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Globant

Globant – Reinventing Businesses With Their Innovative Ideas.

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The time is always running, and there are lots of changes that occur with every passing second. These changes are necessary for life and for the improvement of lifestyle. This is the same motto of Globant, a software company based in Luxembourg. The company always talks about reinvention and walking with the time, accepting all the changes. Globant helps its peers to transform their work conditions using digital and cognitive means. The company is just twenty years old but had made a special place in the IT industry through its innovative ideas and unique products. Since the ideas are based on new technologies, AI and behavior-based science are the prime technologies that it uses to build its software. Globant is not only a good service provider but it is also a great employer supporting a self-mastery work culture for its employees to help them grow their skills while working at Globant.

About Globant

Martín Migoya, Guibert Englebienne, Martín Umaran and Néstor Nocetti are behind the idea of Globant. The company was founded in 2003, establishing its headquarters in Luxembourg City. It is a software development company, and its primary area of service includes Software Development, Infrastructure Management, Mobile application development, Social Networks Development, Mainframe Migration, etc. Apart from Luxembourg, Globant has established offices in Argentina, the U.K, Canada, the U.S., India, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Spain, Chile, Uruguay, Romania, France, etc. The company trades as a public company on New York Stock Exchange with the ticker name GLOB. As per the year 2020 records, the company is home to over 25000 employees and had made annual revenues worth US$814.1 million for the same financial year.

Globant
Image source: business-review.eu

The Founding

Four friends, Martín Migoya, Guibert Englebienne, Martín Umaran and Néstor Nocetti, conceived the idea of Globant, while sitting in a bar. They founded the company in 2003 in Luxembourg, putting up some funds from their personal savings. Just in one year, they opened their first international office in the U.K. in 2024, and in 2005, they opened their second Development GOV Center in Argentina, leading to the opening of multiple development centers in different parts of Argentina in the further years. Later, the company established its multiple offices in different pasts of American, Asian, and European continents. The company was also named the Endeavor Entrepreneur in 2005.

In 2007, Globant acquired the CMMI certificate, and the next year, it closed a financing round worth US$13MM, Riverwood Capital and FTV Capital being the prime investors. The same year, the company had hired over 100o employees globally. By 2010, Globant had opened eight studios, and it had expanded into industries like gaming, big data, cloud computing, creative and social, consumer experience, enterprise communication and mobile engineering, etc.
Globant had started to get recognition for its work from the very beginning, and Global Services Magazine had named it Global Services Magazine in 2005, whereas Gartner recognized it as a Cool Vendor in Business Process Services 2010. Globant was also featured as one of the world’s top 10 most innovative companies in South America by FastCompany. In 2014, the company went public on NYSE.

The further expansion of Globant included some major acquisitions, including Accendra (2008), Openware (2008), Nextive (2011), Clarice Technologies (2015), PointSource (2017), Ratio (2017), Small Footprint (2018), Avanxo (2019), Belatrix Software (2019), BiLive (2020), grupoAssa (2020), Xappia (2020), CloudShift (2021), Habitant (2021), Walmeric (2021), etc.

The CEO at Globant

Martín Migoya is one of the co-founders and the CEO of Globant. Martin went to La Plata University to pursue a bachelor’s degree in Electronic Engineering and completed his master’s degree in Business Administration from CEMA University.
Migoya is recognized as a global leader and one of the most successful entrepreneurs. Under his leadership, Globant has seen extended growth. Martin has won multiple awards for his work in the software industry, including Endeavor Entrepreneur in 2005, one of the most distinguished Argentine businessmen of 2009, America Economía Magazine’s Excellence Award 2009, Konex Award as one of the most innovative entrepreneurs of 2008, and Emerging CEO of the Year 2013, etc. In 2005, he became the CEO of Globant.

Success Story of Xender, Sharing Files Without The Expense of Mobile Data

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India is surely a developing country but still, the internet has not reached every corner of the nation. Even today, it is a part of luxury for some people to be able to use mobile data. Now, mobile phone users without the internet can transfer a file through Bluetooth easily but it also has limitations.

When sending files from an Android OS to iOS, it is not possible via Bluetooth. In this kind of crisis, a software that can help users to transfer files from one device to another without using data and also allowing transfer between different OS is absolutely a blessing.

And to meet these needs of the people, Xender was developed in 2011. Xender is a software written in languages Java and Objective-C which helps connect two smart devices and transfer files without turning on data. The application is currently available on four operating systems, Windows, iOS, Android and Tizen.

  • Xender Founder Peter Jiang

A Chinese Start-up

Xender was developed in 2011 by three developers, namely, S.S Chandwara, Lokesh Narwani, and Tingu Urf Tikiya and was founded by Peter Jiang. Apart from the main advantage of application being running without mobile data, Xender connected with computers as well. And, in the case of computers, Xender was made available for both Windows and MAC.

The main feature of the application was the personal hotspot feature that also assured high speed for the file transfer system. With Xender launching in the market, the two main problems often faced by the users were resolved. First, people didn’t need to think about the cost of data anymore and second, file transfer was made possible between dissimilar operating systems.

The obstacles

After a couple of years of launching Xender, the main competitors of the application were Zapya and SHAREit. Though Xender managed to bag 200 million users by 2015, the stock market of China slowed down during these years. The biggest impact of this sudden change in the economy of the Chinese market was suffered by the tech start-ups as they were unable to find suitable investors. Raising funds became a living nightmare for the company but they didn’t stop looking for investors.

But, after many struggles, this four-year-old start-up raised a good amount of undisclosed funding from angel investors, Linear Venture and investors of WeChat.

Expansion of the market

Xender has been launched in more than 22 countries by now but most of its active users are from Mexico, Brazil, and India. One of the biggest markets for Xender is India given those big companies like Micromax pre-install the application before selling it to the customers. India is Xender’s biggest oversea success and the largest market after China itself. The company is expected to grow exponentially as the production of smartphones is also increasing over the years.

Xender in India

By 2016, Xender announced that it has hit a 50 percent share in the market of India and along with that revealed the growth rate of users, that is, 100 percent. Xender witnessed around 170 million active users of the application blooming in the Indian market. Xender reached 500 million global users by this year and Jiang announced that their goal was to reach 800 million by the next couple of years.

The main users of Xender were from the expected metropolitan cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Delhi. But, the application was also gaining popularity in the northern parts of India especially in the areas where internet connections were not so strong. After the next couple of years, Xender took a gigantic step by coming into a partnership with SONY India for MovieChain Project.

An offline distribution system for movies was a huge change in the business model as compared to the conventional way. But, this sudden change would have definitely increased the Indian Xender user base as transferring movies through mobile terminals without turning on data definitely sounds advantageous in every way.

Jiang, after successfully starting a joint venture with SONY India announced that he plans to expand his partnership with major movie studios around the globe and explore new ways to expand the business. By this time, Xender was used in more than 190 countries with its availability in more than thirty languages.

Paytm

Paytm Suffers Almost Tripled Losses in FY19 due to Additional Expenses on Promotions

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Online banking and payment apps have made life a lot easier, and the rewards we get on the payments are a plus. Paytm being the earliest and the biggest player in the country has been the most used payment app. But with the arrival of other payment apps, the former has to face some good losses. Reportedly, Paytm’s parent company has suffered a 165% extended loss for the financial year that ended on 31st March.

The company reported a total of Rs 3959 crore ($549 million) loss which is triple times up its last year’s losses, i.e., 1490 crore ($206 million). Going further, collectively, One97 Communication, including its other business, had to suffer a loss of Rs 4217.20 crore ($584 million), which is way above its last year’s losses, and that is Rs 1604.34 crore ($222 million).

“The company has incurred huge capital expenditure in creating a brand and establishing its business activity. We have incurred a considerable amount in various capital & operational expenditures which resulted in losses during the financial year,” said the company in the annual report.

Paytm
Image Source: forbes.com

Despite the losses, even the revenue of the company is up from its last year’s, i.e., Rs 3232 crore ($448 million) from Rs 3052 crore ($423 million). And, the company is even planning to invest a $3 billion for the growth of its business. According to its previous announcement, the company is even looking forward to going public with the next two year. But seeing its past expenditures, the company had spent a lot in the promotion of its app than it earned from it. So amid the raised competition, it has to be careful about its spendings in the coming future.

“For the last two years, we have been investing $1 billion each year to expand the digital payments ecosystem in our country. We will further invest about $3 billion in the next two years to scale the same,” said a Paytm spokesperson.

There has been a tough competition for Paytm as there are not less than ten payments (national and international) apps that are offering people exclusive offers along with the easy payments. Most of the big companies have brought their payments app, Google Pay and PhonePe, being the ruling party among of all. In fact, UPI-based apps like PhonePe are backed by the government and are even more flexible for the payments than Paytm. So it has become quite difficult for the company to stay firm in the market.

But according to the company, it is safe and is already spending on expending and strengthening its business and has claimed that the next year, there won’t be such losses. For now, the company is entirely focusing on its payments bank, insurance and insurance broking, travel ticketing, hotel and mobile wallet services, etc.

Instacart

Apoorva Mehta : The Founder of Instacart, the ‘Uber of Grocery’

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The internet and the rise of the tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have inspired a lot of people out there to start their own innovative business. And there is much evidence that the inspiration has worked for numerous people. The Internet has helped people to get idea from their daily needs and transform it into a successfully functioning business. One such person, who was inspired by the success of the big tech companies, is Apoorva Mehta, the founder of Instacart. Mehta was awed by the fact that how the new startups were getting success overnight. And hence, after trying out over 20 business ideas, he finally started Instacart.

Early Life and Career

Mehta belongs to the Indian descent, but was born and brought up in Canada. He had always been inclined towards the internet and technology. He had also been interested in learning science and computer programming. After completing his school education, Mehta joined the University of Waterloo, to complete an electrical engineering degree.

After completing his graduation, Mehta worked for companies like Qualcomm and BlackBerry. Though he had got good jobs, he was a bit confused about what he really wanted to do. Later, in 2008, Mehta moved to Seattle, to work with Amazon. He joined Amazon as the supply chain engineer. But, here too, he could not feel the passion for work and left the company after two years, in 2010.

The Inspiration for Startup

Apoorva Mehta Instacart
Image Source: celebritynetworth.com

With the rise of the tech companies, he had already developed an interest in entrepreneurship, so Mehta started looking for ‘the’ idea, that would help him establish a successful business. It took him over two years and 20 failed startup ideas to finally reach to Instacart. Before Instacart, Mehta tried to build an ad network for the gaming com to developing a social network for lawyers. But nothing worked for him.

After brainstorming for two long years and testing out those twenty startup ideas, Apoorva Mehta stopped and analysed, what he was doing wrong. He even thought of quitting, as none of his ideas had worked out. But persistence is the key. This time, he decided to work with passion and patience. He also realized that a business is successful when it solves a problem. So, he started looking for a problem that he could solve. Ultimately, he got an idea of developing an online grocery delivery service, which came out straight from his own pain point.

While working at Amazon, Apoorva Mehta was unable to find time to go for grocery shopping. He could order anything online, but there were no grocery delivering services. He found an opportunity in the problem and started working to solve it.

Finding the Investors

Mehta developed the app for his new startup ‘Instacart’ and started looking for investors. He tried to get into the Y Combinator tech incubator 2012, but the summer intake was already closed. So he had to take the other way around. He met a few of the partners of Y Combinator to request them to provide him entry into the incubator. But no one agreed. He met the last partner, who did not reject him, but said that the startup idea was nearly impossible.

Apoorva Mehta came back empty-handed but sent a pack of beer to that last partner through his app. This act made that partner think of this idea again, and he convinced the other Y Combinator partners to open the entry for Mehta. And this way, the doors of success were also opened for Mehta and his startup. Finally, he launched the company in 2012, in San Francisco.

The Rise of Instacart

In two years from its inception, the company gained a $40 million and spread to 17 different locations within the U.S. and Canada. The company was named as the ‘Most Promising Company in America’ by Forbes in 2015, and even, valued at $2 billion just in three years.

In 2016, the company went to expand in the North Chicago Zone, and the next year, the company was serving in 1,200 cities in 25 states. By the end of the year, the company partnered with Loblaw Companies for deliveries. The company raised a total of $400 million investment and valued at $3.4 billion.

In 2018, Instacart partnered with companies like Walmart Canada, HyVee, The Fresh Market, Harps, Lunds & Byerlys. It even acquired a Canada-based grocer named Unata. After raising a $200 investment in February 2018, the company raised another $600 million funding in October the same year and valued at $7.6 billion.

Mehta’s startup idea was unique and became successful within a year of its inception. And today, it is among the unicorn companies. The reason behind the success of Instacart is that it was different from the other businesses. It won’t be wrong if we call Instacart the Uber of grocery, as there was no warehouse to store the grocery and no official vans were bought to do the deliveries. In fact, the grocery came directly from the retailers, and the company hired people with their vehicles to do the deliveries. Both Instacart and the retailer are in benefit, and there is no spending of money on the physical cost resources.

Tumblr

David Karp : The Young Entrepreneur Who Founded the Biggest Microblogging Website Tumblr

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Experience matters, and when it is earned since childhood, it can help you achieve many things. As a kid, humans are sharper than adults and capable of learning even the toughest of things. These days we see many little kids coming up and showing off their skills and knowledge, whereas many are already launching their startups in the various fields. Thanks to the evolving technology. Though David Karp is not a teenage entrepreneur, he had achieved a lot before he passed his teens. David Karp is the founder of Tumblr, the microblogging website, and has an interesting success story to follow.

Early Life

Karp was born to a science teacher and a film and television composer, on 6 July 1986, in New York City. He was a bright student and got his primary as well as middle school education from Calhoun School, at the same place where his mother worked. Karp, at the age of 11, started learning HTML and was soon developing websites for businesses.

Karp always wanted to join MIT for his graduation, so, he after studying for one year at The Bronx High School of Science, dropped out and opted for homeschooling, to make his resume interesting for admissions in the university.

Career

David Karp
Image Source: charitybuzz.com

Things to go according to one’s will is not always possible. Karp wanted to add more to his resume, so he was doing many things alongside his homeschooling. He started working at the Frederator Studios as an intern when he was 14. At that time, he was also learning Japanese and had joined maths classes. Along with his maths tutor, he learned some of the programming skills. At the Frederator Studios, he got to work on various software products, and he even developed studio’s first blogging platform and its first internet video network, named Channel Frederator.

Later, he got to work with UrbanBaby. One day, at the firm, he solved a glitch in the software successfully in a comparatively lesser amount of time. The incident helped him to win the attention of John Maloney the founder of UrbanBaby.

Maloney appointed Karp as the head of product at UrbanBaby. Karp continued to work with the company for four more years and left it in 2006 after the company was acquired by CNET. Four years spent in a company made him leave the dream of joining MIT behind, as he had also not received a high school degree yet and he was doing great as a programmer.

Entrepreneurial Journey towards Tumblr

Karp work and experience opened new doors for him, and he went on to start his own development consulting company named Davidville. He hired a programmer named Marco Arment, through Craigslist, with the help of whom, Karp started to work on a new project. Karp had grown an interest in microblogging and was looking forward to developing a platform based-on microblogging. It took him a year and a half on deciding to finally work on his interest, and he launched Tumblr in February 2007.

David Karp was aware of the scope of a microblogging website, but he did not know that his website will gain 75000 users just within two weeks of its launch. In six months, he realised that Tumblr has got huge potential, so to focus on it, entirely, Karp shut down his consulting business and rebranded his company as Tumblr, Inc.

The Rise of the Company

In 2009, the company launched an iOS app for Tumblr, and in 2010, another app was launched for Blackberry phones. In 2011, the company valued at $800 million, and in the same year, raised a funding of $85 million. In October 2011, Tumblr became the first blogging website that hosted American President Barak Obama’s blog.

The 3.0 version of Tumblr launched in 2012, which also included support for Spotify. This way, the users could now post HD pictures on the platform and also use it at offline mode. In August 2012, the company monetized the platform through advertisements.

Major investors including Union Square Ventures, Fred Seibert, John Borthwick, and Sequoia Capital, etc. were the major investor in the company at that time. Karp sold 25% of the company share to few of its investors.

On May 20, 2013, Yahoo! announced that it will be acquiring Tumblr for $1.1 billion, Karp remaining the CEO of the company. After working together with Yahoo! for four years, Karp resigned from his post.

David Karp was named Best Young Tech Entrepreneur by BusinessWeek in August 2009. He was also named in the list of MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

duolingo

Duolingo : The Biggest Free Language Learning Platform

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Even though there are thousands of languages in the world, English has become the main medium of communication. But still, many of the people are struggling with finding a better institute, where they can learn the language at a cheaper price.

Some people want to learn different languages as a hobby, and some need to learn a different language to get a better job. But getting admission into a good college or institution is not easy for everyone.

Thinking of this obstacle, the professor and student duo, Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, thought of developing an online platform that could help the people around the world learn different languages for free.

Duolingo Founders
Image Source: inc.com

Luis von Ahn is the Carnegie Mellon University professor, who is also the developer of reCAPTCHA. And, Severin Hacker was a graduate and Ahn’s student from the same university.

Ahn is a native of Guatemala, a place where the scope of getting a basic education is only 30 per cent. Ahn was a bright student and wanted to study Mathematics. But unfortunately, there were no resources for studying Maths in the whole country. But if a person is working hard, no obstacles can stop him/her from achieving their dreams. Ahn’s determination brought him to the U.S., and he joined the Duke University.

Ahn completed a BS degree in Mathematics from the university in 2000. In 2005, he received a PhD degree in Computer Science from the Carnegie Mellon University. The next year, he joined the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University as the faculty member.

Ahn is recognised for his researches on CAPTCHAs and human computation. He has won many awards for his work including acclaim as the 50 Best Brains in Science by Discover and one of the 10 Most Brilliant Scientists by Popular Science Magazine.

Severin Hacker was born in 1984 in Zug and was brought up in Zurich. He completed a B.S. from Zurich and then moved to Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh, he joined the alumni of Carnegie Mellon University and received a PhD degree in Computer Science. Hacker met Ahn at the university, where Ahn was his graduate advisor.

Being from a place where people struggle with the English language, Ahn and Hacker wanted to create a system, that could translate the website language from English to the other languages. This way, the people who did not understand English could access the website in their own language. But the two were not convinced about this idea completely and decided to develop a program that could do two things at a time, i.e., translate sentences into foreign languages and translate simple phrases in documents.

At the time, another language teaching app, Rosetta Stone, was getting famous. But the paid subscription of the app could not get more subscribers, and it was limited to the ones who could really afford it. But as the two co-founders had come from a place that where not all were economically well, they knew that not all can afford to pay for studies. The two knew that there is a larger population that require to learn a new language, especially English, and if they get a chance, it would be great for them. This led the two co-founders to build a simple and free language learning platform Duolingo.

The two started working on Duolingo in 2009, at the time when Ahn had just sold his startup reCAPTCHA to Google. In November 2011, the two started the beta testing of their product. In the beginning, they used the approach of crowdsourced translations. This gave birth to the early premise of the company, “learn a new language while translating the web”.

A National Science Foundation grant and the Ahn’s MacArthur fellowship sponsored the project initially. Later, Duolingo raised $3.3 million investments from Union Square Ventures and actor Ashton Kutcher’s firm, A-Grade Investments in a private Series A funding.

Ahn talked about Duolingo at his TED Talk in the same year, where he got a chance to reach a bigger number of audience. Though it was not a sales pitch, Ahn talked about the broken education system in underdeveloped countries and the benefits of using Duolingo. The speech received 1 million views, and this way, 300,000 users entered the waiting list for Duolingo signup.

The next year, with much improvements, Duolingo was released for the general public, and the platform included four languages, i.e. English, Spanish, French and German.

The company reported that not only the job seekers and students but the English teachers across the world were also using Duolingo. In late 2012, the company released an iOS app for its users, and the next year, the company also launched the Duolingo Android app. The Android app became an instant hit and had over 1 million downloads within the first three weeks of its launch.

In 2013, Duolingo partnered with BuzzFeed and CNN. The company raised $15 million in series C funding. By 2017, the company had received a total $108.3 million investment.

Though the service is completely free and does not support ads. To generate a certain revenue, the company uses periodic advertising. If the users do not want to see those ads as well, they can pay a subscription fee. The platform offers support for over 25 languages and 30 different courses. On the advice of Hacker, gamification was added to the platform.

The Duoliongo app was named as the number one app on Play Store and App of the Year on Apple Store in 2013. As of 2014, Ahn is serving the company as the CEO. Hacker and Luis von Ahn received the Tech 50 award in 2015.