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Life360

Life360 – A Family Networking App That Received Funding From Both Google And Facebook.

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Life360 is a social family networking app that was initially released in the market in 2008. Chris Hulls is the founder of the company and it’s currently based in San Francisco, US. Life360 is a publicly-traded information technology company that is operated by consumers across the world except in China. The application offers location-based services, alarming with notifications, sharing location, etc. The idea behind Life360 was to design software that would virtually keep a family together and safe. The Life360 app is available for both Android and iOS users.

About Life360 app

The Life360 app has got several features to always get a real-time update on your friends and family members. There are alerts when your family is entering or leaving any specific places or even when they are driving or just walking. One will also receive a notification after the completion of every drive and get to know if they are running low on battery. One of the features called the Driver Protect offers crash detection, roadside assistance, and updated weekly driver reports. The app is designed in a way that it can automatically detect an accident and dispatches emergency services if needed. This feature can also connect the drivers to trained advisors that can assist during minor accidents.

There are two other important features offered by Life360, namely, Check-In and Help Alert. It is a bit worrisome for parents to let their kids or senior citizens travel alone. So, the Check-In feature helps in getting quick updates for when they are traveling, leaving a place, or arriving. The Help Alert button sends an alert to all the emergency contacts and in the Life360 circle with a click of a single button. It also shows the other users when that button was pressed.

Life360
Image source: www.techjunkie.com

Initial Days

Chris Hulls had the idea for Life360 when he was an undergrad student. The initial prototype was launched in the Android marketplace in 2008. Chris received initial funding for Life360 from both Facebook and Google. Life360 participated and won Google’s Android Developer Challenge in 2008 and received $275,000 as of the grant money. This was a huge amount and got the company started in the early stage. After the company started growing it received the funds of $5.5 million, $17 million, and $50 million in Series A, Series B, and Series C funding respectively.

In 2013, Life360 entered into a partnership with BMW such that the location services of the company would be integrated into the navigation system of BMW cars. In this same year, the company also crossed more than 34 million, outrunning Foursquare. By the end of 2013, Life360 had over 40 million registered users. Another reason that Life360 witnessed a growth in the number of users was Google decided to discontinue its platform, Google Latitude in August 2013. Eventually, the company also added more languages to the app other than English and added international SMS.

Recent Events

With every year, the company kept on adding more and more features to the app making it helpful in every way. In 2016, Life360 launched the feature of automatic car crash detection and contacting the people on the emergency list. Life360 started a joint venture with ADT Go and the news was announced by ADT at the CES 2018. ADT has a very expansive security infrastructure to connect and protect its customers outside the home.

Life360 became a public company in 2019 as it was listed in the Australian Securities Exchange and the fund raised was invested to expand globally and partner with various insurance companies. Life360 has recently acquired two new companies. They are a guide app called ZenScreen and an American electronics company, Tile.

Chris Hulls – Founder of Life360

Chris Hulls is a travel enthusiast and a tech entrepreneur. He served in the military after passing high school and was deployed to the Middle East. As an undergrad student at the University of California Berkely, he got an internship with Goldman Sachs. He always wanted to go to the South Pole but in a medical test, he got to know that he has a tumor and life took a different turn.

Virtusa

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

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

About Virtusa

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

Virtusa
Image source: googleusercontent.com

Founding History of Company

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

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

Recent Events

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

Santosh Thomas – CEO of Virtusa

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

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.

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.

nec corporation

NEC Corporation – Story of a Japanese IT and Electronics Company Previously Known as Nippon Electric Limited.

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Established in 1899, NEC Corporation has come a long way in the industrial venture and witnessed different phases of it. When the company was established by Kunihiko Iwadare and Takeshiro Maeda, it was named Nippon Electric Limited Partnership. The company rebranded itself as NEC Corporation in 1983. It is based in Minato, Tokyo, Japan, and operates on a global basis with more than 100,000 employees. The main products of the company are telecommunications equipment, supercomputers, software, electronics, servers, etc. In 2017, the company was featured on the Fortune 500 list.

About NEC Corporation

When the company was established, it mainly focused on the manufacturing and sales of telephones and switches. But, in order to survive, evolution is of utmost importance. Hence today, NEC corporation is not only thriving in the electronics industry but also known for offering cloud computing and IoT platforms. The company was the biggest PC vendor in Japan in the 1980s and also became the fourth largest PC manufacturer in the world. In the 21st century, NEC Corporation has spun off its semiconductor division to Renesas Electronics and Elpida Memory. Last year, when the US banned Huawei’s 5G equipment in the country, NEC geared up to fill that void in both the US and UK.

NEC Corporation
Image source: www.industryglobalnews24.com

Establishment of Nippon Electric Limited

Kunihiko Iwadare and Takeshiro Maeda bought facilities from Miyoshi Electrical Manufacturing Company which helped them establish Nippon Electric. Western Electric, an American manufacturing company, and Nippon formed a joint-stock company in July 1899 which became Nippon Electric Company (NEC). This marked the first-ever joint venture of Japan with a foreign company. Initially, the company started out with the production and sales of telephones and switches and opened a plant at Mita Shikokumachi in 1901. The telephone subscribers started increasing in Japan in the early 1900s which increased the market potential for NEC. With the implementation of the telegraph treaty between Japan and China, NEC entered the Chinese market in 1908 followed by entering the Korean market as well.

Turmoils in the 20th Century

As the market started expanding for NEC, four of its factories were destroyed during the great Kanto earthquake of 1923. But, NEC got back on its feet very quickly and started the radio communications business in 1924. Western Electric was the prime supplier of broadcasting equipment for NEC. The company also established a radio research unit and by 1934 supplied China’s Xinjing station with a 100kW radio broadcasting system. NEC provided the Japanese Ministry of Communications with A-type switching systems and non-loaded line carrier equipment before World War II.

World War II marks the darkest days in history not only for NEC but for entire Japan. The company suffered heavy losses and some of its plants were completely damaged due to bomb attacks and foreign relations were also disrupted. By the end of 1944, the production of NEC reduced drastically. When the situation started getting back to normalcy, NEC re-opened the major plants in 1946. The company started investing significantly in R&D and won the Deming Prize for its excellent quality control. In 1954, computer research and development began in NEC and it designed Japan’s first crossbar switching system. NEC eventually expanded its market to North American and European territories as well.

Present Day NEC Corporation

The 21st century for NEC began with a joint venture with Samsung for manufacturing OLED displays. NEC also collaborated with the UK government and provided projectors for school students. In 2002, the electronics division of NEC became a separate entity rebranded as NEC Laboratories America Inc. NEC built the Earth Simulator which was the fastest supercomputer in the entire world for two years (2002-2004). Participating in the automobile industry marked a joint venture with Nissan in 2007 for producing lithium-ion batteries for electric cars. In 2012, a huge economic crisis struck NEC and it was forced to cut 10,000 jobs. Currently, the principal subsidiaries of NEC Corporation are NEC Corporation of America, Netcracker Technology, NEC Europe, KMD, Avaloq, and NEC Display Solutions (majority stake sold to Sharp Corporation).

Takashi Niino – CEO of NEC Corporation

Takashi Niino is the current CEO of NEC Corporation. He joined the company in 1977 and became the CEO and President in 2016. In this time spent in NEC, he was offered several roles like executive general manager and executive vice president. He completed his education at Kyoto University.

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems – A famous American IT Company Currently Operating Under Oracle Corporation.

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Sun Microsystems is an American IT company that was established in 1982 and is based in California, US. The company became very famous over a short time because it created Java (programming language) whose applications are very wide in today’s IT sector. The company mainly sold computer components, IT services, software but set itself apart by rolling out products like Java, ZFS, SPARC microprocessors, VirtualBox, etc. Sun Microsystems offers a wide range of software products like the Java platform, operating system, Office Suite, database management system, etc. It also offers storage as one of its primary products as well.

About Sun Microsystems

The founders of Sun Microsystems are Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Bill Joy. Sun Microsystems is a company that has always supported open systems like Unix and contributed to open-source software. In 2008, the company acquired MySQL for $1 billion. After a year, Oracle Corporation announced that it would acquire Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion. The company made plenty of acquisitions and expanded to Newark, Oregon, Scotland, Hillsboro, and many other places before it became a part of Oracle Corporation.

Sun Microsystems
Image source: zimbio.com

History Of The Company And The Dot-Com Bubble

The first Unix workstation of Sun Microsystem, Sun1 is the original idea of Andy Bechtolsheim. When he was a graduate student at Stanford University, he started working on the designs of the workstation for his communications project. He designed it using the Motorola 68000 processors and an advanced memory management unit. His first design was completely built out of what he got from his college’s computer science department and Silicon Valley supply houses. As the design of the workstation became a success, two other graduate students, Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosla from the same university joined in and founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy worked at Berkeley Software Division and joined the company soon.

In the first year of its establishment, Sun Microsystems turned out to be profitable. After four years, the company filed its first IPO under the stock symbol SUNW. This symbol was changed to JAVA in 2007 as the company became more famous as the creator of the Java platform. Soon, the situation of the dot-com bubble made an impact on every Silicon Valley business. Sun Microsystem’s business rose dramatically and the share prices as well. The company started hiring more employees and building the company until the bubble burst in 2000. None of the companies were prepared for this and thus it was followed by layoffs and cost-cutting. Sun tried its best to get to the pre-cash scenario as early as possible but had to shut down their Newark, California facility.

Post-Crash Scenario

After the bubble burst, there were changes in the strategies of Sun Microsystems. The company started focusing more on processor optimization for multi-threading and multiprocessing. In 2004, the company collaborated with Fujitsu, a Japanese business, to use their processor chips and Sun servers. Eventually, Sun Microsystems stabilized itself and in 2005 gained a net profit of $19 million. The year before it was acquired by Oracle, the value of Sun Microsystems fell from 2007 to 2008 and its valuation came down to $3 billion.

Acquisitions

Sun Microsystems has a big list of acquisitions from the year 1987 to 2009, just before Oracle acquired it. In the 1980s it acquired Transept Systems, Sitka Corp, Centrum System West, and Folio Inc. The company acquired a lot of businesses in the late 1990s. Some of them are Lighthouse Design, Encore Computer, LongView Technologies, etc. Out of all the companies it acquired, MySQL was the biggest acquisition in the company’s history. Q-Layer was the last company that it acquired before Oracle bought it off.

About The Founders

Scott McNealy is an alumni of Harvard and Stanford University. Mostly famous as co-founding Sun Microsystems, he also founded Curriki which is a free e-learning service. He founded Wayin in 2011 and served as its CEO for quite some time. In 2018, he joined the Advisory Board of Redis Labs.

Vinod Khosla is an Indian American businessman who graduated from IIT Delhi. He also went to Carnegie Mellon University followed by Stanford. Apart from Sun Microsystems, he founded Khosla Ventures. Last year, he was featured on the Forbes 400 list.

Apart from being an investor and an entrepreneur, Andy’s career started as an electrical engineer. He was very talented as a student as he graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with the help of the Fulbright Scholarship. Later, he went to Stanford to complete his Ph.D. He is also a Google investor. Before co-founding Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy worked at Fabry’s Computer Systems Research Group. He is an electrical engineer and also acquired a degree in computer science.