startup

Genius Sports – A Young Startup That Has Become The Current Talk Of The Sports Data Industry.

Being the messiah in the world of sports data and technology, Genius Sports is known for organizing, optimizing, and creating unique sports experiences. The company was founded in 2016 as a result of a merger between two companies. Currently, the headquarters of the company is based in London, UK. Genius Sports is mainly responsible for offering software to various sports leagues and federations. Various services like data management, video streaming, and integrated services are also provided by the company. Various sports allow the company (giving rights) to commercialize their data and video content with authorities like media companies and casinos.

About Genius Sports

Being founded only five years ago, Genius Sports is currently one of the fastest-growing sports technology companies across the globe. The company now employs more than 1,800 people around the world with major offices in New York City, Tallinn, Los Angeles, Medellin, and many more. The company is catering toward building a more sustainable sports ecosystem with a fair share of engagement, commercial benefits, and competitiveness. To date, the company has covered around 240,000 sports events and established more than 600 long-term partnerships. In April 2021, the company got listed on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company, dMY Technology Group.

A Merger Between Two Companies

In 2016, Mark Locke decided to merge his company, Betgenius and SportingPulse International. The newly formed company was called Genius Sports which became a perfect blend of sports technology, data supplier, and the betting industry. One year after the merger, Sports Genius started acquiring several other companies starting with Data Project, a volleyball technology provider. In the same year, the PGA Tour launched a new integrity program for mainly preventing betting-related corruption. The company was selected to support this integrity program through close monitoring and educational services.

In 2018, a new statistics initiative was announced by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) for all its members alongside Genius Sports. In the same year, Apax Partners acquired Genius Sports but even after the acquisition, Locke continued as the CEO of the company. Later in 2018, Football Data Co. came into an agreement along with Genius Sports and Perform Group to protect the football leagues in England and Scotland against match-fixing. This was for the first time that two technology companies combined for the mentioned reason.

Expansion

As the company was eventually landing deals with various types of sports leagues, in 2019 it struck a deal with NASCAR stock-car racing association. Genius Sports chose to strike a deal with this organization to become the exclusive provider of NASCAR data to licensed sportsbooks across the world. In the same year, it made a deal with Football DataCo for being the official supplier of live data. The company also partnered with the German Football Association and Superliga Argentina to help prevent match-fixing and unhealthy sports betting. In October 2020, the company acquired Oppia Performance, a video production, and streaming company. In 2021, Company partnered with the National Football League, WynnBET, Canadian Football League, and many other famous and influential organizations in the sports industry.

Mark Locke – CEO of Genius Sports

Mark Locke is not only the CEO of Genius Sports but also its co-founder. Locke has more than fifteen years of experience in both the sports technology and media industry. His entrepreneurial journey started when he launched Betgenius in 2001 and currently it is a part of the Genius Sports Group. Locke, in 2015, recognized the huge potential hidden between the intersection of sports and the betting industry. This is the reason why he decided to merge Betgenius and SportingPulse International. Locke also has a history in telecommunications and ventures for property management.

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

Expensify – A Journey From Assisting Homeless Individuals To Building A Successful Startup.

Expensify is one of the world’s most innovative companies (according to Fast Company, 2015) that was established in 2008. David Barrett is the founder and current CEO of the company. The headquarters of the company is based in California, United States. Expensify has approximately 144 members, according to December 2021. The major and widely used product launched by the company is an expense reporting application that is available both for Android and Apple devices. Expensify’s expense management software not only helps to track everyday expenses but also helps in creating receipts for online purchases which can be further used for reimbursement.

Founding History

The story of David Barrett and his successful entrepreneurial life starts back in 2008. It all started with a bleak hope and a doubtful mind to open the startup and after a decade it has become a successful US-based public company. Getting deeper into the backstory of Expensify, Barrett used to live in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco in 2008. Living in this neighborhood, Barrett came across his unhoused neighbors almost every day on the street. This got him thinking about several ways to help these people without giving direct cash. While thinking about an alternate solution, he came up with an idea of a debit card linked to the personal account of these people which would ensure that they could buy food and all be able to access various kinds of public services.

Pitching this idea was accompanied by several hiccups as most of the banks thought the idea was very strange and risky. David got turned down for funding wherever he pitched the idea initially. But Barrett was determined to found this company and hence the next time he pitched a low-risk idea to the bank for getting funding. This led to the development of Expensify, an expense report platform for both business and personal use.

Journey to Becoming Expensify

After having a clear idea about how he wanted to pitch a solution, Barrett finally came up with his card technology concept in 2008. He presented his idea at TechCrunch50 and named his solution as Expensify with a tagline, “The Corporate Card for the Masses!”. Initially, Barrett didn’t have any planning to open a startup but he realized that people actually loved the concept of expense reporting.

Eventually, David started working to establish Expensify properly and expand the team. In the next couple of years, David and his company launched the first receipt-scanning technology in the industry. This product was called SmartScan which allowed the user to take a photo of the receipt for automatic transcription. The name of Expensify’s platform spread like a wildfire in the initial years. Expense management is a very crucial task, especially for working individuals, so the new users of the platform increased at an exponential rate. As word-of-mouth spread, Expensify was able to raise much more funding (from $1 million in 2009 to $17 million in 2015). It also received several awards and recognitions like Tabby Award (2015), Forbes Cloud 100 (2016), Top 10 Free Mobiles Sales App by Inc Magazine (2014), and many more.

About the Founder

David Barrett is a famous American entrepreneur who is known for being the CEO and founder of Expensify. Barrett is an alumni of the University of Michigan and he studied software engineering. David was into programming from the early age of six. After he joined Michigan, he started working there in a virtual reality laboratory. After he graduated, he worked in the video game industry where he helped in developing 3D graphics. Before starting his company, Barrett worked at Red Swoosh, a peer-to-peer file-sharing company.

Annasha

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

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

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

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

About the Company

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

The Back Story

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

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

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

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

The CEO at WalkMe

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

Yashica Vashishtha

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

www.xornor.co

Monday.com – A Company That Gives The Liberty To Design Their Own Work Management Applications.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Founded in 2012 by three entrepreneurs, Monday.com was built in a way to give companies and individual clients the liberty to develop their own applications. Depending on the needs and goals of a company, it has to buy or develop customized work management software. Monday.com is a publicly-traded company that specializes in several domains including project management, team management, no-code development platform, and many more. The project of Monday.com was started in 2012 and was officially launched two years after that. The company’s headquarters is based in Tel Aviv, Israel and currently, it has more than 1,000 employees.

About the Company

Being an expert in project and work management, the main services offered by Monday.com are sales and CRM, inventory tracking, software development, HR, operations, etc. Monday.com can be best described as a Work Operating System (Work OS) that is a very flexible option, especially for the remote work environment. It helps in shaping the entire workflow in a team from collaboration to developing custom work applications. The UI of Monday.com is very careful and it helps in visualizing a lot of information from a different perspective. Monday.com was originally famous as daPulse and its name was changed in 2017. Recently, the company was also awarded Calcalist’s most promising startups.

History

The founders of Monday.com are Roy Mann, Eran Kampf, and Eran Zinman. These three founders started the project to develop something innovative and easily customizable so that it can be used by everyone. In 2012 the company was started and it was a huge triumph for the company that later in the same year it was able to raised funding of $1.5 million in the seed round. The first step towards developing a new project, the founders tried to understand the pain points of their target customers and eventually built a prototype under the brand name daPulse. In 2014, after two years of hard work the company was finally able to launch its first commercial product, and in the same year, it was able to land its first six customers. The business started out of an apartment in Tel Aviv and in that tiny office, they hosted their first board meeting.

Expansion

The company started growing impressively as within one year of launching its first product its customer base went from having six customers to 3,181 new customers. So, it expanded the team as well and added nine new members. In 2016, the company hosted its Series A funding round and raised $7.6 million. This funding round was led by Genesis Partners and Entrée Capital. By the end of this year, the company was able to acquire more than 7,000 new customers. Monday.com released a new mobile application in 2016. The Series B funding round of the company took place in 2017 and the company successfully raised $25 million. Insight Venture Partners along with existing investors from the Series A funding round. The total customer base of the company exceeded 20,000. Monday.com eventually got some exposure in 2017 when it was featured in Globes Most Promising Startup of the Year and also became one of the top 15 companies in 500 Fastest Growing Companies. By the end of 2017, daPulse was officially branded as Monday.com.

In 2018, the company expanded more as it opened its first international office in New York City. The company also raised $50 million in Series C funding and a new investor called Stripes Group was added. In the Series D funding round, the company was able to raise $150 million and it was raised by Sapphire Ventures. The company became the recipient of the 2020 Webby Award and also achieved unicorn status. It has also expanded to the UK, Miami, and San Francisco.

Roy Mann – CEO of Monday.com

Roy Mann is one of the founders of Monday.com and the present CEO of the company. He started his career as a web developer at Finjan. Apart from co-founding Monday.com, he is also the founder of SaveAnAlien.com and served as the former C-CTO of wix.com. Mann studied computer science at Reichman University.

Annasha

Ashneer Grover, India’s Startup King Has Lost Luster Following Allegations Of Embezzlement.

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Team YTS

The likes of Uber’s Travis Kalanick and WeWork’s Adam Neumann have a special place in the annals of controversial startup founders. Ashneer Grover of India may now join their ranks.

A ferocious split has split the board of BharatPe, one of the country’s fastest-growing financial technology companies, from Ashneer Grover, the co-founder, and former managing director. Grover has been accused of misappropriating funds by senior leadership in recent days. A long list of grievances has been voiced by employees. A man whose voice sounds like Grover’s threatens a bank employee with death in a leaked audio recording posted anonymously on Twitter for not helping him get shares in a hot stock.

Grover went on leave shortly after the recording surfaced online, though he denied on Twitter that the voice was his. In the days since, the 39-year-old has launched a full-fledged attack on the company he helped found, attempting to oust a hand-picked CEO and threatening to sue BharatPe’s board of directors.

Ashneer Grover resigned from the startup last week, bringing the drama to a close. BharatPe said in a statement that it “reserves all rights to pursue legal action against him and his family.” His picture was taken down from the website.

Grover claims the allegations against him stem from “personal hatred and low thinking,” including that he stole company funds to fund an extravagant lifestyle. “The only thing lavish about me is my dreams and ability to achieve them against all odds through hard work and enterprise,” he said in a statement to Bloomberg.

Grover and his colleagues are locked in a tense showdown at the pinnacle, or perhaps the beginning of the end, of India’s startup boom. Hard-charging entrepreneurs have pushed into uncharted territory in recent years, including e-commerce, online tutoring, and digital health services. Investors were mostly unconcerned about obnoxious behavior or personnel conflicts, focusing instead on record-breaking initial public offerings and a surge of foreign capital flowing into India after China built walls around its economy.

This account of the BharatPe saga is based on interviews with over a dozen current and former BharatPe employees, as well as other company insiders. It’s a case study in how India’s business culture is evolving, as a slew of promising startups competes for legitimacy — and fortune — in one of the world’s most promising markets.

BharatPe was lionised in the pantheon of India’s up-and-coming companies until just a few weeks ago. Grover led the New Delhi-based company through successful funding rounds from Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management, Ribbit Capital, Coatue Management, and Beenext, among others. BharatPe has a market capitalization of nearly $3 billion after only three years in operation.

The tech unicorn found success in digital payments, competing against older rivals like Paytm and Walmart Inc.’s PhonePe. Grover was the company’s growth engine, a smooth talker who could persuade Bollywood celebrities such as Salman Khan to endorse the brand. As a “shark” investor on the Indian version of Shark Tank, he was also a master marketer, making public appearances in snazzy jackets and landing zingers on fresh-faced entrepreneurs.

Grover’s power appears to be waning now. Madhuri, a key executive at BharatPe with the title “Head of Controls,” has left the company. Grover has been relatively quiet since the board announced his ouster last week, despite weeks of mudslinging.

Grover remained silent on the subject. Madhuri Grover did not respond to requests for an interview. Sequoia, Tiger Global, Beenext, and Coatue did not respond to requests for comment. A request for comment from Ribbit was not returned.

Whizzing The Fundraiser

Shashwat Nakrani, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, one of the country’s most prestigious schools, founded BharatPe in 2018.

After working on a commercial pilot with Bhavik Koladia, the two started small businesses to better understand the issues with digital payments in India. He asked Grover to join as a co-founder after a few months of hard work.

Using merchant transaction data and underwriting loans to shopkeepers at the click of a button, men make zero on profitable business models. BharatPe deducts daily loan arrears at a monthly interest rate of 2%.

Ashneer Grover, a former investment banker, was a crucial part of the fundraising team, assisting in the acquisition of $ 2 million from Sequoia and Beenext. A senior Bharatpe employee said, “He knew exactly what the investors wanted.” “He had a knack for delivering.”

Grover’s wife, Madhuri, who has a background in fashion design, was also instrumental in the establishment of the company, overseeing everything from hiring to marketing costs.

Team YTS

Zeta Global – A Marketing Tech Startup That Has Received Unicorn Status.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Zeta Global is a US-based company specializing in data-driven marketing technology. It is a new company that was founded fourteen years ago in 2007. The headquarters of the company is based in New York City and it focuses on offering multichannel marketing tools to its customers. David A. Steinberg and John Sculley, the former CEO of Apple co-founded Zeta Global. Back in 2007, it was established under the name of “XL Marketing” and its name became Zeta Global in October 2016.

About Zeta Global

Zeta’s marketing platform is used by some of the largest companies in the world to grow and retain customers at an affordable rate. When Zeta was founded, it was established with the idea that it should be able to offer solutions to a complexity arising from managing multiple vendors across various channels. All these vendors provide different points of solution like automation, customer data management (CDM), omnichannel engagement, etc. So, Zeta was founded to bring all these solutions under one roof by developing very intelligent software.

The platform of Zeta is not only about growth and bringing in more audience, but also strengthening the relationship between existing customers. Today, after Google and Facebook, Zeta Global has the third-largest dataset in the entire world that is powered by various demographics, behavioral, locational, etc factors. Zeta Global started trading publicly in 2021 at a $1.7 billion valuation. The company has a presence in 11 countries including India.

History of the Company

XL Marketing was established in 2007 and its name was changed to Zeta Interactive in 2014 followed by the current brand, Zeta Global in 2016. Within the first ten years of the company, Zeta acquired nine other companies. In 2013, it acquired the Adchemy Actions division of a parent ad tech firm, Adchemy. This acquisition helped Zeta have access to Adchemy’s machine learning-based advertising platform. Next year Zeta acquired a Boston-based company called Clicksquared that offered a SaaS-based campaign management platform.

To grow the company through more acquisitions, Zeta raised $125 million from Blackstone’s GSO Capital Partners. With this funding, Zeta mainly focused on acquiring data startup companies. Later in that year, Zeta acquired eBay’s customer relationship management division and this deal was worth $80-$90 million. Steinberg, after the acquisition, made a statement that this deal would help them become the largest customer lifecycle management platform. In August 2016, Zeta bought “Acxiom Impact”, a market automation tool for $50 million from the parent company, Acxiom. Later in that year, the company also hired a new CFO, Jarrod Yahes who was a former executive at EXL Service Holdings.

Recent Events

In 2017, Zeta hired Donald Steele as the company’s CRO. This was the first time in ten years that the company hired for this position. In a debt funding round in April 2017, Zeta raised $140 million from GPI Capital and Franklin Square Capital Partners. After this funding round, the company’s total valuation became $1.3 billion. In the same year, Zeta acquired two new companies, Boomtrain, an ML platform, and Disqus. In the past three years also Zeta acquired several ad tech companies including Temnos, Sizmek, etc. In March 2021, the company raised $222.5 million after which it announced that it will file its first IPO. Currently, it is traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

Awards & Accolades

It has been featured in many top-rated magazines and websites. Zeta was featured in the Forbes Most Promising Company in 2014 followed by in the list of Forbes “Top 100 Analytics Startups of 2015.” In 2017, Zeta was ranked as “Visionary” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs.

David A. Steinberg – CEO of Zeta Global

David Steinberg is famous as a serial entrepreneur who has founded multiple companies including Zeta Global. David’s net worth is approximately around $750 million. In 1993, he founded his first company, Sterling Cellular from the basement of his house. And, before co-founding Zeta, there were other two companies, namely, Inphonic and CAIVIS Acquisition Corp. David went to Washington & Jefferson College.

Annasha

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