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Altium

Altium, 35 years old PC-based electronics design software development company.

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Integrated Circuits are the biggest discovery in the field of IT and electronics. This little device has helped the IT industry to grow rapidly and computers reach every home as PCs. These circuits are small in size, but there is a lot of work done over it. These are built on printed circuit boards with thousands of lines of code written on them. So building an IC is a huge task, which includes multiple phases. Many software companies write codes for ICs and without these companies, it will be really difficult to make a single IC chip. Altium is one of those software companies that build software for companies that make printed circuit boards. The company is one of the leading software development companies, serving companies based in different parts of the world, including the US, Australia, China, Japan, etc.

About Altium

Altium is a more than 35 years old PC-based electronics design software development company. Nick Martin founded Altium in 1985, and today, the company is known as one of the leading EDA/FPGA software development companies. It is an Australian company with its regional headquarters based in countries like the United States, Australia, China, Japan, and some countries of Europe. The company develops software products for industries that build EDA, Printed circuit boards, FPGA, Embedded Systems, Electronics Design, etc., including telecommunication, automation, aerospace, and defense, etc. Altium Designer is the most popular product by Altium. Apart from that, the company is known for its products like Altium Concord Pro, Altium NEXUS, Vault, CircuitStudio, CircuitMaker, TASKING, Octopart, Ciiva, Upverter, etc.

Altium
Image source: www.altium.com

Founding Altium

Nicholas Martin founded Altium as Protel Systems Pty Ltd in 1985, while he was already working at the University of Tasmania as an electronics designer. The idea of his company came to him when he was working at the company and thought of making more affordable electronic products for people. He merged the electronics design into PC platforms and launched the first DOS-based printed circuit board layout and design tool in 1985. The next year, Protel Systems partnered with HST Technology Pty Ltd. and started its international journey, too. The same year, the company partnered with ACCEL Technologies, Inc. to provide customer support to clients based in the US, Canada, and Mexico. The company brought new software in the following years, including Protel Schematic for DOS, Autotrax, and Easytrax, etc.

At the beginning of the next decade, Compay started to develop FPGA, PCB, and embedded software under its single data model project. In 1991, the company came with the first Windows-based PCB design system for Windows, named Advanced Schematic/PCB 1.0. In 1999, Altium went public on the Australian Securities Exchange. The company changed its name from Protel Systems to Compay in 2001 and made some important acquisitions like Tasking (2001), Hoschar AG (2002), Morfik Technology Pty Ltd. (2010), Octopart (2015), Ciiva (2015), Perception Software (2016), Upverter (2017), etc.
In the past few years, the company has expanded to Asia, Europe, Canada, and the US. As of 2019, the company made annual revenue worth US$171.8 million. The company is currently serving industries including automotive, aerospace, defence, and telecommunications, etc.

The CEO at Altium

Aram Mirkazemi is the CEO of Altium. He is a native of Iran and had come to Australia as a Refugee in the 80s. Though he wasn’t good at English at that time, it was Maths in which he excelled and got admission to the University of Tasmania. In the later years, Mirkazemi found his interest in computers and artificial intelligence as well. While he was still studying at the university, he received an offer from Nick Martin to join Altium (then Protel). For the past 30 plus years, he has served Altium in various positions, including the company’s CTO, senior executive VP of engineering, etc. In 2014, Mirkazemi became the CEO of Altium. He also founded Morfik, a software company that Altium acquired in 2010.

blackbaud

Anthony Bakker, From banker to establish a software company that works for social good organizations.

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There are an infinite number of software development companies all over the world, but how many are there that are working dedicatedly for social good organizations. Blackbaud is one such company that develops software only to serve the social good communities, like nonprofits, healthcare organizations, fundraisers, etc. The company promotes the idea of strengthening the social economy, and for that, it develops software that would be useful for communities that work for social welfare.

Blackbaud has been there for almost 40 years and has gone through a great growth transition. It started from building a small billing system for a school, and today it is producing similar but advanced cloud-based software. The company products include software for analytics, financial management, fundraising and relationship management, grant and award management, marketing and engagement, organizational and program management, payment services, and social responsibility, etc. Blackbaud also promotes philanthropy by encouraging its employees to join and volunteer in community services. It specifically offers paid vacations to its employees, so that they can volunteer with full heart in such services.

About Blackbaud

Blackbaud is a cloud computing provider and software publishing company founded in 1983, in New York. The company headquarters is based in South Carolina, United States, whereas it serves in about 60 countries, including England, Australia, and Canada, etc. Blackbaud is mainly known for its flagship software named Raiser’s Edge. It is a fundraising SQL database software used by many companies globally. Apart from that, the company builds software like Customer Relationship Management software, Marketing Campaign software, Fundraising as well as Finance and Accounting software, helping communities working for social good. Anthony Bakker is the founder of Blackbaud and Michael Gianoni is the current CEO of the company.

blackbaud
Image source: www.bleepstatic.com

Founding Blackbaud

Anthony Bakker, the founder of Blackbaud, before founding the company worked as a banker. He first developed a billing system for a school, based in Manhattan, New York, in 1981. By 1982, the software became quite popular among a few other clients. This led Bakker to leave his job and start Blackbaud Microsystems in 1983. As a company, Blackbaud launched a student billing system as its first product. The famous Raiser’s Edge is the advanced version of the same student billing system by Blackbaud.

In the year 1989, Blackbaud shifted its headquarters from New York to South Carolina. The company then released its software for Windows 95 in 1995, raising the number of clients for it. The company also made some important acquisitions during the same time, including ACOMS, Master Systems Inc. as well as Master Software.

Blackbaud had its first IPO in 2004. It trades on Nasdaq with the symbol BLKB. Some more acquisitions took place in the further years, Campagne Associates (2006), eTapestry (2007), Target Analysis Group (2007), Target Software (2007), and Kintera (2008) being the most important ones among them. In the next decade, Blackbaud acquired names like Convio (2012), MicroEdge (2014), JustGiving (2017), Reeher (2018), YourCause (2019), etc. Blackbaud has been Forbes Most Innovative Growth Company multiple times.

The CEO at Blackbaud

Michael Gianoni is the current President and the CEO at Blackbaud. He grew an interest in engineering when he was in high school and attended a one-day engineering class. After graduating from high school, he opted for Electrical Engineering from Waterbury State Technical College in 1979. He then joined Charter Oak College to study business and received a master’s degree in Business Administration from the University of New Haven in 1992. He has also been awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Business Administration from the University of Haven in 2014.

Gianoni has worked in some big-name companies in prominent positions. He was the Senior Vice President of DST. He also served Fiserv for seven years as the President and the Group President. Gianoni joined Teradata as the Chair of the Board of Directors in 2015 and still continues to serve in the same position. In January 2014, Gianoni joined Blackbaud as the CEO.

Sprinklr

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

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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.

Sprinklr
Image source: www.battery.com

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.

Pluralsight

Pluralsight, Story of company that started from classroom training to a famous online platform.

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Pluralsight is an online platform that offers video courses and certification to gain knowledge that will help one stay updated in the 21st century. From various courses on software development to gaining creative knowledge, Pluralsight has made everything available. Aaron Skonnard, Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, and Bill Williams founded Pluralsight in 2004 as a classroom training company. But, to keep up with the time it evolved eventually to an online platform similar to Coursera and Udemy. The company’s headquarters is based in Utah, US and it is owned by Vista Equity Partners.

About Pluralsight

Back when the company was founded, Pluralsight used to send instructors to a business or training event. But today, with the help of an online learning platform, it is making the training courses available for everyone. Pluralsight uses a subscription-based model and focuses mainly on training tech-based professionals like software and security developers, IT professionals, product managers, etc.

Pluralsight has split its training approach into two paths, skills and flow. In the skill path, the platform lets the users learn and adapt new skills, upgrade skills according to needs, etc. In the flow path, a person can compare between old and new codes, fix bugs, use data to measure each team member’s contribution, etc. The minimum cost of the Pluralsight platform starts from $29 per month.

Pluralsight
Image source:

Brief history

The company started as a classroom training service in 2004 but after three years shifted its focus to online video training. Pluralsight started making huge profits in 2011 and it is also in the top 20 list of Utah companies. Inc 5000 also named it as one of the fastest-growing private companies and one of the top education companies. In 2012, the company went into a partnership with Microsoft such that the courses of the company were available for the MSDN subscribers. Pluralsight also launched a free programming coding boot camp that focused on offering coding classes to kids who are 10 and above. The company also provided a free one-year subscription to its training library for the Utah K-12 teachers.

In 2017, Pluralsight ranked #20 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list and also made it into the list of Great Place To Work’s 2017 Best Workplaces (for small and medium-sized companies). Next year, Pluralsight filed for its IPO and began trading publicly but in December 2020 it was acquired by a private equity firm called Vista Equity Partners. The deal was closed by $3.5 billion. In the past decade, Pluralsight has successfully landed many corporate clients, and the majority of them are Fortune 500 companies.

Funding

When Pluralsight was started, it was a self-funded venture as each of the four founders contributed $5000. For a very long time, the company didn’t receive any external funding until December 2012 when the Series A funding round was conducted. In the first funding round, Pluralsight raised $27.5 million from Insight Venture Partners and received an additional $2.5 million later. In 2014, Pluralsight raised another $135 million in Series B funding when some new investors like ICONIQ Capital and Sorenson Capital joined in. During that time, Pluralsight became the first Utah-based company ever to receive that much amount of funding. After the Series C funding round in 2016, Pluralsight became a billion-dollar company.

Acquisitions

Pluralsight started acquiring a series of companies from 2013 starting with e-learning and education businesses. It acquired PeepCode in July 2013 followed by TrainSignal and Tekpub in the same year. In 2014, it acquired Digital-Tutors expanding Pluralsight’s training courses to media and design. Later in the same year, it acquired an online skill assessment platform called Smarterer. Some of the other companies it acquired in the last few years are Train Simple, GitPrime, Next Tech, etc.

About Aaron Skonnard – CEO and co-founder

Aaron started to code from a very young age when his father bought him an Apple II computer. He completed his studies in Computer Science from Brigham Young University and worked at various companies like 3M, Intel, and Axiom Technologies. He also published a few books and invested in start-ups that emerged in Utah.

Netskope

Netskope, Indian Co-Founders who make a huge contribution to the success of the company.

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Founded in 2012, Netskope is an American software company based in Santa Clara, California, United States. Netskope provides a computer security platform and offers cloud-native solutions for enterprises such that the companies can protect their sensitive data and defend their application and system against various cyber threats. Netskope is considered a leading company in its sector because of its Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB). The founders of the company are Sanjay Beri (current CEO), Lebin Cheng, Ravi Ithal, and Krishna Narayanaswamy. Apart from its headquarters that is based in Santa Clara, the company also has a software development facility in Bangalore, India. 

About Netskope

When the team of Netskope was formed, it brought in distinguished engineers from the security and networking field. Some of its early members are ex-employees of Cisco, Juniper Networks, Palo Alto Networks, and VMWare. The company currently has more than 1,000 employees and it has some of the biggest multinational conglomerates as its clients (more than 25% of Fortune 100 customers). 

Netskope has expanded to various international markets including India, Singapore, Melbourne, London, etc. In the 21st century, Netskope is one of the fastest-growing SASE companies and the main idea behind building the company was to give people the power to access the cloud on their devices,

Netskope
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Founding History of Netskope

Before co-founding Netskope, Sanjay Beri was the VP of the Access & Security business at Juniper Networks. Since Sanjay worked at a very reputed company he made several connections throughout the year. So, for some time he took time and spoke to several CEOs of other companies and finally in 2012 co-founded Netskope. He started the company with initial venture capital of $21 million approximately. During the first six months, an office was set up in Palo Alto from where Netskope operated. When they established the company, the first thing that Netskope put their focus on was hiring the best talents. 

In October 2013, the company launched its first product which was security software available openly. The company also formed an advisory team and brought Enrique Salem, former Symantec Chairman onboard. In the funding round of 2014, the company raised $35 million followed by raising another $75 million in 2015. The latter funding round was led by ICONIQ Capital. The company announced that the latest fundings would be invested to expand in New Zealand and Australia. 

Funding and Acquisition

In 2016, the first two patents of Netskope were finally issued in its name for security and network-delivered services. Next year, the company conducted another funding round which was bigger than all the funding rounds held before that. Netskope was able to raise $100 million in the funding round and it was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. In the same year, the company acquired Sift Security, a software business that mainly focused on next-generation cloud infrastructure security. Cloud Hunter of Sift Security was renamed as Netskope’s Security Cloud after the acquisition. In 2018, another patent was issued to Netskope for context-aware data loss prevention. By the end of 2018, the company successfully raised another $168.7 million. 

Recent Days

In 2019, the company brought a new CFO of Netskope, Drew Del Matto (former Citrix and Fortinet executive). Earlier in 2020, Netskope conducted another funding round and raised $340 million. This funding round was led by Sequoia Capital Global Equities and the total funding summed up to $740 million. In February 2020, the company launched Netskope Private Access Solution, and the same year the company’s total valuation became $3 billion (tripled within fifteen months). The company has made Forbes Cloud 100 list because of its advanced cloud services that include protection against cyber threats. The company has already entered into a partnership with Cybersecurity and Exclusive Networks. 

Sanjay Beri – Co-founder and CEO

Sanjay pursued computer engineering from the University of Waterloo followed by completing his master’s in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Though Sanjay came on the radar after co-founding Netskope, his first startup was Ingrian Networks which was eventually acquired by SafeNet. Some of the companies that he worked at before building his own company were Microsoft, McAfee, and Juniper Networks. 

MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy – A Powerful Business Intelligence And Data Analytics Company.

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MicroStrategy is one of the leading providers of enterprise software globally. The company was founded in 1989 in Wilmington, Delaware. The founders of the company are Michael J. Saylor, Thomas Spahr, and Sanju Bansal. It is a publicly-traded company listed on New York Stock Exchange. MicroStrategy’s main focus is on developing software and that analyzes both internal and external data and helps businesses make better decisions. The company’s headquarters is based in Virginia and it has nearly 3,200 employees.

About MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy has become a very dominating company in the business analytics sector as it has successfully built a simple UI design combined with high system performance and a universal approach. MicroStrategy has 4,000 customers spread across 26 countries for whom it provides a consistent and high-quality analytics platform. The major competitors of MicroStrategy in the market are IBM Cognos, Oracle’s BI Platform, and SAP AG Business Objects. The main goal of the company is to make sure that an enterprise has access to all its data and the platform functions optimally for the user end.

History Of The Company

Michael Saylor with a consulting contract from DuPont started MicroStrategy in 1989. He received $250,000 as start-up capital and office space in Delaware to start his work. Saylor went to MIT and while he was in college he met Sanju Bansal who joined the company shortly as a co-founder. While they were in college, both of them took a class in systems dynamics theory. Based on the idea of that subject MicroStrategy developed data mining and business intelligence software using nonlinear mathematics. After three years, the company landed its first major client, McDonald’s, and signed a contract of $10 million.

Between 1990 and 1996 the company was able to increase revenue by 100% each year. With the rapid growth, the company decided to move from Delaware to Virginia with its 50 employees. In June 1998 it applied for an IPO and became a public company. MicroStrategy eventually started focusing on its research and development division hence founded Alarm.com as part of its R&D unit.

MicroStrategy
Image source: solutionsreview.com

Economic Downfall And Lawsuit

In 2000, the company decided to restate its financial years for the preceding two years after doing a review of its accounting. When the company became a public entity its stock price rose from $7 per share to $333 per share within a year. But it started falling ($120 per share) and it was due to the burst of the dot-com bubble. The same year, MicroStrategy went through another turmoil as the US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against the company and its executives. The charges were mostly of fraud and the matter was settled later in December where each of those officials paid $350,000 in fines.

Recent Days Of MicroStrategy

In 2009, the company decided to sell Alarm.com for $27.7 million. The deal was finalized with a venture capital firm ABS Capital Partners. The same year the company introduced OLAP services and eventually started developing business intelligence software applications for iPhone and iPad. In the last decade, the company also expanded the range of its services as it launched a cloud-based service, MicroStrategy Cloud in 2011. In 2014, the company collaborated with Facebook and introduced a new feature on its platform called PRIME (Parallel Relational In-Memory Engine).

The company was going through a rough financial state in 2014 and decided to lay off 770 employees. Saylor also requested the company to reduce his salary to $1 from $875,000. In 2015, the company launched MicroStrategy 10 and after three years released the next version. Last year, the company released MicroStrategy 2020 which included a new design for its Hyperintelligence analytics tool.

Michael J. Saylor – Co-Founder And CEO

Michael J. Saylor is a famous American entrepreneur who is famous for co-founding MicroStrategy. He is also an author and the sole trustee of Saylor Academy. He went to MIT with a scholarship. He also joined the Theta Delta Chi fraternity where he met Sanju Bansal. In 1999 he was featured in MIT Technology Review as an “Innovator Under 35.”