Software Company

Braze – The Trio Of Founders Came Up With The idea To establish Company At NYC Disrupt Hackathon.

Cloud technology is the most innovative and in-demand technology today. Hence the number of companies that require cloud services and the number of companies that develop cloud-based solutions has increased drastically in the past five years. Braze is another leading cloud-based software company that is not only popular in the American technology industry but also provides its service all over the world. The company is known for its customer engagement platform, and we can easily estimate the popularity of Braze based on how fast it has expanded to different corners of the world. Today, the company has established its offices in countries like San Francisco, London, Singapore, Chicago, and Tokyo.

About the Company

Braze is a mere a decade old company, which got its success through its customer engagement platform used by the business for multichannel marketing. The product is based on cloud technology, so provides the best user experience to the clients. It is a publically traded company and trades on NASDAQ as BRAZE. Mark Ghermezian, Bill Magnuson, and Jon Hyman founded Braze in 2011, and Bill Magnuson is the CEO of the company. The company headquarters is based in New York, US. The Customer Engagement Platform is the major product of the company and over 1000 people are working for it. Burger King, Babylon Health, HBO Max, Pure Gym, and Grubhub are some of Braze’s permanent clients.

The Founding of Braze

Jon Hyman and Mark Ghermezian participated in and won the NYC Disrupt Hackathon for Gilt-ii in 2011. The two met the third co-founder, Mark Ghermezian, of Braze at the same event, and the trio decided to establish a Company. The three founded Braze as Appboy in 2011, raising $3 million in investments from different investors. The very next year, the company released an iOS SDK, and in 2013, it raised $7.6 million in a Series A round of funding along with releasing an Android SDK.

In 2015, the company held a Series B round of funding and raised $15 million. The same year, Appboy also introduced an API. With a Series C round of funding in 2016, the company made bagged investments worth $20 million and opened a new office in London. The company ran with the same name for six years, and in 2017, it was rebranded as Braze Inc. after it led a series D funding raising $50 million.

In 2018, Braze launched Braze Alloys for email, and the next year it introduced Google AMP for email. With Series E funding, Company raised $80 million in 2018 and is valued at f $850 million. Forbes listed the company under the Cloud 100 list of 2019. Also, Inc. named Braze one of the Best Places to Work in the same year. By 2020, Company was delivering over 100 billion messages each month. The company was named one of the Best Places to Work for the second time in 2020.

In 2021, Braze recorded an annual revenue worth $200 million for FY21. The same year, the company launched Canvas, Skyscanner, and Apptopia. The company also partnered with Snowflake and Shopify in 2021. Braze went public on NASDAQ in October 2021 and started trading as BRZE. With the IPO, the company raised $520 million and was valued at $5.9 billion.

The CEO at Braze

Bill Magnuson is one of the co-founders and the CEO of Braze Inc. He went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he completed a B.S. in Computer Science and a Master’s in EECS. After completing his higher education, Bill started his internship at Google as a software engineer. In 2010, he started working as a software engineer at Bridgewater Associates. The next year, he, along with Jon Hyman and Mark Ghermezian, co-founded Braze as Appboy Inc. and became the CTO of the company. In January 2017, Bill was appointed as the CEO of Braze.

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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DOMO – Wise Usage And Management Of Data On Your Fingertips.

Today the world is all about data and managing the data. Taking about days earlier than twenty years, humans managed all the business data, and it was quite a hectic job. Slowly, with the more installation of the computers and increased availability of the internet, this job was made easy. And today, we have even more resources for this data management. Thanks to the cloud technology and various platforms, which are helpful in easy access and managing of data not only for the common people but also for the big business organizations as well as governments. American company Domo is also one of those leading companies which have been working on developing platforms for businesses so that they can have easy access to their data and combine and use it in real-time for their everyday business activities.

About Domo

Domo is only a decade old company, founded in October 2010. The founder of the company is Josh James, and the company headquarters have been established in American Fork, Utah, US. Being a cloud technology company, Domo offers its services worldwide and has a long list of customers, including Unilever, eBay, Cisco, NBA, Danaher, Emerson, Master Card, etc. Domo is a publically traded company and trades on NASDAQ as DOMO. The company provides products for business intelligence tools and data visualization. Domo Business Cloud is its flagship product, a low-code data app platform for businesses that allows them to combine their data and use it as they require. Talking about the revenues, as per the 2021 records, the company made $210.2 Million for the same financial year. The company is home to more than 800 employees.

The Founding

Domo has a similar founding story to many of the other technology companies. Josh James, the founder of Domo, is a veteran and had already founded three companies before Domo. One of those companies was even acquired by Adobe in 2006, and James continued to work in his company under Adobe’s name. While working at Adobe, he continued to conceptulising and raising money for new business, and in 2010 left Adobe.

James established Shacho Inc. in October 2010. Just in two months, the newly founded company acquired Lindon-based Corda Technologies, and Shacho was renamed Domo in December 2010.

As soon as Domo was established, it started to work on data connectivity and analytics for business. The company built a platform, which offered data integration, BI & Analytics as well as App Framework in one place, attracting multiple clients from almost every industry. The platform allows the users to manage all their data placed on different websites and apps. There is a dashboard available on the platform such that you can access Amazon Redshift, Oracle, Salesforce, Google Analytics, etc., from that single dashboard.

Trusting the capabilities of Josh James, investors like Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Ron Conway came forward for the initial investments in Domo. In 2011, the company received $20 million from Institutional Venture Partners. The company held a Series B round of investment and raised $60 million. The next year as Series C funding was hosted, and the company raised $125 million, followed by raising another $200 million in Series D financing with a $2 billion valuation in 2015. In June 2018, Domo went public on NASDAQ Global Exchange.

The CEO at Domo

John Mellor is the CEO and Director at Domo. He is a SaaS veteran and has over 25 years of experience working in the technology industry.

Mellor is a mechanical engineering graduate and has an MBA in marketing and finance from Brigham Young University. He has co-founded ViewPoint and led the company as the VP of marketing and business development. Mellor has also worked at companies like RichFX and was working at Omniture as the EVP of strategy and business development when Adobe acquired the company. With the acquisition, Mellor also joined Adobe and worked in various leading positions at the company. In 2019, He left Adobe and joined Domo to become the Chief Strategy Officer and was promoted to be the Chief Executive Officer and the Director at Domo in 2022.

Yashica Vashishtha

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ForgeRock – Accessing the Internet With Security.

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

The past two decades have brought a lot of changes in almost every industry. From personal computers to having multiple personal virtual accounts on various sites and for work, we are all about usernames and passwords today. Having a different account for each client helps the companies manage them better, hence, from having a work identity to a shopping identity, we have to have those IDs for almost everything. But when we are logging in to various such sites, whether for shopping or work only, we have constant doubt of identity theft. Therefore, companies like ForgeRock are there.

ForgeRock is an American company building an enterprise-grade platform for managing, securing, and governing different types of organisations. The ForgeRock platform from the company helps the organisations to work faster and in a safer environment. With the changing technologies, the company is using cloud architecture to make every site, app or any other platform using ForgeRock accessible from anywhere securely.

About ForgeRock

ForgeRock is an identity and access management software company founded in February 2010. A group of people who worked at Sun Microsystem had founded the company in Norway, and the headquarters of the company resides in San Francisco, California, United States. It is a publically traded company and trades as FORG on NYSE. Its flagship product is identity management software named after the company’s name, i.e., ForgeRock. The company produces identity solutions for big organizations and offers its service in over 50 countries. As per the 2021 records, over 700 people are employed at ForgeRock, whereas it has gained more than 1300 permanent clients globally. The company made annual revenues worth $100 million for FY2019.

The Back Story

A group of people, who were employed at Sun Microsystems founded ForgeRock in 2010, in Norway. ForgeRock was a concept upon which Sun was already working, but after Oracle acquired the company, it discontinued the project, and the founders of the Company started to work on the same project and eventually founded the company. In the very beginning, only the employees of a company using computers for their work needed identity protection, but the founders of ForgeRock had a larger vision. They knew that the concept of identity management has a bigger scope in general. This vision helped the company build a platform that is sufficient to manage identities across and for the workforce, consumers, and things.

The company provides two different types of products, i.e., a platform for organisations and SDKs for building apps. The company also offers training and certification programs for developing and deploying identity solutions under its ForgeRock University.

For the establishment of the company, the founders bagged investments worth $250 million from investors like Accel Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Riverwood Capital, etc., in venture capital. Names like BMW, Toyota, BBC, Philips, Geico, Richmond, etc., are a few of the permanent clients of ForgeRock, and the company serves industries including financial services, healthcare, government, retail, manufacturing, telecommunication, media, auto, smart mobility, etc.

ForgeRock is a publically traded company and went public on NYSE in September 2021. The ForgeRock platform offers services like Access Management, Identity Gateway, Directory Services as well as Identity Management, etc. The company has also won some recognition, including the SC2020 Awards, 2020 Fortress Cyber Security Award, Silver 2020 Stevie Award, etc.

The CEO at ForgeRock

Fran brings is the current CEO at ForgeRock. He has over twenty years of experience as a management leader in various leading name companies, including VeriSign and Symantec. Rosch holds B.S. in industrial engineering from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA.

Yashica Vashishtha

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

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

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

History

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

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

Success

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

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

About the Founder

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

Annasha

Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more

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

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

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

Founding Story

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

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

Awards & Accolades

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

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

Rajiv Ramaswami – CEO of Nutanix

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

Annasha

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

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

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

About Basware

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

History

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

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

Acquisitions

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

Klaus Andersen – CEO of Basware

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

Annasha

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