went to Ohio State University followed by the University of Denver.

Annasha

OVHcloud – Journey Of Cloud Computing Started By A 24-Year Old Octave Klaba.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

OVHcloud is a French cloud computing company that was founded in 1999. Octave Klaba is the founder and Chairman of OVH and the current CEO of the company is Michel Paulin. OVHcloud offers various cloud-based services like web hosting, VPS, dedicated servers, enterprise solutions, and public and private cloud. Being a French company, it initially expanded to other European countries but in recent years its main focus has been North America and the US. Unfortunately, in 2021 the company suffered huge losses due to a fire in its Strasbourg data center. The company reported estimated damage of approximately €105 million.

Early Days

Octave Klaba at the age of 24 decided to begin his entrepreneurial journey with OVHcloud. The idea of founding a cloud computing startup strikes his mind when he realized France is in sheer need of web hosting. He didn’t have any initial capital to invest so he took support from his close friends and family. He got support from his three family members and was able to borrow 25,000 francs with which he started the company.

Web hosting was the then-new concept in France so initially, no one believed in what he was doing. But it didn’t stop Klaba from renting ten servers from a provider in Paris and starting his project. The business started growing slowly as in 2000 the company had 20 active servers and it also received entitlements for .fr and .be domain names. The net profit OVH was making was fully reinvested in adding new servers. Eventually, Klaba’s brother, Miroslaw joined the venture to help him out.

Expansion

Entering a new decade, OVH was starting to land more and more customers. It also opened the company’s first data center in Paris but soon it outgrew the space. Also, for easy maintenance of the servers, OVH decided to make in-house casings. In 2002, the company opened a new data center in Paris and built its first sever called the Greenbox. Until 2003, OVH was doing all the operational work from leased data centers. But the company opened its first wholly-owned data center in 2003 and it was a 3,000 square meter building. The company didn’t only own a data center but became one of the first cloud-hosting companies to use water-based cooling technology in a data center. In 2004, the company expanded to Poland and Spain and the old servers in the company were retro-fitted with water cooling systems.

OVH expanded to the Roubaix Valley in 2005 and expanded to Germany in the next year. By the end of 2006, OVH has 12,000 active servers and also deployed advanced network infrastructure. OVH expanded to Italy, Portugal, and the UK in 2008 followed by opening five new subsidiaries in Ireland, Netherlands, Lithuania, Czech Republic, and Finland. By 2010, the company had more than 350 employees and it invested around €10 Million in R&D cloud. The company’s plan to enter the American market started in 2012 with the aim to build the world’s largest data center in Canada. After a funding round in 2016, the value of OVH surpassed the $1 billion mark. In 2017 it expanded to the US market after the acquisition of vCloud Air from VMware. OVH also became a publicly-traded company in 2021 and it is listed on the Paris Stock Exchange.

About the Founder

Octave Klaba is the founder and Chairman of the world’s one of the most successful cloud computing companies. He is originally from Poland but he moved to France when he was sixteen. Being passionate about computer science from an early age, he graduated from ICAM Lille with a computer science degree. After he graduated, his main focus was founding OVHcloud and he didn’t work for any other companies.

Annasha

Nutanix – A Leading IT Company Offering An Unparallel Enterprise Cloud Platform.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

With a goal to make IT management easier for the industrial sector, Nutanix Inc was founded in September 2009. The company’s founding team was three successful Indian entrepreneurs, Dheeraj Pandey, Mohit Aron, and Ajeet Singh. Nutanix’s headquarters is based in San Jose, California, US. The main products of the company are Enterprise Cloud Platform, Business Software, and IoT. It offers various cloud-based solutions and services as well disaster recovery, cloud monitoring, and much more. There are more than 20,000 leading companies that are customers of Nutanix including Volkswagen, Vodafone, Nasdaq, Seattle Children’s, etc. Currently, the company is focusing on developing more products for entering into the hybrid multi-cloud ecosystem.

Founding Story

Nutanix is an IT company that mainly focuses on providing cloud-based enterprise software. It has also received several awards for innovation and best products and also as a startup. This startup was founded in 2009 and one of the co-founders, Dheeraj Pandey became the CEO of the company. Mohit Aron left the company in 2013 to found a computer data storage company, Cohesity. Nutanix was very lucky when it came to raising funds as, within four years of its establishment, it successfully hosted five funding rounds. By 2013, the company raised $312.2 million from funding and it also reached a $1 billion valuation in the same year and received unicorn status. In 2014, its valuation became $2 billion after the Series E funding where it raised $140 million. Some of the major investors involved were Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Blumberg Capital.

Nutanix became a public company in 2015 but unfortunately, it suffered a net loss of $126 million in the same year. The company also started acquisitions in 2016 and acquired two companies, namely, PernixData and Calm.io in the same year. In 2017, Nutanix established a partnership with IBM, and again in 2018 acquired three companies, Netsil, Minjar, and MainFrame2 Inc. After the pandemic, the company shifted from making hardware applications to SaaS products.

Awards & Accolades

Founded in 2009, Nutanix started receiving prestigious awards after a couple of years. In 2011, the company received the Best of VMworld 2011 – Gold Award for its products. The experts made Nutanix the winner based on innovation, usability, reliability, value, and performance. In 2012, Nutanix again received the “Best New Product of 2012” award by VMworld because they liked the SAN-free approach by Nutanix for enhancing virtualization performance. It received a series of awards in 2013 including VMworld vFlipcup 2013 Champions, announced one of the top 100 companies in North America by Red Herring, LinkedIn Top 10 InDemand Tech Startup, recognized as “Cool Vendor” by Gartner, and a few more.

In 2014, Nutanix was named a Tech Trailblazer which is a new concept in the startup ecosystem. This award was mainly given to young startups and after it was recognized as such, the companies received a lot of support for growing their business. In the same year, it also bagged a customer service award and received the Technology of the Year award by InfoWorld. Dheeraj Pandey, one of the co-founders was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year in 2015. In 2018, the company was featured by well-known magazines and companies like Forbes, Gartner, Deloitte, and GEC Media Group. Nutanix was also named one of the 18 great companies for millennials in the San Francisco area. Recently, it has received a few awards for being one of the top workplaces.

Rajiv Ramaswami – CEO of Nutanix

Rajib Ramaswami is the current CEO and President of Nutanix who joined the company late in 2020. Before he joined Nutanix, he worked in various positions at VMware. Ramaswami was the Executive Vice President and General Manager of VMware’s networking and security business and later he became the Chief Operating Officer of Products and Cloud Services. Ramaswami worked at various other companies including IBM, Cisco, Nortel, Tellabs, and Broadcom. He completed his bachelor’s degree in India and then went to the University of California, Berkeley.

Annasha

Basware – One Of The Best Providers Of Financial Technologies Across The Globe.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Basware was originally founded as Baltic Accounting Systems in 1985. Its headquarters is based in Espoo, Finland and it is one of the finest fintech companies in the country. The company offers worldwide services and it has started operations in more than 50 countries. Currently, Basware has established its market in six continents. Its major markets are the Nordic countries, Europe, Russia, and North America but apart from these regions, it has also expanded to the Asia-Pacific region. Basware sells enterprise software for various financial processes and recently it has also achieved Green Supply Chain Award for two years consecutively.

About Basware

The network of Basware is very vast and it connects more than 2 million active buyers and suppliers with the company. Basware is known for offering cloud-based e-invoicing and purchase-to-pay solutions to its worldwide customers. According to Klaus Andersen, CEO of Basware Corporation, one of the unique selling points of the company is the ability to cope with the complexity of a global business while operating smoothly. The main customers of Basware are mostly global large enterprises. Basware also has small industrial clients but it becomes difficult to work with them since their entire system is not digitized yet. The company is also focusing on its relationship with its partners. Hence it has launched the Partner Center of Excellence for better implementations.

History

When Basware was founded, it was a subsidiary of an American corporation that was established in Finland. But after five years, the Finnish management team decided to buy the company and thus it was spinned off from the American conglomerate. This Finnish team of Basware included Hannu Vaajoensuu, Ilkka Sihvo, Kirsi Eräkangas, Antti Pöllänen and Sakari Perttunen. After it became an independent company it started working to roll out its first commercial product. It was the company’s first Financial Management Software and it was released in 1992. The company launched its second product in 1997 which was their first Invoice Processing Software. This product became very famous especially because it had the feature of Scan & Capture Workflow for Invoices. This also helped Basware land its first international client from Sweden in 1999.

Basware decided to go public in 2000 and hence it got listed on the Helsinki Stock Exchange. In the following years, the company introduced the first electronic invoicing, intelligent OCR, archiving, and much more. Eventually, it was able to land customers from Norway, Denmark, and other European countries. In the next two years, the company planned to expand into Australia, USA, UK, and Central Europe.

Acquisitions

Basware started acquiring companies in 2005 and started with Iocore, a Norway-based company. In the same year, it also acquired Finnish Trivet Software and in 2006 it acquired Finnish Analyste followed by Digital Vision Technologies Ltd in 2007. In 2008 the company acquired Contempus AS and in 2009 it acquired Itella’s Norwegian invoice automation solution business. In 2016, Company acquired a US-based company called Verian. It is a leading provider of cloud-based solutions for the financial sector.

Klaus Andersen – CEO of Basware

Kalus Andersen is a very experienced person in the executive position with more than 20 years of experience in the field. He joined Basware in 2018 as the Chief Technology Officer of the company and after a year he was appointed the CEO. Before joining the company, he worked at several companies. From 1996 to 2008, he worked at SimCorp where he was the Head of SimCorp Dimension, Research, and Development. He also served as the Senior Vice President, IMS Development. From 2008 to 2014, he served as the Managing Director of SimCorp UK Ltd. Prior to joining Basware, he was the Executive Vice President of Global Engineering at Itiviti AB.

Annasha

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