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Nuix

Nuix – An Australian Company Founded With The Goal To Extract knowledge From Unstructured Data.

Nuix is a publicly-traded company that was founded in 2000. The company’s main goal is to collect vast quantities of unstructured data to extract useful information from it. Every organization, big or small, needs to study data to understand every aspect of the business from the consumer market to market regulations. So, the solutions of this company are very useful especially to big corporations that have millions of customers across the world meaning more unstructured data. Some of the biggest clients of Nuix are Airbus, Amazon, American Express, Barclays, AIG, etc. Nuix currently serves more than 2,000 customers in 79 countries.

About Nuix

Nuix is a software development company with its headquarters based in Sydney, Australia. The company develops innovative software to harness the power of unstructured data to its full potential. Nuix’s technology is used for various purposes in the digital world including data privacy, data governance, financial crimes, digital forensics, regulatory compliance, etc. Nuix has been the recipient of several prestigious awards because of its innovative technology. The company currently has around 400 employees and the numbers didn’t change much since 2006. Apart from Australia, the company has headquarters in Asia, the Middle East, North America, and Europe.

Truth be told, though organizations keep records of every employee, every customer in an organized way, the amount of unstructured data exceeds the structured data. The data received from social media, online communications, etc are messy but they are important. And, Nuix’s technology helps in visualizing and analyzing this chaotic data into something more meaningful that businesses could use to increase their growth. The six primary products of the company are Nuix Adaptive Security, Nuix Automation, Nuix Discover, Nuix Investigate, Nuix Enterprise Collection Center, and Nuix Workstation.

Nuix
Image source: marcustoday.com

David Sitsky – Brain Behind the Technology

David Sitsky is the main brain behind founding Nuix. He had immense knowledge in complex operating systems and large-scale parallel computing. He dedicated his career to developing algorithms that could search through search and analyze through the unstructured and messy data from emails and any social platforms. He understood that his idea has good potential when one of the largest employers in Canberra used his algorithm to find some inappropriate image that was attached to an email. After the attempt was successful, it became the first evidence that Sistky’s algorithm is very powerful and it could find things with forensic accuracy. Even today people of the company believe that Sitsky was able to build software like this because he was able to imagine the amount of unstructured data that will generate in the future.

History of Nuix

Nuix has grown beautifully over the last twenty years. From a one-man operation, today fifty software developers and ninety software engineers work in America in sync with employers in Sydney. America is a huge market for Nuix’s technology especially for the tech giants that are dominating the digital market across the world. For the unique and impactful work done by the company, Nuix was offered a contract by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2010.

In 2012, the company bagged the Australian Export Awards for the Information and Communication Technology category and also won the Premier’s NSW Exporter of the Year Award in 2015. Nuix was also made an Industry Partner of the International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Threats. It was only in 2020 that Company decided to go public and filed its IPO. It is currently listed on the Australian Securities Exchange and the largest shareholder of the company is Macquarie Group.

Jonathan Rubinsztein – CEO of Nuix

Jonathan Rubinsztein is the new CEO of Nuix who was appointed in December 2021. Before that, he was the CEO and Managing Director of Informedia Ltd. He is also an entrepreneur who founded DXC Red Rock and served as its CEO for more than sixteen years. Rubinsztein is also the founder of RockSolid SQL, a company that developed a database management product. After his post-graduation, his career started with Accenture where he joined as a consultant.

TomTom

TomTom – Leaders In The Navigation As Well As The Consumer Electronics Industry.

Online map and navigation systems are the one revolutionary product that is being used by almost every third person on earth. They use them to locate a restaurant, to be safe when in a different place by sharing their location, or just to reach a certain destination. Though the paper maps have been there for a while, the technology-backed online maps are the most useful in today’s time. The navigation technology has not only helped big organizations like the vehicle manufacturers, Apple or Google (for their navigation software for earnings) but has empowered the common people, too. Today, the common people can independently roam around using those maps in a place, where they have never been before. Apart from the famous Google Maps, these navigation technologies are available with Apple, Bing, Here, Jawg and MapBox, etc. Most of the automobile companies are also including navigation systems into their vehicles, one big example includes the electric car manufacturer Tesla. Having navigation at one’s fingertips is the work of companies like TomTom. TomTom is a multinational Dutch company that is one of the leaders in the navigation as well as the consumer electronics industry. Apple’s maps app is also empowered by TomTom’s navigation data.

About the Company

TomTom is a thirty years old company, founded in 1991 and has its headquarters based in Amsterdam. The company started as a software developer (meter reading and bar-code reading) for corporate handheld devices (palmtop, mobile phones). But by end of the 90s, it started to focus on satellite navigation software development. Today, the company is counted among the leading navigation software developers. The company is a publically traded company and trades on Amsterdam Stock Exchange. In the past thirty years, the company has grown to have over 4500 employees. As per the 2019 records, TomTom made annual revenues worth 701 million, and its estimated operating income was € 56 million.

TomTom
Image source: webassets.tomtom.com

The Back Story

Corinne Vigreux, Peter-Frans Pauwels and Pieter Geelen founder TomTom as Palmtop Software in 1991 in Amsterdam. As the name suggests, the company started to develop software for corporate handheld devices, such as the meter reading and bar-code reading software. The company mainly focused on developing the Psion devices software. In fact, TomTom had partnered with Psion and developed EPOC32. Along with that, the company also released its first map software a route planning application in 1996 that worked on mobile devices. By the end of the 90s, TomTom had developed mapping software like EnRoute, Citymaps, and Routeplanner, etc.

In 2001, with a name change from Palmtop Software to TomTom, the company also released its first car satellite navigation software named TomTom Navigator. Later, in 2004, the company added a new feature, a subscription-based traffic update service to TomTom Navigator. In the same year, the company also released TomTom Go, a personal navigation device for common people.

TomTom went public on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange in 2005 and valued at approximately €50 million. The next year, the company introduced water-proof navigation devices for motorcycle users and also, added the text-to-speech feature for road names to its existing navigation software. In 2007, TomTom partnered with Vodafone to develop a real-time traffic data service for its consumers. The very feature was also released for the Netherlands, and in further years it reached the other countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Switzerland. TomTom released its software for iPhone in 2009, and for Android, the software came in 2015.

2013, the company released a GPS sports watch named TomTomRunner, the next year, it came with the Runner Cardio GPS, and in 2015, it brought a new action camera named Bandit. By 2018, TomTom had bagged a contract from Apple to be its main GPS data supplier for Apple’s map app. TomTom reported in 2019 that it had earned over 800 million users for its various software and devices. Apart from Apple using TomTom maps data, the company’s main clients from the auto industry include Volvo, Nissan, Fiat Chrysler, Porche, Lamborghini, Bentley, etc.
In the past thirty years, TomTom has also made some strategic acquisitions that have been an additional benefit for its growth. Companies acquired by TomTom include Datafactory AG (2005), Applied Generics (2006), Tele Atlas (2008), etc.

The CEO at TomTom

Harold Goddijn is one of the founders and the CEO of TomTom. He is a native of the Netherlands and was born on 23 April 1960 in Oegstgeest, Netherlands. Goddijn is an Economics graduate from the University of Amsterdam and started his career at a venture capital firm. Later in 1989, he founded Psion Netherlands BV, becoming the managing director of Psion Computers. Goddijn left the company to full-time join Palmtop Software in 1999. With the name change of Palmtop to TomTom, Goddijn became the CEO of the company in 2001.

Sapiens International Corporation

Sapiens International Corporation, the company making software for the insurance industry since 1982.

The rising popularity of the internet and the emergence of the cloud has made it necessary for every sort of industry to have dedicated software that would ease out the daily work for them. Industries from healthcare, aviation to hospitality to education, etc., each are using information technology in one or the other way. Some are merging AI to their daily operations, whereas, others are paying for special software products for performing special tasks in the company. This is the same case with the insurance industry too. The industry is also is operating through some major software and online platforms made by some leading software companies like Sapiens International Corporation.

About the Company

Sapiens International Corporation is a forty years old company. It is a computer software company, with its headquarters based in Holon, Israel. Insurers and brokers are the company’s major clients, who cover insurance on property, Casualty, pension as well as worker compensation.
Tsvi Misinai, Tuvi Orbach, and Shai Sole founded Sapiens in 1982, and since then, the company has gone through a lot of positive changes adding to its growth. With over 4000 people working for the company, it has operating income worth US$ 45.03 million (as per 2020 records) and had generated revenues worth US$ 382 million in FY20. Sapiens International Corporation has its clients based in all corners of the world, and it operates through its subsidiaries, i.e., Sapiens America, Sapiens North America, Sapiens Technologies, Sapiens (UK) Limited, Sapiens Japan Co, and Sapiens Israel Software, etc. The company trades as a public company on Nasdaq as SPNS and on Tel Aviv Stock Exchange as SPNS.

Sapiens International Corporation
Image source: www.celent.com

The Founding of Sapiens International

Sapiens International Corporation was founded by three members of a team working on a project to build a novel object-oriented application generator in partnership with Advanced Automated Applications (AAA). These founders included Tsvi Misinai, Tuvi Orbach, and Shai Sole, Tuvi Orbach being the founder of AAA. AAA also got merged into the newly built company during its founding. Though the company was founded in 1982, the founders adopted the name Sapiens in 1984.
In the next ten years, Sapiens had grown to 900 workers and 33 different branches established all over the globe. The company also started to trade publically on NASDAQ in 1992. With the rising popularity of the internet, Sapiens also started to merge technology with its services. It developed the business rules technology (eMerge) in the late 90s. By this time, Sapiens’ revenues had reached $91 million.
The year 2001 was the year of new beginnings for Sapiens, as it started to develop new software products for the insurance industry. The company also made some major acquisitions to have speedy growth. These acquisitions included Harcase (2010), IBEXI Solutions (2015), Insseco (2015), Maximum Processing (2016), StoneRiver, Inc. (2017), Calculo (2019), sum.cumo GmbH (2019), Tia Technologies (2020), etc.
Life Insurance, P&C, Decision Management, Workers’ Compensation, Financial & Compliance, Reinsurance, Medical Professional Liability, Digital Insurance Modules, etc., are the major software products from Sapiens.

The Founders

Tsvi Misinai is one of the three founders and the main brains behind Sapiens International Corporation. He is a well-known Israeli computer scientist and entrepreneur. Misinai was born on 15 April 1946 in Jerusalem, the British Mandate of Palestine. He is a Physics graduate and the first Israeli Rothschild Award for industrial development in the field of software recipient (1992).
During the 70s, he was working for Weizmann Institute of Science, a public research university in Rehovot. Misinai was the project head for the novel object-oriented application generator development program at the institution. He left the institute in the late 80s to founding Sapiens in 1982. The founders included one of the team members at the institute, Shai Sole, and the AAA owner, Tuvi Orbach. With the founding of Sapiens, he became the President of the newly founded company and remained so till 1994.

QAD Inc.

QAD Inc. – Company acquired by Thoma Bravo in an All-Cash $2 Billion Transaction.

QAD Inc is an American software company with headquarters based in Santa Barbara, California. It offers enterprise resource planning software and other related software to several manufacturing companies across the world. It is a privately held company as in November 2021, Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm completed the acquisition of QAD Inc. It was an all-cash transaction with an equity value of $2 billion. The founder of the company is Pamela Lopker, who is currently serving as the President and Chairman of the Board at QAD Inc.

About QAD Inc

QAD is a leading company in the manufacturing sector as it developed the best full-featured manufacturing ERP software and supply chain solutions. When the company was founded in 1979, there were only a few local customers who supported the company and from there it currently has customers across 100 countries. This is why QAD strongly believes in a very loyal and strong community. QAD has nearly 2,000 employees and it is currently focusing on enabling adaptive manufacturing enterprises and eradicating the disruption problems caused by technology and the constant shift in the preferences of customers.

QAD Inc.
Image source: wistia.com

History of the Company

Pamela Lopker started the company in 1979 and initially targeted the manufacturing companies in Southern California. The company started locally by offering them proprietary software applications and then eventually expanded to international markets. In 1984, QAD Inc introduced a new product that was built using 4GL (Fourth Generation Language) and RDBMS of Progress Software. QAD followed the APICS principles to build its first software product, MFG/PRO for the manufacturers. This also became one of the first products to support closed-loop Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II). In 1997, QAD Inc decided to go public and filed its first IPO. It began trading on 6th August 1997.

In 2003, the company launched its first SaaS product and it was a huge success. The product was launched as Supply Visualization and later became QAD Supplier Portal. This platform allowed the QAD customers and the authorized suppliers to share necessary information about orders, shipments, inventory, etc. In 2006, QAD launched a user interface called .NET UI. In 2007, the company changed the name of its core product suite MFG/PRO to QAD Enterprise Applications. After a few years, the company launched QAD Cloud ERP.

Currently, QAD focuses on selling its software products in six different manufacturing industries. They are automotive, high tech, food and beverage, consumer products, industrial equipment, and life sciences. QAD Adaptive ERP is the flagship product of the company which is a SaaS software marketed using cloud computing.

Acquisitions

QAD Inc has acquired several companies during the 2000s and a few of them recently. In 2006, it acquired three companies in a row. In September 2006, QAD acquired a company called Precision Software. It offered transportation and supply chain management software. The company was renamed QAD Precision in 2019. In November 2006, it acquired FBO Systems, an enterprise asset management company followed by a UK-based marketing company, Bisgen Ltd. Some of the other companies on the list are FullTilt Solutions’ product suite, DynaSys (a European company), CEBOS (management software and services), Allocation Network GmbH (German-based supplier management), etc.

About Thoma Bravo

Thoma Bravo is an American private equity firm whose history dates back to 1980 when Golder Thoma & Co was established. The current brand, Thoma Bravo was established in 2008 after they dropped the name Cressey from Thoma Cressey Bravo. Thoma Bravo has three headquarters in Illinois, California, and Florida.

Pamela Lopker – Founder of QAD Inc

Pamela Lopker is famous as the founder and President of QAD Inc. She went to the University of California, Santa Barbara, and right after graduating started writing codes. She started working on a project for radar defense systems for a naval defense contractor in California. She also helped his husband, Karl Lopker with his sandal company, Deckers Outdoor. It was then she realized there wasn’t any perfect software to track from sales to inventory and other requirements for Deckers Outdoor and decided to start her own software company for manufacturing sectors.

Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic, Helping companies to get real-time insight into data.

Data is the most important asset today, and it has become essential for every company to safeguard their company as well as client data from any external threat. The maintenance process for data has generated new long queues for the company employees, and it has become quite difficult to properly maintain and analyze the data at the same time. For that, companies like Sumo Logic work and develop software that helps other companies to upkeep the data and analyze it in the most efficient way. The company is about ten years old has been doing great in the industry such that it has been able to bag contacts from big-name companies, like Google and Amazon.

About Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic is a software development company that mainly works to build log management and analytics software for companies, helping them to get real-time insight into data. Kumar Saurabh and Christian Beedgen founded Soft Logic in 2010. The company headquarters is based in Redwood City, California, USA. The company is into developing software based on IT operations, security analytics, cloud SIEM, data analytics, etc. It is a publically held company that trades on Nasdaq with ticker SUMO. As per the 2020 records, it made annual revenues worth $155 Million, and over 800 people are employed at Soft Logic.

Sumo Logic
Image source: www.digitalstacks.net

The Back Story

Kumar Saurabh and Christian Beedgen, two of the developers of ArcSight, a cyber security software, founded Sumo Logic in April 2010. The company received its initial funding from names like Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital, Sapphire Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures, etc. The company built its flagship product, a cloud-based elastic petabyte-scale platform that helps companies to collect, manage and analyze their enterprise log data in the most efficient way, saving on time and money. Being a cloud-based product, it provides access to data ion fingertips. In 2012, the company released another software, the Sumo Logic Free, deployed on AWS and Sumo Logic for VMware.
In a Series B round of funding held in January 2012, Sumo Logic raised $15 million, where it also unveiled a new cloud-based log management platform. In June 2015, the company had another, Series E round of funding, where it raised a sum of $160.5 million in venture capital. The next product of the company, a data analytic platform came in 2016, and in 2017, it introduced machine data analytics service. Then in 2018, the company partnered with Google Cloud Platform and also integrated its software with TensorFlow. The same year, it introduced cloud SIEM and added it to its machine data analytics platform. In May 2019, the company had its first IPO, and it went public on Nasdaq.
Sumo Logic has won some awards and recognitions as well. It was named among the ten Most Innovative Companies by RSA in 2012 and won the Audience Choice Awards for Performance Monitoring in the same year. Gartner named the company ‘Cool Vendor’ in 2014, and in 2019, Fortune added the company to its list of 50 Best Workplaces in Technology. Forbes named Sumo Logic one of the 100 Best Enterprise Security Products in the same year.

The CEO at Sumo Logic

Ramin Sayar is the residing CEO at Sumo Logic. He has got a graduate degree in B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara as well as an MBA from San Jose State University. For the past twenty-plus years, Sayar has worked at some prominent positions at various big-name companies. He has held the position of Product Line Marketing Manager at iPlanet and Netscape. He was the Director of Products and Solutions at TIBCO and the Senior Director of Products at Mercury Software. Sayar has also been the Vice President of Products and Strategy at HP Software. He joined VMware for five years leading the Cloud Management Business Unit of the company. After VMware, he joined Sumo Cloud in December 2014 and became the CEO of the company.

Momentive

Momentive, The company that was earlier known for its popular product SurveyMonkey.

Though the word of mouth has been the most effective way of marketing, people before the internet did not have any reliable source to actually get through those experiences based reviews on things, rather going through TV ads or Newspapers. After the internet came into being and computers reached every household, people came with the idea to build websites and software that can help people get through authentic reviews on things and such that those people could make up their mind on what they should buy or leave. Momentive Inc. is a company that works on a similar idea and develops cloud-based experience management software for companies so that these companies can offer their clients genuine reviews on things like market insight, brand insight, company atmosphere for aspirants, and customer experience, etc.

About Momentiv Inc.

Momentive is a 22 years old software development company founded in 1999 by Ryan Finley and Chris Finley. It is a publically traded company that develops software for experience management. The company trades on Nasdaq as MNTV, whereas the headquarters of the company is based in San Mateo, CA, United States. The company has its regional offices set up in locations like San Mateo, Portland, Seattle, Dublin, Ottawa, London, Sydney, etc, and serves its customers worldwide. Momentive provides cloud-based experience management and survey software services, Momentive, GetFeedback, and SurveyMonkey being the most popular products by the company. As of 2020, 1,220 people are employed at various Momentive offices, and it made annual revenues worth US$233.5 million in the same year, with 25,000,000 registered to its services.

Momentive
Image source: prnewswire.com

Founding Story of Momentive

Ryan Finley and Chris Finley founded Momentive Inc. as SurveyMonkey in 1999. The company was one of its kind and launched its first product, a consumer-oriented survey platform. Due to the unique idea of the company, it became successful from day one. The service it provided was free, and many of its services remain free till today.
In the year 2009, Dave Goldberg joined SurveyMonkey as the CEO, who helped the company grow really fast. The same year, Spectrum Equity and Bain Capital took over some of the majority shares in SurveyMonkey. In 2013, the company raised $800 million in debt, and the company became a unicorn with a valuation worth $1.35 billion. The next year, MonekySurvey received $250 million from companies like Google Capital and Morgan Stanley, etc.
In August 2014, SurveyMonkey acquired Fluidware, a competitor survey company based in Canada. This purchase was followed by the acquisitions of TechValidate in 2015, Usabilla, and GetFeedback in 2019. The company also acquired some survey tools, including Precision Polling, Wufoo, and Zoomerang, etc., for the purpose of adding some more features to its existing platforms and other products to its product line.
In June 2021, SurveyMonkey changed its name to Momentive. The news of the acquisition of Momentive by Zendesk Inc. also came in October month of the same year. Though the merger is still to happen, the amount is already decided, and that is nearly $4 billion.

The CEO at Momentive

SurveyMonkey, aka Momentive, had seen the most growth in the leadership of Dave Goldberg as the CEO. But after his death in 2015, Zander Lurie was named the CEO of the company. Lurie is a native American who is also known as one of the leading business executives as well as a board member of GoPro. He has a graduate degree from the University of Washington and an MBA from Emory University. Lurie has worked at companies like GoPro as the Senior Vice President and CBS Interactive as the CFO. He also co-founded CoachArt in 2001. In 2015, he became the chairman of the board of SurveyMonkey 2015, and in 2016, he was named the CEO of the company.