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Zendesk, Founded By Three Friends that Revolution Customer Support Experience.

Zendesk ignited a revolution in the customer experience arena. The company Zendesk facilitates billions of interactions, bringing together more than 100,000 businesses and millions of customers via phone, chatting, mail, texting, social media, communities, review websites, and help desks. Zendesk improves customer support by creating software to fulfill customers’ requirements, empower teams, and maintain company synchronization.

About The Company

Zendesk is an American company offering software-as-a-service items for customer communications, sales, and customer support. The company has its main office in San Francisco, CA. In 2007, the business was established in Copenhagen, Denmark. Before the public offering in 2014, It raised around $86 million in funding from venture capitalists.

History

Morten Primdahl, Alexander Aghassipour, and Mikkel Svane, three friends, founded Zendesk in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2007. The co-founders of Zendesk initially contributed to the company funding while working as consultants. In 2007, the SaaS product had roughly 1,000 trial users within a few months of its release. At first, the software’s popularity grew gradually through word-of-mouth referrals primarily among several other startups. Due to a greater interest in handling complaints from customers on social networks and when Twitter began utilizing, its popularity skyrocketed in 2008. Venture capitalists were only ready to fund Zendesk if the firm relocated to the USA where the majority of their clients were located. Zendesk relocated to Boston, Massachusetts, in 2009. They relocated again around six months later, to San Francisco, CA. As Zendesk expanded globally, offices were opened in Australia, Ireland, Denmark, and Singapore. In 2012, It launched its first app store for third-party Zendesk software. Zendesk filed for an IPO in 2014 and had a $1.7 billion valuation. The software from Zendesk was first designed to help small firms, but over time it evolved to help bigger businesses. Additionally, It changed its emphasis from responding to inbound customer inquiries to proactive customer communication based on online comments. Zendesk relaunched in 2016 with a new logo that emphasized proactive customer communication. In 2016, it launched features that convert online testimonials and comments into customer support tickets, and in 2017, it bought Outbound.io, a service that aids companies in responding to online complaints. In 2018, It generated $500 million in revenue annually. In 2019 Zendesk acquired Smooch, a Montreal-based company that provided live customer assistance messaging. In 2020, the company announced additional customer support tools for web-based media. In 2022, it was revealed that a group of private equity investors fronted by Permira and Hellman & Friedman will acquire it for $10.2 billion.

Business

Zendesk Support allows you to have an efficient and effective work process by bringing all of your client relationships together in one location. No matter how a client contacts you—via email, social media like Facebook, social messaging services like WhatsApp, Twitter, WeChat, Direct, etc.—the experience will be the same. Additionally, It offers a cloud-based chatbot that is designed to grow with a company or group’s demands. The product works well for both major companies and various fair-sized businesses. Zendesk Chat is already being used by many companies since it enables them to communicate with customers directly. Etsy, Dropbox, Kickstart, and League of Legends are just a few of Zendesk’s well-known clients.

Founder – Mikkel Svane, Alexander Aghassipour, Morten Primdahl

Mikkel Svane, Alexander Aghassipour, and Morten Primdahl created a software platform in 2006 in a spacious loft in Copenhagen to assist businesses in handling customer support demands. Companies needed a method to handle complaints quicker than they could be submitted online because social media platforms like Facebook were empowering the voices of irate users. Zendesk is a tenacious little startup founded to appease discontent.

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

LiveRamp, A Data Networking Platform For Efficient And Secure Data Utilization.

LiveRamp is a data networking platform for efficient and secure data utilization. LiveRamp allows firms and their partner organizations to better interact, regulate, and invoke data to reshape user experiences and produce more valuable business outcomes. Some of the greatest companies, agencies, and publishers in the world receive end-to-end addressability via LiveRamp’s entirely neutral and interoperable infrastructure.

About The Company

Located in San Francisco, California, LiveRamp is a SaaS company that provides a data connectivity platform. One of its services is data onboarding, which involves transferring offline information online for marketing reasons. After being established in 1969, the firm underwent a number of name changes before acquiring the LiveRamp brand from a business it had acquired. This happened after the Acxiom Marketing Services (AMS) unit of the company was spun off and transferred to the multinational ad network Interpublic Group of Companies.

History

In 1969, Charles D. Ward founded the company Demographics, Inc. in Arkansas. The business’s initial activities included processing payroll and creating mailing lists from phone books. Conway Communications Exchange became the company’s new name in 1980, and in 1983 it became a corporation under the name CCX Network, Inc. and completed its initial public offering. It took the name Acxiom Corporation in 1988. The largest business database in the world belonged to Acxiom until 2018. After the Cambridge Analytica controversy, Acxiom and the data trading sector were the subject of intense public scrutiny. New privacy regulations in California and the EU fundamentally altered the sector. In response, Acxiom sold its databases and brand for $2.3 billion, changed its name to Liveramp, and positioned itself as a standard for data interchange among global data marketplaces. In 2019, LiveRamp acquired Faktor, a developer of consent management platforms. LiveRamp paid $150 million to acquire the Boston-based TV analytics startup Data Plus Math. In 2020, the company unveiled Privacy Manager, its own platform for managing consent. Later in the year, the company introduced Safe Haven, a technology that enables media owners and advertisers to share consumer data while upholding privacy regulations.

Products

IdentityLink( now Data Marketplace) is LiveRamp’s flagship product today. It gives data owners the ability to use its algorithms to match a person’s data with hundreds of identifiers and to augment it with data from third parties. Organizations can enter the content of their CRM or POS platforms, and it will be linked utilizing AI technology with sources of data including publicly available data and ‘contextual cues’ like the weather in your present location. The procedure currently referred to as “Data Onboarding” relies heavily on browser cookies to integrate additional data. The company’s Authenticated Traffic Solutions (ATS) tool helps publishers and marketers to connect their data sources without utilizing browser cookies. The company’s Data Plus Math product helps firms, advertisers, cable operators, streaming platforms, and networks to know who is viewing their advertisements, Data Plus Math offers media measurement services.

Founder – Auren Hoffman

Auren Hoffman is the former CEO and co-founder of LiveRamp. Hoffman cofounded Rapleaf in 2006 and ran it as CEO until 2012 when he resigned to lead LiveRamp, a spinoff of Rapleaf that had been acquired by TowerData, an email marketing firm. In 2014, Acxiom acquired LiveRamp. Hoffman left the company after a year of this acquisition.

CEO – Scott Howe

Scott Howe is the CEO of LiveRamp. Howe headed Acxiom, the previous parent company of LiveRamp, from 2011 to 2018. Howe held executive positions at Microsoft and aQuantive before joining Acxiom in 2011. Scott obtained a bachelor’s degree in economics from Princeton University and an MBA degree from Harvard University.

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

WalkMe – The Pioneers Of The World’s First Digital Adoption Platform.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Yashica Vashishtha

Building software from scratch is a very hectic job. But still, people need to make apps and add features to them based on their business models. But these days, with the availability of APIs and SDKs, the developers are able to add features to their apps. These APIs and SDKs reduce a lot of work for the developers and also help them add different types of features to their platforms. Another way to add required features to the apps and other software platforms is to use a Digital Adoption Platform. WalkMe is a company that develops a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) with the same name as the company and has got the patent for the same, becoming the first company to develop such a product.

The platform is a code-free system, which helps the application owners to use software and feature adoption tools, and they also can access change management solutions for web, desktop, and desktop applications, etc., through the same DAP.

About the Company

Dan Adika, Rafael Sweary, Eyal Cohen, and Yuval Shalom Ozanna are the founders of WalkMe, a software-as-a-service company. The company was founded in 2011, and the headquarters have been established in San Francisco, California, U.S. The company offers its products under the category Digital Adoption Platform, such that the users can include required features for their platform through the WalkMe Digital Adoption Platform. Abbi, Jaco, DeepUI, and Zest are a few of the subsidiary companies of WalkMe, and over 1100 people are working for the company. Apart from San Francisco, the company has offices in Raleigh, North Carolina, Tel Aviv, Israel, the UK, Australia, and Japan. The ease of use of the WalkMe platform has made it more than 2000 corporate clients across the globe. As of 2020, the company made revenues worth $148.3 million in FY20.

The Back Story

The four co-founders, Dan Adika, Rafael Sweary, Eyal Cohen, and Yuval Shalom Ozanna, founded WalkMe in 2011 with a vision to help companies transform their productivity using technology. Dan Adika had seen his mother struggling using multiple digital interfaces and got inspired to build a single platform to work for many.

The company released its first product WalkMe in 2012. The same year, the company held round A and round B funding and raised US$1 million and US$5.5 million, respectively, and just one year of the launch of the product, the company was named Cool Vendor by Gartner as it generated $1 million ARR.
Further, WalkMe held a Round C Series funding in 2014, raising US$11 million, and a Series D funding in 2015, raising US$25 million. In a Series E round of funding in 2017, the company raised US$125 million, followed by Series F funding in 2018 and a Series G round of funding in 2019, raising US$50 million and US$90 million, respectively. WalkMe’s expansion was also through some important acquisitions, including Abbi (2017), Jaco (2017), DeepUI.ai (2018), and Zest (2021).

With the acquisitions of Abbi and Jaco in 2017, WalkMe also introduced the WalkMe products to work on web browsers and native mobile applications. The company also launched the WalkMe Workstation for the desktops as a single interface for the employees in 2020. In 2021, WalkMe introduced WalkMe Beyond, a Digital Adoption Product that lets the DAP professionals, partners, and innovators work together on the same platform.

In 2020, WalkMe partnered with Microsoft to integrate WalkMe’s DAP in Microsoft’s Dynamics 365. The same year, the company established a Digital Adoption Institute and offered scholarships to people who are unemployed and want to gain new skills. In June 2021, WalkMe went public on NASDAQ and now trades as WKME. With the IPO, the company was valued at US$2.56 billion.

The CEO at WalkMe

Dan Adika is one of the co-founders and the CEO of WalkMe. Before founding WalkMe, he worked as a software engineer in different companies, including HP. He also worked with the Israeli Army and completed a 6-years tenure with its Elite Computing Unit with Honors.

Yashica Vashishtha

Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.

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Cision – A media software company that merged from a 154-year old Swedish press agency.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Cision is a public relations and media technology company incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Its history roots back to 1867 when a Swedish press agency called Svenska Telegrambyrån was formed. Its headquarters is currently based in Chicago, Illinois and it provides worldwide services to customers. Cision currently has Abel Clark as its CEO who leads 6,300 employees of the company to achieve better PR and marketing strategies. Recently, Company has also won the Best Feature Set (Cision Communications Cloud) 2021 and Best Customer Support awards by TrustRadius.

About Cision

Though Cision is famous as a web-based PR and media software company, the company also owns other online publicity and media service brands. These include PRNewswire, Canada Newswire, Bulletin Intelligence, PRWeb, etc. Apart from its offices in Canada and US, the company also operates in Europe and Asia. The PR services that are provided to the clients are either through a cloud-based model or SaaS. The customers of Cision include commercial businesses, government bodies, non-profit organizations, and educational institutions.

Founding Story of Cision

Svenska Telegrambyrån, a Swedish press agency marks the founding date of Cision in 1867. After this press agency was founded, Henry Romeike in 1881 founded the first clipping bureau in London. In 1892, Svenska Telegrambyrån established its advertising department along with a press clipping service which became famous as Pressurklipp. Between 1932 and 1934, Bacon’s Clipping Bureau was founded for the production of media books and guides on public relations.

Bacon eventually started launching many new services that included a directory for the contact information of every editor and reporter and press release mailing services. In 1972, Bacon along with Romeike & Curtice Ltd collaborated and launched a joint enterprise called Bacon’s Information International. In 1995, K-III Communications acquired Bacon’s Information and later changed its name to Primedia Inc.

A couple of years after the acquisition, Bacon partnered with MediaMap and announced that the companies will combine their media databases and PR software. By this time a company called Sifo Group AB bought Pressurklip and also acquired Romeike Group to become the largest media monitoring company globally (1999). After acquiring Romeike Group, the company changed its name to Observer AB which after two years acquired Bacon’s Information.

After all the global leaders of media and PR came under the same brand name, it acquired a series of companies in the early 2000s. The companies include Chicago News, MediaPulse, Media Clips Inc, Multivision, and many more. In 2007, Observer AB and Bacon’s Information were rebranded as Cision and in the same year, their campaign management software was launched as CisionPoint.

Recent Days

After 2007, all the operations of Observer AB were carried out under the name Cision/Cision AB. In 2011, the company sold its Finish subsidiary, Oy Cision Finland AB to M-Brain Group. By this time every industry witnessed the growing popularity of digital marketing and how social platforms were used to grow. So, Cision acquired a social media analytics company called Visible Technologies in 2014. Later that year, Cision AB merged with another public relations company, Vocus and they agreed upon the deal that the joined entity will be known as Cision. After this merger, Company relocated its headquarters to Chicago.

In 2015, Company acquired a UK-based company called Gorkana that also offered monitoring and analysis services. Cision also acquired PRNewswire from UBM Plc in December 2015 for $841 million. In 2017, the company went public via a reverse merger but again in 2020, it became a private company when Platinum Equity acquired Cision for $2.7 billion. Latest, Compay acquired Brandwatch for $450 million in February 2021.

Abel Clark – CEO of Cision

Abel Clark joined Cision directly as the CEO of the company in 2020. He is a very experienced industrial person who served as the CEO and Chairman of TruSight before joining Cision. Abel also has past working experience with Thomson Reuters as the Global Managing Director. He has high experience in leading management teams, simplifying business, and providing strategic growth solutions. Abel has an engineering degree from the University of Southampton.

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

Ragy Thomas started coding in his spare time to build a famous software company.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Ragy Thomas, an Indian-born American entrepreneur founded Sprinklr, a software company in 2009. The company’s headquarters is based in New York City and has more than 2,400 employees. Earlier in 2021, Sprinklr got listed on the New York Stock Exchange and started trading as a public company. Sprinklr specializes in SaaS customer management experience (CME) platform and combines different applications for social media marketing and monitoring, content management, collaboration, etc. Many multinational conglomerates like Nike, Cisco, Microsoft have signed up over time for the services of Sprinklr.

About Sprinklr

Ragy founded Sprinklr from his spare bedroom in 2009 and officially launched the company in 2010. He launched the company after successfully landing his first customer but in no time many big companies signed up for Sprinklr’s platform. The idea behind Sprinklr’s platform for managing customer experience on the modern channel is something the companies will look up to during the 21st century. Thus, it became very popular in a little time. Over the years, Ragy has brought experienced executives onboard from companies like BMC, Salesforce, Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, etc. Sprinklr currently has offices in 25 countries and two other headquarters in London and Singapore respectively.

Early Days

Before Ragy founded Sprinklr, he had years of experience in the IT sector. When he moved to America, Ragy started working in IT consulting for AT&T and Bell Labs. But soon there was the dot-com bubble burst and he decided to spin out the company’s email marketing unit that he was working for. The new business (after spin-off) acquired Bigfoot Interactive and took its brand name which was later acquired by Alliance Data System in 2005. During this time he completed his MBA in a part-time program from New York University.

Eventually, Ragy witnessed the landscape of business changing as online marketing shifted to social media from emails. So, in his spare time, he started to code social media publishing tools and finally was able to build a dashboard for all social platforms. This marked his entrepreneurial journey and he named the company Sprinklr. During the first couple of years, Ragy self-funded the business and after he was able to land some big clients like Cisco and Dell, his brand gained popularity.

Success

In 2012, Sprinklr received its first funding from external sources, and eventually, the numbers kept rising. After a couple of years, Sprinklr raised $40 million in a funding round after which the company’s valuation became $500 million. It also acquired the Dachis Group to stretch the abilities of the Sprinklr platform. In 2014, Sprinklr acquired two more companies, namely, TBG Digital and a brand advocacy company called Branderati. Next year, the company raised another $46 million in Series E funding, and by this time the company valuation crossed $1 billion. It also launched a brand new product called Experience Cloud platform where companies can manage interaction for 23 different social media and channels. Sprinklr acquired two more companies, NewBrand and Booshaka.

In 2016, the company raised $105 million in a funding round leading its valuation to $1.8 billion. The company decided to launch new products for its Experience Cloud platform and thus expanded from social media management to customer experience management. In 2018, the company released another new product called Sprinklr Intuition (an AI-based solution) for the automatic collection and analysis of data from social media platforms. Next year, it released another AI-based product called Product Insights which can segregate various customer comments and reviews related to design, features, etc. In 2020, another funding led the company’s valuation increase to $2.7 billion.

Ragy Thomas – Founder and CEO of Sprinklr

Ragy Thomas was born and raised in India but his parents moved to Nigeria due to work purposes when he was very young. Later, he again shifted to India and attended Pondicherry Engineering College, and started working at TCS. Later, he moved to New Jersey and started working in the IT consulting sector. Currently, Ragy is the CEO of his company Sprinklr and is also present in the Board of Directors.

Annasha

ZoomInfo – The Largest Cloud Market Intelligence Platform.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Yashica Vashishtha

A business is all about marketing and sales. Better the marketing, the higher are the sales for a business. For the past many years, the marketing techniques had been the same, but for the last couple of years, we have become more dependent on online marketing and customer data for the growth of the businesses. Data, though, has always been an important part of marketing, today, the value of data has increased by 100 times. The user data, whether about their behavior, daily needs, or liking, is the basis of how the marketing strategies should be developed.
Considering the significance of the data in marketing, ZoomInfo took the initiative to make it the very basis of their business, too. The company is one of the biggest information and database companies providing subscription-based software as a service (SaaS) to its clients, helping them accelerate their sales and business growth.

About The Company

ZoomInfo is the provider of B2B data and information to companies which are helpful for the latter in marketing and sales of their products, leading to better business growth. The company provides a cloud-based platform including information about companies, business people, marketing, and recruiting professionals. This information is available to ZoomInfo customers through various subscription plans. Henry Schuck and Kirk Brown founded ZoomInfo in 2007 as DiscoverOrg. The company operated with the same name till 2019. In 2019 ZoomInfo acquired Zoom Information and renamed the DiscoverOrg as ZoomInfo.
With the merger of the two companies, they combined their platforms and developed a new flagship Go-to-Market (GTM) for its customers. ZoomInfo gathers and verifies data of various companies, such that to provide accurate information to its clients. It has curated an in-house research team of over 300 data analysts who use updated technologies, tools, and integrations to verify the information and provide the highest accuracy data to the customers.
ZoomInfo headquarters is based in Vancouver, Washington, United States, and over 2500 people are working for it. One of the founders, Henry Schuck is the current CEO at ZoomInfo. NeverBounce and Datanyze are the ZoomInfo subsidiaries. As of 2020, the company made revenues worth $476 million.

The Founding Of ZoomInfo

Henry Schuck and Kirk Brown founded ZoomInfo as DiscoverOrg in 2007. The co-founders were law students but eventually, ended up launching DiscoverOrg, a completely different company than their education, at the age of 23. Henry Schuck took up a part-time job as a marketing analyst to pay his tuition fees for college. This very job helped Schuck conceive the idea of DiscoverOrg, and he founded the company with his college mate Kirk Brown.
RainKing was another newly founded company that worked on the same concept as ZoomInfo, except, RainKing had the funding, whereas ZoomInfo was just a concept, and the founders possessed no experience. But in the next ten years, with immense hard work, ZoomInfo was able to acquire RainKing in 2017. As soon as the company started to grow, it received investments from companies like TA Associates, The Carlyle Group, and 22C Capital.
ZoomInfo’s other acquisitions include NeverBounce (2018), Komiko (2019), Clickagy (2020), EverString Technology (2020), and Insent (2021), etc. The company had its first IPO in June 2020, and it went public on Nasdaq Global Select Market trading with ticker symbol ZI. Today the company serves over 16000 customers globally. ZoomInfo has won multiple awards for excellence, like Leader by Forrester in its B2B Marketing Data Wave and was ranked Number One in customer service by G2 Crowd.

The CEO At ZoomInfo

Henry Schuck is a lawyer by education and has got a license for practicing as a lawyer from Washington State Bar Association and Nevada Supreme Court. He received his BS in Accounting and Hospitality Administration from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Juris Doctorate in Law from the Ohio State University. While Schuck was still in college, he worked as a data analyst at Political Data Inc. Later he joined MGM grand as Hotel Operations Administrator. Schuck also worked as the vice president of operations at iProfile. In 2007, he launched DiscoverOrg with Kirk Brown, becoming the CEO of the company.

Yashica Vashishtha

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About The Company

The Founding Of ZoomInfo

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