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Veritone – A Company That Is Investing In Unleashing The Undiscovered Potential Of AI.

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Humans are making progress with technology every day, hence we are constantly discovering and learning something. The real power of an invention remains unknown until and unless the entire world is trying to fathom it. Artificial Intelligence is a very prominent example to understand the various layers of how an invention slowly unfolds its power. Veritone, founded in 2014, by Chad and Ryan Steelberg has embraced the entrepreneurial journey to do the same. They have founded Veritone to explore and unleash different powers of AI that the world hasn’t witnessed before. The main goal of the company is to offer AI-powered solutions to solve some of the biggest complicated challenges of the modern world. 

About Veritone

Veritone is an artificial intelligence company based in Costa Mesa, California. The company was founded in 2014 and within the next few years went international. Veritone has offices in California, New York City, Denver, London, and other places. It is a publicly-traded company (traded on NASDAQ Global Market) and offers services to more than 1,500 customers across the globe. It has a very diverse customer base that ranges from media conglomerates to various police agencies. Veritone has two wholly owned subsidiaries, Veritone One and Veritone Digital that offer content management solutions and licensing services. Veritone’s most famous product is its proprietary software system, aiWARE which is used by worldwide customers. 

veritone
Image source: hindustantimes.com

Company’s Story

Both brothers, Chad and Ryan Steelberg, grew a deep interest in technology from a very young age. Their dream was to welcome the world into a new age of technology. Eventually, when they started their career life, their experience grew and wanted to build an AI-powered empire for the world. So, with the past experience and a zeal to create a new empire, the two brothers founded Veritone in 2014. Three years after founding the company, Veritone decided to go public but unfortunately suffered a loss of $59.6 million in that year. It also acquired a company called Atigeo Corporation during the same time. In 2018, the company acquired four new businesses, including, Machine Box, Wazee Digital, Performance Bridge, and S Media Limited. At the end of 2018, the company recorded a loss of $61.1 million. 

In 2019, the company heavily invested in ads for clients like Uber, LinkedIn, HelloFresh, Audible, etc. Since the company was facing losses, in 2020 it received a loan of $6.5 million from Sunwest Bank. The company later announced that it would return the full loan because it has the financial flexibility to maintain its capital position. In 2022, Veritone became the winner of the 14th Annual Media Excellence Awards for Best Artificial Intelligence. 

About The Founders

The two brothers, Chad and Ryan Steelberg founded Veritone in 2014 with the sole purpose to extend the application of AI by manipulating its unexplored power. But, at the same time, they made sure that the company also follows all the ethical rules to do the same. 

Apart from being one of the co-founders of the company, Chad Steelberg is the current CEO and Chairman of the Board as well. Before co-founding Veritone, he served as a board member of Brand Affinity Technologies for almost five years. He also worked at Google for a year as the general manager of the Audio Division. He is also the co-founder of an advertising company that was acquired by Google in 2006. The first company founded by Chad Steelberg was Adforce, an independent ad service company that was eventually acquired by CMGi. 

Ryan Steelberg is the co-founder of Veritone who also co-founded dMarc Broadcasting, an advertising company with his brother. He is currently the President of Veritone One and also became the President of the parent company in 2017. For seven years, he worked with Brand Affinity Technologies as its CEO and President. At Google, he worked as the Head of the Radio Division. 

Support.com

Support.com – A 25-year old Tech Support Company Acquired By Greenidge Generation.

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Support.com was established in 1997 as a technical support company and it was merged with Greenidge Generation, a bitcoin mining company in 2021. Currently, Lance Rosenzweig is operating as the CEO of the company and its headquarters is based in Wilmington, Delaware and its administrative office is based in California, USA. The company is mainly known for providing tech support and related services to various businesses and their consumers. It has also expanded its products and services to security software after acquiring SUPERAntiSpyware. During the pandemic, Support.com has focused more on providing remote tech support, especially for small businesses.

About Support.com

Mark Pincus is the main founder of Support.com who along with his partners, Scott Dale and Cadir Lee founded the company in 1997. It is a technical support company that also provides various software solutions for system security and interaction optimization. The products apart from the tech support are not the original solutions of Support.com. The company offers these solutions to customers through a few subsidiaries it has acquired over the years. A company like Support.com became a great asset especially during the pandemic because of the sudden shift to remote working.

Support.com mainly focuses on two types of customers, namely, small businesses and general customers. The company offers 24/7 technical support which also includes call center services and it is based in the US. It can basically provide tech support for anything from setting up a new device to troubleshooting. The tech support can provide services via voice calls, chats, and also offline calls at home. The company also offers monthly and yearly subscription plans to avail of any tech support around the clock.

Support.com
Image source: businesswire.com

History

When Mark Pincus established the company, it was officially launched as Replicase Inc in the Redwood City of California. Mark and his other partners launched Replicase as s software company and after a year it was renamed Tioga Systems and its headquarters were relocated to Palo Alto, California. In the initial days of the company, SoftBank became a major investor and supported the business with $2.5 million. Since the company was launched in the software industry, Tioga put its focus on designing self-healing software such that Windows applications can automatically encounter any problems and fix them by themselves. Again after a year, the company was renamed Support.com and its primary solutions shifted its self-healing focus to developing software for enterprises. In this year the headquarters were also shifted to Redwood City.

Journey of Support.com

Only after three years the company was launched in the market, it decided to go public in 2000. When Support.com went public, it was backed by the investment banking division of Credit Suisse Group. After a couple of years, the company changed its name to SupportSoft Inc but after the enterprise technology of SupportSoft was acquired by Consona Corporation, the company again was back to Support.com. The company also made a handful of acquisitions before its latest merger with the bitcoin mining company. Some of its acquisitions include Core Networks (2004), YourTechOnline (2008), Sammsoft (2009), SUPERAntiSpyware (2011), and RightHand IT (2012). Apart from the chain of acquisitions, it established a partnership with Target (one of America’s largest retailers) to provide tech support to MyTGTtech solutions.

Support.com became very active during the COVID-19 pandemic and people around the world needed online support for everything. So, to help and support the consumers get used to this new online work environment, Support.com provided a month of free tech support for those working and learning from home. It also hired additional employees during the onset of the pandemic while most of the companies were discussing layoffs.

About the Founder

Mark Pincus is an American entrepreneur who has founded several companies other than Support.com. He is mainly popular as the founder of Zynga, a mobile social gaming company. Some of his other endeavors are Freeloader Inc and Tribe Networks. Mark completed his education at the University of Pennsylvania followed by Harvard University.

PTC Inc

PTC Inc – An American Technology Company Specializing In IoT And Augmented Reality.

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PTC Inc is a famous American software company that was founded in 1985. The main products and services of the company include the Internet of Things (IoT), Augmented Reality (AR), and collaboration software. The headquarters of the company is based in Boston, Massachusetts, US. A Russian immigrant and mathematician, Samuel P. Giesberg is the mastermind behind the foundation of PTC Inc. He worked as a software engineer at other companies before founding PTC. Today, this public multinational company has more than 6,000 employees spread across 30 countries.

The Initial Story Of PTC Inc

In May 1985, Samuel Giesberg officially launched PTC Inc and worked for developing a new CAD-CAM program. In the first few years, Samuel was looking for venture capitalists to market his new software. Initially, he was turned down by many venture capitalists but at last, he received a total fund of $4 million from Charles River Ventures and other firms. In 1988, the company launched its first product and by then half the funding money was invested. The first product of the company was the CAD-CAM program but PTC entered late in the market and was already surrounded by powerful rivals.

The CAD-CAM software technology entered the market in the 1960s and it was in the late 1980s that Samuel launched the new software. But, what he brought into the market has an added innovation in the already developed technology which left its rival surprised. For example, the CAD-CAM software in the market was able to make different changes in a 3D model but PTC’s software was able to predict the consequences of that change in the overall model. Thus, this new software became a breakthrough as it made the work of an engineer much easier. Within one year, PTC made a total sales of $11 million and a net income of more than $1.5 million.

PTC Inc
Image source: wikimedia.org

Business Growth

After the sales started escalating in the late 1980s, the company filed its first IPO and went public. Samuel also launched different versions of the mechanical software for various operating systems. Only after two years of launching the CAD-CAM software, PTC was controlling 10 percent of this software market. By the end of 1991, the total sales of the company reached $45 million. The CAD-CAM Pro/Engineer system was such a big hit that it attracted clients of big companies who were established in the industry. In 1992, this technology was named “Technology of the Year” by IndustryWeek. PTC also made into the list of Fortune 500 in 1995 and crossed $800 million in revenue.

In 1993 PTC’s market share increased to 20 percent and it landed big clients like Ford Motor and Caterpillar Inc. By this time the company also started increasing the number of employees and the annual revenue doubled within a year. In 1998, PTC acquired Comoutervision, where Samuel was a former employee, and Windchill Technology. In the early 2000s, PTC broadened the range of products as it developed lifecycle management software for products and services. PTC made both CAD-related and other acquisitions that include Polyplan Technologies, NetRegulus, Synapsis Technology, Mathsoft, CoCreate, NC Graphics, etc. Three years ago, the company landed a major investor, Rockwell Automation. It invested $1 billion in the company and acquired an 8.4 percent ownership stake.

About The Founder

Samuel Giesberg was a maths professor who fled to the US in 1974 with his 11-year old son. After he moved to a new country, he started working as a software engineer and soon he became a prodigy at Computervision (the company he worked for). Samuel’s brother Vladimir gave him the push to start his own company and also suggested landing some investors for financing the same. Samuel had ten years of experience in designing CAD-CAM software and thus decided to leap.

Trend Micro

Trend Micro – The World’s Largest Web Security Firm.

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The past few years have been years of fast growth for the internet and other web services. From sending instant messages to making online payments, everything has been really easy for every person. But with this ease of doing things, the internet has also brought danger to the security of data and other important assets online. To deal with such situations, lots of firms and developers are already working dedicatedly to ensure safer web surfing to making big transactions online for people. One such name which has been successfully providing cyber security services to its clients is Trend Micro.

About The Company

Trend Micro Inc., aka Torendo Maikuro Kabushiki-Gaisha, is an American-Japanese multinational cyber security company founded on 24 October 1988. The company has its global headquarters based in Tokyo, Japan, and Irving, Texas, United States. It has been working to provide software solutions, cloud computing as well as cyber security services to its clients all around the world for the past 32 years. The cyber security solutions by Micro Trend cover all platforms based on VMWare, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon AWS, etc. The company has also launched its research, development, and support center, named TrendLabs, operational in different parts of Asia, Europe, and North America.

Trend Micro
Image source: wikimedia.org

The Founding of Trend Micro

Steve Chang, along with his wife, Jenny Chang, and her sister, Eva Chen, founded Trend Micro on 24 October 1988 in Los Angeles. The company started off by selling protection dongles to a United States-based Rainbow Technologies. Soon the founders shifted the company headquarters to Taipei, and Trend Micro acquired a Japanese software firm in 1992, moving the headquarters to Japan. The company bagged a contract from Intel and supplied anti-virus to the latter. Intel also helped Trend Micro to sell its anti-virus in the US and Europe.
In 1996, Trend Micro partnered with Novell. The company got listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1998, and the next year, it start to trade on the United States-based NASDAQ. The company expanded its operations by acquiring companies like Braintree, Third Brigade, Identum, Kelkea, InterMute, and Provilla, etc. These acquisitions also helped Trend Micro to open offices in various parts of Europe, America, and Asia. By the end of the 2000s, Trend Micro was already making IP filtering software, antispyware programs, antispam software, data loss prevention software, and ID-based email encryption software.
With the acquisition of Leeds in June 2010, Trend Micro started to provide cloud-based data storage and synchronization services, too. In the next decade, the company acquired names like Mobile Armor, AffirmTrust, Broadweb, IMMUNIO, TippingPoint, etc. In 2013, the company moved its headquarters to Irving, Texas, and the next year, it established a partnership with INTERPOL to provide its Threat Intelligence Service to the latter. Company also bagged a contract from Microsoft to offer Cloud App Security to Microsoft Office 365, which later was adopted by companies like Dropbox and Google Drive.
In 2015, Company got certified as a VCE validation ready as well Vblock ready solution. The company also added Deep Security to its platform. Trend Micro has also been investing in startups for quite some time now through its venture capital subsidiary named Trend Forward Capital. Few of its major investments include Veem, Muse, Mojio, and Interaxon. The company had a partnership with Telco Systems in 2017 so that to expand its operations into virtual network cybersecurity. The next year, Trend Micro partnered with Cybersecurity Tech Accord to design programs to deal with malicious attacks by cybercriminal gangs and nation-states.

The Founders

Steve Chang, along with his wife Jenny Chang and her sister Eva Chen, founded Trend Micro in 1988. He is a renowned Taiwanese businessman born in Pingtung, Taiwan, in 1954. Chang did his schooling at the National Pingtung Senior High School and attained a graduate degree from the Fu Jen Catholic University in 1977. He also went to the US to pursue a post-graduate degree in computer science from Lehigh University in 1978 and graduated in 1979.
Chang started his career at Hewlett-Packard in Taiwan, where he held the post of head of sales operations, handling operations in seven countries. After gaining enough experience, he decided to start Trend Micro in 1988. He was the first CEO of the company. Chang is a popular businessman and has won awards like “Star of Asia” by Business Week for his work.