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floqast

FloQast, A Software Company That Simplifies The Accounting Process.

FloQast is an industry leader in accounting process automation. The company, which was founded in 2013, offers a close management system to accounting departments in companies to assist them in the better balancing of the accounts each month. FloQast’s automating of routine accounting processes, streamlines and increases the efficiency of the accounting process.

About The Company

FloQast is a provider of accounting software with headquarters in Los Angeles, California. The company provides one of the best Financial Close Management workflow optimization tools enabling businesses to implement accounting excellence. Over 1,600 financial accounting teams trust FloQast, which was created by accountants for accountants to improve the efficiency of accounting teams. The company’s clients include Roblox, Zoom, Twilio, Snowflake, and Los Angeles Lakers. Customers may automate workflows like automated reconciliations, requests for documentation, and other procedures that affect the closing process at the month’s end with the help of FloQast. Since its founding, the company has received numerous mentions in major magazines as one of the finest places to work in the LA tech scene.

FloQast
Image Source: floqast.com

History

Chris Sluty, Mike Whitmire, and Cullen Zandstra established FloQast. Whitmire was a senior accountant at Cornerstone OnDemand when he first had the idea for the business. Whitmire set out to develop a product that would aid finance and accounting teams during the frantic financial close process after personally experiencing the difficulties accounting teams faced when closing the account books each month, including ineffective procedures, out-of-date workflows, and flawed organizational structures. Whitmire selected Zandstra to serve as the CTO and co-founder after coming up with the idea. The two created a minimal viable product (MVP), which led to their acceptance into the esteemed Amplify.LA accelerator program. Whitmire enlisted Sluty, to join the team as co-founder, COO, and head of customer success after the company received its initial funding. In 2014, the company received $1.3 million in seed funding from Amplify.LA and Toba Capital. In 2017, FloQast received $25 million in Series B funding after a period of expansion during which the business tripled its revenue. In 2021, the firm raised $110M in Series D financing. With this, FloQast has now received $203M in funding overall.

Product

FloQast is a SaaS application. The month-end closure of an organization’s financial books is automated by the financial close management software, which integrates with Microsoft Excel and makes use of process management, reports, and collaboration. By providing accounting departments with checklists and tie-outs connected to Excel workbooks and the client of firms’ enterprise resources planning (ERP) system, the software automates reconciliations and, as a result, speeds up the financial closure process. FloQast ‘s AutoRec is a technology that uses artificial intelligence to aid in the automation of the reconciliation process. FloQast works with cloud-based file storage platforms like Google Drive, Box, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. The easy and simple configuration products from FloQast improve the way accounting departments now operate so they can work more efficiently.

Founder – Mike Whitmire; Chris Sluty; Cullen Zandstra

Chris Sluty and Mike Whitmire, former corporate accountants, and seasoned software programmer Cullen Zandstra established FloQast. Whitmire was a senior accountant at Cornerstone OnDemand when he first had the idea for the business. Cullen Zandstra later joined them as the co-founder of the company.

CEO – Mike Whitmire

Mike Whitmire is the CEO of FloQast. Mike worked on the finance and accounting team at the quickly expanding Cornerstone OnDemand before starting FloQast. Mike started his auditing career with Ernst & Young, where he concentrated on the media and entertainment industry. He carried out public business audits, opening balance sheet audits, cash to GAAP restatement, etc at EY. Mike earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Syracuse University.

Blackline

Blackline, A Leading Tech Company Providing Accounting Software.

BlackLine cloud-based finance operations management software, drives accountability through visibility, unifies data and processes for businesses, automates repetitive tasks, and provides industry-leading customer support.

About the Company

Blackline is an American software company that offers cloud-based services to automate and manage the complete financial closing process. Numerous clients depend on BlackLine to deliver thorough and precise results quickly. The company established the cloud financial closing market, and customers at reputable end-user review websites like Gartner Peer Insights, TrustRadius, and G2 have named it the best. Large enterprises and small businesses across all industries benefit from BlackLine’s solutions for managing and automating financial close, accounts receivable, and inter-company accounting operations. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles, California, and has 11 offices around the globe.

Blackline
Image Souce: prnewswire.com

History

In 2001, Therese Tucker, a former CTO at SunGard Treasury Systems, established BlackLine. The initial objective was to assist clients in switching from using Excel to a set of accounting systems. The company operated without any outside funding up until 2013, when Silver Lake Partners, a private equity group, invested over $200 million in the firm. In 2015 a strategic partnership was made between Blackline and McGladrey, a financial consultancy firm. The companies started providing a business process as a service (BPaaS) framework as a consequence of the deal. In 2016, BlackLine went public and is represented by the ticker BL on the NASDAQ. In 2016, Blackline paid over $34 million to acquire Runbook, a competitor in Europe Before being bought by Blackline, Runbook sold a dashboard application software package for SAP. The “automation of recurrent financial activities” by the software improve “internal control systems and compliance paperwork” and increases “visibility and transparency” of data kept by SAP. In 2018, BLackline and SAP entered into a contract with SAP to “resell BlackLine’s cloud-based accounting and finance solutions” as a component of “SAP Solution Extensions.” In 2020, the company acquired UK-based accounts receivable automation startup Rimilia. In 2016, Forbes’ Cloud 100 list included BlackLine at number 43. The company, which has a market worth of $3.5 billion, is the biggest tech company with a single female founder.

Operations

More than 3,100 organizations, including Netflix, Costco, Coca-Cola, JetBlue Airways, Kraft Heinz, Google, Sirius XM Holdings, and Under Armour, use Blackline’s software. In contrast to simple general ledger software, the company develops stronger financial controls. A technique referred to as continuous auditing is used by BlackLine’s software to manage financial data, reconcile balances from sub-systems, assure correct and thorough closings, and keep an eye on regulatory controls. The business uses cloud-based software that complies with ISO 27001 standards and is predominantly run on the Cloud Platform from Google.

Founder – Therese Tucker

BlackLine was founded by American entrepreneur Therese Tucker. Tucker’s first role was as an engineer at Hughes Aircraft. Earlier she was the CTO at SunGard Treasury Systems. In 2016, she made BlackLine public. Tucker held the positions of CEO and Chairman until 2020 when she resigned. Her worth was estimated to be $140 million after BlackLine’s IPO. based. In 2020, Forbes placed her net wealth at $370 million. She graduated from the University of Illinois with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science.

CEO – Marc Huffman

A veteran of the cloud accounting software sector Marc Huffman has an outstanding track at various prosperous software firms. He began working with BlackLine in 2018 as COO before being elected as the company’s President in 2020. As President, he oversaw all customer-facing sales, marketing, and technology organizations globally. Early in 2021, he was elevated to the role of CEO. Since his hiring, BlackLine has expanded its sales and client success teams strategically realigned its go-to-market strategy, finalized a global reseller deal with SAP, set up a subsidiary in Japan, and formed several collaborations with the top consulting and advising firms around the globe.

Expensify

Expensify – A Journey From Assisting Homeless Individuals To Building A Successful Startup.

Expensify is one of the world’s most innovative companies (according to Fast Company, 2015) that was established in 2008. David Barrett is the founder and current CEO of the company. The headquarters of the company is based in California, United States. Expensify has approximately 144 members, according to December 2021. The major and widely used product launched by the company is an expense reporting application that is available both for Android and Apple devices. Expensify’s expense management software not only helps to track everyday expenses but also helps in creating receipts for online purchases which can be further used for reimbursement.

Founding History

The story of David Barrett and his successful entrepreneurial life starts back in 2008. It all started with a bleak hope and a doubtful mind to open the startup and after a decade it has become a successful US-based public company. Getting deeper into the backstory of Expensify, Barrett used to live in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco in 2008. Living in this neighborhood, Barrett came across his unhoused neighbors almost every day on the street. This got him thinking about several ways to help these people without giving direct cash. While thinking about an alternate solution, he came up with an idea of a debit card linked to the personal account of these people which would ensure that they could buy food and all be able to access various kinds of public services.

Pitching this idea was accompanied by several hiccups as most of the banks thought the idea was very strange and risky. David got turned down for funding wherever he pitched the idea initially. But Barrett was determined to found this company and hence the next time he pitched a low-risk idea to the bank for getting funding. This led to the development of Expensify, an expense report platform for both business and personal use.

Expensify
Image source: googleusercontent.com

Journey to Becoming Expensify

After having a clear idea about how he wanted to pitch a solution, Barrett finally came up with his card technology concept in 2008. He presented his idea at TechCrunch50 and named his solution as Expensify with a tagline, “The Corporate Card for the Masses!”. Initially, Barrett didn’t have any planning to open a startup but he realized that people actually loved the concept of expense reporting.

Eventually, David started working to establish Expensify properly and expand the team. In the next couple of years, David and his company launched the first receipt-scanning technology in the industry. This product was called SmartScan which allowed the user to take a photo of the receipt for automatic transcription. The name of Expensify’s platform spread like a wildfire in the initial years. Expense management is a very crucial task, especially for working individuals, so the new users of the platform increased at an exponential rate. As word-of-mouth spread, Expensify was able to raise much more funding (from $1 million in 2009 to $17 million in 2015). It also received several awards and recognitions like Tabby Award (2015), Forbes Cloud 100 (2016), Top 10 Free Mobiles Sales App by Inc Magazine (2014), and many more.

About the Founder

David Barrett is a famous American entrepreneur who is known for being the CEO and founder of Expensify. Barrett is an alumni of the University of Michigan and he studied software engineering. David was into programming from the early age of six. After he joined Michigan, he started working there in a virtual reality laboratory. After he graduated, he worked in the video game industry where he helped in developing 3D graphics. Before starting his company, Barrett worked at Red Swoosh, a peer-to-peer file-sharing company.

Asana

Asana – The Makers Of Simplified Management Tools To Help Companies Focus On Their Goals.

Small or big, goals are necessary for every type of growth, be it personal growth or growth as a big company. To achieve these goals, one needs to have a system or discipline that would help manage the tasks required to be fulfilled for those goals. The idea behind founding Asana has been the same. The company was founded to provide companies with software and web applications that would help them reduce the complexity of managing their teams, daily tasks, etc. so that they can achieve their targets (small or big) with lesser efforts and in time. The applications by Asana do not only help companies manage their teams and tasks, but also help the employees increase their productivity.

About Asana

Asana is a task management and productivity software development company founded in 2008. Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein founded the company to reduce the complexity of daily office work for the companies so that they can focus on the major part of the work. Asana is a Sanskrit word that means Yoga pose. The company headquarters is based in San Francisco, California, US and offers services to its clients globally. The software and applications by Asana include tasks like organizing and managing daily office work, managing the teams, and tracking the progress. Apart from web applications and software, Asana also provides API integration to third-party applications. Gmail, Outlook, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Slack are some of those applications with Asana API integrations.
As of 2019, around 1000 people are working at Asana, and it made annual revenues worth $142.2 million in the same year. The company is publically traded, trading on New York Stock Exchange as ASAN.

Asana
Image source: thisweekinstartups.com

The Company History

Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein were working together at Facebook in its beginning years. The two worked on improving the productivity of the Facebook employees, as CTO and the engineer manager, respectively. In 2008, the two left their jobs at Facebook to establish Asana. The company launched the beta version of their software in 2011 and offered it for free to companies. Later in 2012, Asana released the software for commercial use. The software from Asana is to manage the collaboration of the employees and daily tasks. It is a software-as-a-service that provides multiple features helpful for companies to handle their projects and their teams.
In 2013, Asana launched another software named Organizations providing administration tools for companies. The next year, the company released Calendar View for iOS and the Android app for the same came in 2015, including team conversations feature. By the next year, Company had added more features to its software like team management, member management, status updates, task dependencies, custom fields, Boards, pre-made project templates, and security features, etc.
Asana partnered with Microsoft in 2017 and integrated its features into Microsoft Teams. The same year, Gmail also integrated some Asana features into it, resulting in the release of comment-only projects. Asana also released its versions in French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese in 2017 and 2018. CSV importer and Timeline came in 2018. In 2021, Asana launched a special app for Zoom as well as a new Enterprise Work Graph suite.
Though Asana is not a very old company, it has been successful in bagging contracts and partnerships from big names like Google, Slack, Wufoo, Okta, Uber, Zoom, IBM, eBay, and Microsoft, and over 100,000 other paying customers. The company has won a few recognitions, like “one of the best collaboration and productivity apps for teams” by PC Magazine in 2017 and “one of the Best Workplaces for Parents” by Great Place to Work in 2020.

The Founder/CEO

Dustin Aaron Moskovitz is one of the co-founders and the present CEO of Asana. He was born on 22 May 1984 in Gainesville, Florida, U.S. Moskovitz went to the Vanguard High School and joined Harvard University to pursue a graduate degree with an economics major. He was one of the four roommates with Mark Zuckerberg at the university. So when Zuckerberg decided to drop from college to work on a Facebook full time, Moskovitz too joined in and moved to Palo Alto with him. Moskovitz was the first CTO at Facebook and spent four years at the company. In 2008, he, along with Justin Rosenstein, left Facebook and started Asana. Moskovitz became the first CEO of Asana and is still serving the company as the CEO.

NetSuite

NetSuite – The Leading Cloud-based Business Management Software Providers.

The past thirty to forty years have been the years of growth for the IT industry. With time, the size of the computer started to decrease, whereas the storage capacity of these computers started to increase. Slowly computers reached almost every person’s home, and all the industries were using them. This led to the increase in demand for storage, and cloud technology came to the rescue. Many companies tried their hands on this new technology, and now, they are a few of the famous ones. NetSuite is one such company that has been there for about thirty years, providing cloud computing services to its clients. NetSuite is an American cloud computing company that became part of Oracle in 2016.

About the Company

Evan Goldberg founded NetSuite as NetLedger in 1998 in California, US. Currently, it operates as the subsidiary of Oracle Corporation, having its headquarters in Redwood Shores, California. The company started as a business consultancy firm and provided services, like business finances, operations, and customer relations, etc., small and medium-sized enterprises being its target customers. Later, the company grew to become one of the leading Cloud-based business management platform providers.
The product range of NetSuite includes accounting software, applicant tracking system, customer relationship management, e-commerce enterprise resource planning, human resource management system, etc.

NetSuite
Image source: erpsoftwareblog.com

Founding of NetSuite

Evan Goldberg founded NetSuite in 1998 in California as NetLedger in a small office above a hair salon next to a liquor store. In the very beginning, the company was providing web-hosted accounting software, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison being one of the major investors in the company. Ellison had put all his money into the venture.
The very next year of the founding of the Company, it started to work on Cloud-computing, technically making Company the first cloud computing software company. After successfully running as a leading cloud-computing company, it went public in December 2007 on NYSE.
In the next few years, Company expanded its operations overseas, establishing offices in countries like Denver, Chicago, New York, Boston, Toronto, the Philippines, etc. In November 2016, Oracle acquired Company for a sum of US$9.3 billion, transforming the company into Oracle NetSuite Business Unit. After the acquisition, the founder and CEO Evan Goldberg became the President of the Oracle NetSuite Business Unit.
The Company’s expansion included some major acquisitions. Some of the NetSuite’s acquired companies include OpenAir (2008), QuickArrow (2009), Retail Anywhere (2013), TribeHR (2013), LightCMS (2013), Venda (2014), eBizNET Solutions (2014), Bronto Software (2015), and Monexa (2015), etc.
NetSuite is known for custom development of software for its clients on basis of their needs. The products by NetSuite are able to manage management reporting, human resources management, accounting, billing, payroll accounting, sales tools, etc. The cloud support for all the software extends the scope of the NetSuite software.

The Founder

Evan Goldberg is the founder of NetSuite Inc. He is a Harvard graduate having a degree in Computer Science. Goldberg started his career at Oracle as a member of the database team at the company. He met the future investor for NetSuite, Larry Ellison at Oracle, as he was one of the interviewers for Goldberg. After switching to various roles in Oracle, he became the vice president role at Oracle for the launch of mBed Software.
While working at Oracle, Goldberg had already developed the idea of NetSuite. He left his job at Oracle in 1995 to found a website development company. Though the company failed to make any mark, it helped Goldberg grow as an entrepreneur. NetSuite was his next venture, and Larry Ellison also showed his interest in the same. He invested $2000 in the company, and they founded NetSuite as NetLedger in 1998.
Goldberg served NetSuite as the CEO from the beginning, and in 2016, after Oracle acquired the company, he became the President of the newly formed Oracle NetSuite Business Unit.