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klarna

Sebastian Siemiatkowski : The Founder of Swedish Buy-Now-Pay-Later Fintech Klarna

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There have been many rags to riches story, among which, Jack Ma’s rejection story is on the top. In almost every such story, the people who have succeeded once had difficulty in even earning their one time meal. But as time changes, their hard work takes them to new heights, and they only set up new examples for other people. One such story is of the founder of Klarna, a Swedish version of Paypal, which was founded by Sebastian Siemiatkowski in 2005. Siemiatkowski was not rejected, but had a similar humble background and worked at Burger King. And now, like Ma, he has also established himself as one of the successful entrepreneurs in the tech industry.

Early Life

Sebastian Siemiatkowski met his future partner and friend Niklas Adalberth, at Burger King, where both worked as part-timers. Later, the two went on to join the Stockholm School of Economics to pursue a graduate degree in Economics. At the college, they even met the third co-founder of Klarna, Victor Jacobsson.

The two while studying and working together always discussed new startup ideas, but none of them was sure about what they should really do. During their college, they decided to take a year’s off and travel the world without flying. The two went to explore the world through road trips and on ships. This way, they got extra time to think about their career.

Klarna founder
Image Source: businessinsider.com

Founding Klarna

While back from the trip, Siemiatkowski joined sales job and came across the emerging concept of e-Commerce. While working with the sales department, he got to know that it is quite difficult to sell things online, as people do not trust the online payment systems. This problem later became the basis for Klarna.

Siemiatkowski discussed the problem with Niklas and decided to build a new payment system for people to make the purchases. Jacobsson also joined in, and they participated in the Stockholm School of Economics annual entrepreneurship award with the idea. Though Siemiatkowski and his partners had a lot of faith in the idea, it could not make to the finals. In fact, it was one of the lasts. But Jane Walerud, an angel investor, showed interest in the idea and invested in it. He even helped the three co-founders to meet a good development team.

Finally, in the mid of 2005, Siemiatkowski along with his partners founded Klarna and opened its first office in Sweden. They started by offering the option of paying for the goods after receiving them. This led the consumers to trust Klarna faster, as they were hesitant about buying things online. But with Klarna, they could pay after deciding if they wanted to keep the goods.

The Success

The company received another investment from AB Öresund in 2007. In 2010, the company expanded its services to Norway, Finland, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. The same years, Klarna also received investment from Sequoia Capital, and the company’s revenue raised by 80%.

In 2011, the company was named as one of Europe’s 100 most promising young tech companies by The Telegraph. In a round of funding, led by General Atlantic Klarna raised a $155M investment. The company also acquired the Israeli company Analyzd specialising in risk management and online payments. Klarna then expanded its services to the US. This expansion has contributed a lot to the growth of Klarna. In the same year, the company’s revenues made it one of the Unicorns in the country.

By 2018, the company registered around 60M users, and around 90,000 online merchants were using Klarna to carry out their payments. In the latest round of funding held in 2019, Klarna raised $460 million, Dragoneer Investment Group, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, HMI Capital, Merian Chysalis Investment Company Limited being the major investors. This funding round made the company value at $5.5 billion, and it became the largest fintech start-up in Europe.

Through the story of Klarna, we definitely can say that hard work can really change one’s life if it is put in the right direction.

Civic Champs

Civic Champs : An App that Helps Nonprofit Organisations to Manage their Volunteers

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In a world, where everyone is delving deeper into the competitiveness seeking powerful jobs in the corporate world, let’s have a look at the story of Civic Champs, a mobile app that is helping the nonprofit organizations manage to volunteer. According to Geng Wang and Ryan Underdahl, the founders of Civic Champs, the nonprofit organizations should focus more on their aim and less on tracking volunteers. So, as an initiative to help organizations like these, with a bigger goal to improve our world, they founded Civic Champs in 2019. It has not even been a month that the company has been established, but it is receiving unexpected appreciation and support.

The Founders

Wang went to Michigan State University and completed his Bachelor’s in Supply Chain Management and International Relations in 2008, after which, he went to Harvard to complete his MBA. Wang has a very versatile career profile as he worked as a summer intern in Shell Oil Company, worked as a content manager in a business centre, business analyst at McKinsey and Company, a summer associate at Cue Ball Capital and not to mention deeply engaged in volunteering.

Wang has also co-founded TeamCartoon.com, Rent Jungle and Community Elf. He also served as a board member at Drizzle, Advisory Board Member at The Bee Corp and Clever Real Estate. Wang is still a part of The Bee Corp even after founding Civic Champs.

Civic Champ founder
Image Source: zimbio.com

After graduating from Boise State University in 2010 with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Underdahl went to Kelly School of Business under Indiana University after seven long years. In these span of seven years, Underdahl served as a District Manager (Gitanjali Gems Ltd), Store Manager (Signet), Intern at LRAP Association and currently as the CEO of Civic Champs.

During Underdahl’s days in LRAP Association, he came across Wang and both of them together along with three other employees decided to open Civic Champs.

What is Civic Champs and how it works?

Wang, along with Underdahl, created Civic Champs to help the nonprofit organizations easily deal with volunteering. The platform is created nearly six months ago as a great initiative for social upliftment. Both the volunteers and the nonprofit organizations can interact with each other in a hassle-free and efficient way, thus, making the work of such organizations even easier.

The first and the only, product of the company till date is a mobile-first platform through which the nonprofit organizations can track volunteering and can engage with them. The mobile-based application of Civic Champs is available for iPhone. Like every other application, Civic Champs also uses GPS technology, and along with that, a geofence. A geofence is a part of modern GPS technology that creates a virtual geographical boundary and based on that, the users are alerted when a volunteer is leaving or entering in a particular zone. Basically, once the data is used from a volunteer’s phone it gets tracked, and hence, the users receive an update.

The volunteers, thereby, receive messages from the organizations, if they are free to volunteer, and the app keeps a record of the volunteer hours, by collecting relevant information. Since the app is created for the nonprofit organizations, Civic Champs also receives a donation from the volunteers working for them.

The question may arise that how can there be so many enthusiastic people in a town who can be interested to volunteer for the nonprofit organizations.

Talking about that, My Sister’s Closet is one of the nonprofit organizations that are registered to Civic Champs. The organization provides professional training to low-income women and especially to those women who are not socially accepted. More than 350 people volunteer in this organization through the website of Civic Champs. With the help of Civic Champs’ database, the organisation keeps the data of the volunteers, and without wasting any time, it reaches to them whenever they require them. The story is the same for many other organizations.

The Team and Funding

Within the period of six months, Civic Champs has raised $312,000 in the pre-seed round. The company’s headquarters are based in Great Lakes, Midwestern U.S., and the team currently comprises of ten members. A great initiative taken by Civic Champs has inspired people to sign up both as a volunteer as well as donors, and it will flourish more in the near future.

belkin

Chet Pipkin : The ‘Low Profile’ Wealthiest Tech Person in the U.S.

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Most of the people are desperate to get fame, and for that, they don’t mind doing anything. But there are some people who believe in sheer hard work, and no fame is more important for them than their work. So despite having achieved a lot in life, the popularity does not affect them, and they rather try to stay away from the limelight. One such personality is Chester J. Pipkin (aka Chet Pipkin), the founder, chief executive and chairman of Belkin International, a company that manufactures and deals in computer hardware and peripheral devices.

Early Life

Chet Pipkin was born in a working-class family in California. His father worked as a machinist in World War II, and his mother was a machine operator in aircraft factories. Since his parents never had gone to a college, they wanted Pipkin to join one.

Pipkin was always interested in history, so he went on to opt for history as his major in college and joined the UCLA university. But soon, amid the revolution that the personal computers were ready to bring, he decided to switch to computer science as his graduation subject. Meanwhile, he also joined a part-time job at an electronics company to earn his daily expenses. He then joined the YMCA as a camp counsellor, he met his future wife Janice.

Chet pipkin
Image Source: theaustralian.com

Founding Belkin International

While working and attending school, he realised that though people are getting familiar with the new personal computers, they still find it difficult to connect the computers with the printers. This brought him an idea to invent cable assemblies that would help people easily connect computers with printers, and he started Belkin in his parent’s two-car garage.

Caught up between studies, job and his own business, he decided to drop off from the college. But soon, he realised that he was more focused on Belkin, so he had to leave his job too. So finally, he started to work solely on Belkin and established the company in 1983. In the beginning, he worked on inventing cables to connect printers and modems. The company’s first product was the Belkin Hamlet, which was made to connect an Apple IIc computer to the non-Apple printers.

While trying to establish the business, it was not a smooth ride, and like every other startup, he had to go through a lot of ups and downs. But he did not come out of these situations with regrets or discouragements, but life lessons. Despite the challenges, the company earned a $100,000 revenue in the first year of its inception.

Developing and selling the PC hardware for around 6-7 years, Belkin moved its focus to the USB storage devices in the early 90s. Since then, the company has focused on reinventing things and has become a leader in the field of IoT devices manufacturing and selling.

Since Chet Pipkin has always been low-profile about him as well his company, there has been no information on the revenues for the past many years. But the company is surely in profit. Pipkin has even kept the company private despite the trend of silicon valley companies going for their IPO within 4-5 years of tasting success.

In 2013, Belkin International acquired the Cisco Systems, and its further units, including Linksys. Since then, Belkin has been dealing in three divisions, Belkin International, Linksys and WeMo. Linksys deals in the data networking hardware products, whereas WeMo sells devices like wireless chargers, screen protectors, USB-C cables.

The success of Belkin has made Chet Pipkin one of the wealthiest men in the U.S.

Achievements

Belkin has been named in the Inc.’s ‘500 Fastest growing privately held companies in the United States’ list multiple-times. It has also been among the ‘Los Angeles Technology Fast 50 Company’ around nine times. The company also got featured around six times in the LA Business Journal’s list of ‘100 Fastest-growing Privately Held Companies’.

On the other hand, being the owner of such an innovative company, Chet also has been a finalist in the ‘Los Angeles Entrepreneur of the Year Awards’ three times. He even won the ‘Southern California Regional Award’ in 1996. He has also featured in the ‘Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame’ of the Dealerscope Magazine in 2006. Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce awarded him the ‘Lifetime Still Achieving’ in 2013.

snaplogic

SnapLogic : One of the “Coolest” Cloud Platform Companies

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Another software company in the marketplace to deal with data integration is excelling in the field and satisfying millions of customers worldwide. The company provides clients with better and many efficient tools to connect applications and transfer data in a hassle-free way. Gaurav Dhillon’s company, SnapLogic was founded in 2006 and is majorly known for web data integration. After the internet has bathed the world with a new aura of possibilities, companies like SnapLogic had reached cloud eleven. The never-ending demand of cloud data sources, SaaS applications and most importantly, efficient data transfer gives a pictorial representation of the success of SnapLogic.

The Founder

SnapLogic was fully functional and became public from 2006. Before Dhillon created SnapLogic, he was already a founder of 2 more start-ups, including Informatica Corp and jaman.com.

Dhillon created Informatica, a software company in 1993 based in California, the United States with $75,000 provided to him by the National Institute of Health. He didn’t have many facilities then, so with this little amount of capital, he started the company in his garage. Informatica was quite a success, and it was acquired in 2015 for $5.3billion.

Snaplogic founder
Image Source: cbronline.com

Dhillon’s next start-up was Jaman.com, which was founded in 2005 in California as well. The website ceased all its operations in 2017. Jaman was a site that provided movie discovery sites and thus, let users download videos on demand.

SnapLogic

EAI stands for enterprise application integration, and this is what Dhillon’s interest lied upon. After Informatica emerged as one of the most successful start-ups in the world of EAI, Dhillon’s passion triggered to create more in this area. According to him, a lot of areas was unexplored in this field, and he buckled up to roll the stones.

So SnapLogic was created in 2006 after Dhillon himself invested in this business, and in 2009, he became the CEO of the company. The main focus of Dhillon was to reduce the problems the users faced with cloud computing. The company is based in San Mateo, California and serves throughout the world.

Success of SnapLogic

The first big news of SnapLogic was raising $2.3million in Series A funding in 2009. The prime investors were Andreessen Horowitz, Maples Investments, Brian McClendon (Google Engineering Vice President), Naval Ravikant and a few more. After the closing of this funding round, Dhillon was declared the CEO of the company, and he announced that the money will be invested in improving the DataFlow platform. The data integrating solution of SnapLogic turned out to be very useful for SaaS applications and websites, like SalesForce, Twitter, and SugarCRM, etc.

In 8th December 2010, Dhillon announced that the company has raised $10million in Series B funding, and new technologies have been incorporated in the products of SnapLogic, which is both time and cost-efficient. After this funding round, Dhillon planned to expand the business in the European market. One of the biggest success of SnapLogic was that it became the world’s first company to integrate data that existed both on-premise and in the cloud. This was followed by the launch of elastic integration in June 2013, which made application integration in the clouds even simpler. By the end of 2013, SnapLogic provided the users with 150 various data connectors for applications like SAP and Oracle.

On 10th December 2015, SnapLogic raised $37.5 million in the funding round led by Microsoft, Silver Lake Waterman, Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, and Triangle Peak Partners. At the end of this year, the net worth of SnapLogic turned out to be $96.3million. By this time, machine learning and artificial intelligence already started spreading like a wildfire in the tech market. Taking a note, the company made a very smart move by introducing the SnapLogic Integration Assistant, an AI-powered product of the company in May 2017. In this year, the company also raised $136.3 million from the existing investors.

SnapLogic Today

The latest and one of the biggest successes in the history of SnapLogic is Gartner naming the company (SnapLogic) as a leader in the Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) Magic Quadrant for four consecutive years. The fascinating performance of SnapLogic in data integration has driven the world crazy with more time-efficient and better ways to connect applications and integrate data.

omnivis

OmniVis : Medical Science Meets Technology to Make the World Better and Disease Free

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In the bigger picture, the present condition of our world is no less than mayhem. On the one hand, science is creating wonders with technology making our lives easier but on the other hand, millions of people are dying every day due to lack of treatment and development in medical science. Who is to blame for this? Are we way too ignorant to make significant contributions in the medical community? Or the price is so high that we have blatantly stopped trying? There are so many people dying every minute suffering from incurable diseases or due to late detection of infections in their body. Though the renowned and biggest research centres of our world are working together to invent instruments that can easily detect diseases, they are way too costly for common citizens.

With the zeal to alter the future of our world and stop it from destruction, four scholars of Purdue University, Katherine Clayton, Tamara Kinzer-Ursem, Jacqueline Linnes and Steve Wereley, came up with a unique solution to detect infectious and deadly diseases, which are both times efficient and affordable. With the mission to create affordable medical equipment, these four enlightened minds founded OmniVis, a company that will reach out to common people, help them detect disease and make out society better in terms of well-being.

Founders of OmniVis

Currently, Katherine Clayton is the CEO of the company with Ursem, Linnes and Wereley working as the Advisors.

Katherine Clayton Founder OmniVis
Image Source: halcyonhouse.org

Clayton, who is originally from San Francisco, went to Pursue University to complete her PhD in mechanical engineering. When she was an undergraduate student, she had already decided to work with healthcare products and make easy infection and disease detection equipment available to common people. When Clayton was a kid, she lost someone very close to her, due to the absence of better tools in the medical field, and hence, this was the beginning of her dream to do better for the community. She, with other three scholars, co-founded OmniVis in 2017, and since then, it has received worldwide support and funding.

Ursem is associated with Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering as an assistant professor which is under Purdue University. Her main area of research involves molecular biology, computational biology and neuroscience.

Linnes is also an assistant professor in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering as well. The Linnes Lab basically works to create technologies that can detect pathogens in a time-efficient way and stop them from propagating. She also has her own start-up, PotaVida founded in April 2010. The company’s goal is to develop pocket-friendly water purifiers and reach to the rural areas of the entire world.

Currently, Wereley is a professor at the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. His specialised fields are fluid mechanics and optics. He is also the founder of a company called Microfluidics Innovations.

The Idea

Since all of them belonged to a strong research background, OmniVis emerged out as a successful idea. More than a business, it is really an idea that inspired every company, research institutes throughout the world. OmniVis has created products that can detect Cholera with less than an hour with its concepts and techniques.

Currently, OmniVis works with iPhone but soon it will incorporate the software in Android and start testing the beta version. OmniVis works in a simple process with few steps, collect the sample, detect pathogen and map location. OmniVis detects and shows the location on the map from where the sample was taken to alert the authorities. And all of these are getting done within 30 minutes with the technology of OmniVis.

The Achievements

In 2017, OmniVis acquired the first place in Vodafone Wireless Innovation Project funded by Vodafone Foundation. In 2018, OmniVis was nominated for World Changing Idea Finalist. In June 2018, the company received Phase I SBIR Grant from National Science Foundation. In the same year, OmniVis won the 2018 AMPLIFY Pitch Competition where participants from 46 different countries participated. After winning the Biological Innovation Award in February 2019, OmniVis took a step ahead and expanded out of Indiana. In May 2019, the team reached out to Bangladesh and shared the benefits of OmniVis products with them.

Some of the major investors at OmniVis are Vodafone Foundation, Deloitte, Fast Company, Purdue University, halcyon and many more.

cookpad

Cookpad : Success Story of the Largest Recipe Sharing Platform

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In earlier times, it was the dinner table where people had most of their interactions and the family members connected with each other. Slowly, the time changed, and people were more into buying readymade food and eat it alone. We can call it a lack of time that people no more find time to sit and eat food with their family. This way, people also started forgetting the recipes of traditional food and preferred not to cook. But there is a man named Aki Sano, the founder of Cookpad, who understands the value of self-cooked food. It not only helps people save a lot of money but also keeps people in touch with their traditions.

Aki Sano founded Cookpad about 22 years ago in Japan. It is not that he hit the idea, and the startup was an instant success. There were a number of incidents that took place before Cookpad could really be one of the largest online recipe-sharing platforms in the world.

About the Founder

Aki Sano is a Japanese entrepreneur, who was born on 1 May 1973 in Tokyo, Japan and studied at Keio University, Tokyo. He had always been interested in technology as well as alternative energy. When he was in high school, he built solar-powered cars. Following his passion, he took alternative energy as a subject at the university. He then went to attend a one year Solar Summer Camp, too. Later, during his graduation, he also made it to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) conference in New York. Though he found the conference quite boring and dull, he met an interesting fellow from West Indies named Abdu.

Aki Sano Cookpad
Image Source: cookpadteam.com

Abdu had got a degree from the US but returned to his homeland, where he grew his own vegetables and did farming. Sano found it quite interesting, and it had a great impact on him. Back to Japan, while buying vegetables from a supermarket, Sano realised that he was about to buy imported vegetables when he could get fresh ones from across the road from the local farmers. This incident and meeting with Abdu got him to sell vegetables from the farmers to the students at the university.

He managed to join in many farmers who would deliver vegetables to the students at the university who had placed the orders, and if there were any extra veggies, they would sell those to people passing by. This way, it became a huge business, and Sano had to build a website for the same. This, eventually, became his first startup. He managed the business for two years, and after two years, it was the time to graduate. His friends had started cracking the interviews with companies and were already placed. But Sano was still thinking of what he should do.

Founding Cookpad

With his experience with the vegetable selling business as well as his interest in corporate business, he decided to start his company and named it COIN. But despite he launched the company, he had no idea what he would be producing or selling. He ended up with three ideas, expanding his vegetable selling business, build products that endorse alternative energy or do something around housing. But eventually, he discarded all those ideas and came with Cookpad.

Initially, Cookpad was known as Kitchen@Coin, which was a side by side business that he was running along with a full-time job. The idea behind the startup was that people were avoiding cooking food and ultimately, buying the vegetables, just because they did not have the right recipes. With Cookpad, he wanted people to find the right recipe to cook the right food. It was a subscription-based service, where people could put their food recipes. The subscription fee for the platform was $5 per month. Sano set the target of 50,000 people joining the platform within two months, but only 100 people joined the platform and that too, in three months.

This discouraged Sano badly, and he asked his subscribers how he could return the money as he had decided to close the platform. But for his surprise, the subscribers were ready to pay more to keep the service going. This way, he made the service free for his subscribers and changed the name Kitechen@Coin to Cookpad in June 1999.

The Success

By March 2002, the company started advertising the business across the country. In September 2004, Cookpad launched premium service for the users. After two years, the company launched its first mobile service naming it as MOBAREPI. It then announced a premium service for the MOBAREPI users as well, in November 2008. Cookpad hosted its IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on July 2009. This was the time when the company really saw the success and had earned revenues increased by 80 per cent.

Cookpad was named in the list of the TSE Mothers in July 2009. By 2010, the company started expanding across borders and opened its first office in California, USA, followed by opening one in Singapore in 2011. Today, the company has its offices in countries, including the UK, Spain, Indonesia, Lebanon, Brazil, India, Taiwan, Hungary, Greece, Russia, etc. The company has established its international headquarters in Bristol, UK.

Today, Cookpad has got around 5 million registered recipes on it and hosts 40 million monthly unique users globally. Sano stepped down from the post of the CEO of Cookpad, and in 2014, he owned a 44% stake in the company, which valued more than $1 billion. In 2016, Sano ranked at #42 in the Forbes Japan’s 50 Richest 2016 list.