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Waymo

Waymo – Facilitating Safe Movement Of People And Goods With Autonomous Driving Technology.

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Tesla is very much ahead of its time in terms of autonomous driving technology. But names like Alphabet are also trying to expand in the very field and provide its customer with the best of them all. Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, has another subsidiary named Waymo, which dedicatedly works to developing autonomous driving technology. In fact, the said company also runs a commercial self-driving taxi service in the Arizona region, named Waymo One, the only self-driving taxi service. The taxis under this project runs without having a standby driver for emergencies. Apart from Waymo’s self-driving taxis, the software developed by the company is also used by some other car companies, like Stellantis, Jaguar, Daimler AG, Land Rover, Volvo, and Nissan-Renault.

About Waymo

Waymo LLC is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. and has its headquarters based in Mountain View, California, U.S. It is a 13-years-old company founded in January 2009 by Sebastian Thrun and Anthony Levandowski. Till 2016, Google was the parent company of Waymo when it started a self-driving car project in 2009, but in 2016 Alphabet became the parent company of the same, when the same project had a name change to Waymo. Dmitri Dolgov and Dmitri Dolgov (Co-CEO) Tekedra Mawakana are leading Waymo as the co-CEOs.

The basic concept behind the idea of Waymo is to avoid the accidental deaths that happen due to various negligence reasons of humans. The company makes use of artificial intelligence, sensors, and hardware-enhanced vision system to provide safer transit for both humans and goods.

Waymo
Image source: bwbx.io

Founding Waymo

Waymo wasn’t founded as a company but was launched as a project by Google in its Google X lab. The project was headed and launched by Sebastian Thrun, who had gained much experience in artificial intelligence after being a part of organisations like SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) and Anthony Levandowski. During 2006-07, Google was already working on improving its maps and street view, and for that, the Street View team of Google has launched Ground Truth, a project that became the basis of Google’s self-driving program.

Anthony Levandowski, the other co-founder of Wymo, was also in self-driving vehicles and had built an autonomous two-wheeled motorcycle named Ghost Rider for the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge. Being a Google employee, Levandowski sold his technology to Google, which was an addition to Google’s self-driving program. In 2012, Google obtained a driverless technology license from the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), and it carried out its first experiment with the self-driven car. The license was the first of its kind in America.

Under project Chauffeur, Google launched a new driverless car prototype (100% autonomous) without any steering wheel, gas pedal, and brake pedal in May 2014. Another prototype came in December with the name Firefly, mainly built for learning and experimentation. In 2015, the company introduced the world’s first fully driverless ride on public roads, and the experiment included no test driver.

This project Chaufwur was renamed Wayno in 2016 and was established as a start-up company as well as a subsidiary of Alphabet. By October 2017, the company was testing driverless minivans on roads, and in 2019, it started to build its cars in a Detroit manufacturing plant. Waymo also started integrating its technology into the existing car models rather than building new designs for them. In 2020, the company raised a sum of $3 billion from its various investors. The same year, Waymo also partnered with Volvo for the integration of its technology into Volvo’s vehicles.

The CEO at Waymo

Dmitri is a Russian-American businessman, whereas Tekedra has been a lawyer and a well-known businesswoman in America.

Dmitri is an alumnus of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, where he earned a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science degree in physics and math. He also got a PhD degree in computer science from the University of Michigan and a postdoctoral from Stanford University. He has vast experience in the field of self-driving technology and has worked at Toyota and Google.

Tekedra, on the other hand, was already working at Waymo as the COO before she held the post of CEO. She has also worked with companies like Steptoe & Johnson, AOL, Yahoo!, eBay, etc. Tekedra holds a Doctorate in law.

SenseTime

SenseTime – A Chinese AI Unicorn That Came Up With Some Of The World’s Most Advanced Technologies.

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Based in Hong Kong, SenseTime is known as the world’s most valuable AI (artificial intelligence) company. It was founded in 2014 and within 7 years it has gained unicorn status and developed some of the advanced AI algorithms. A computer science professor, Tang Xiao’ou, and a computer scientist, Xu Li co-founded the company with others. It started as an academic project and by 2019 its valuation became $4.5 billion. It has landed some of the biggest conglomerates as its clients including Alibaba, Honda, Qualcomm, and Weibo.

About The SenseTime

It is almost hard to believe that a young seven-year-old company develops such advanced Ai-based technologies that it is one of the finest in the world. The company develops AI technology including image and facial recognition, object detection, medical image analysis, video analysis, remote sensing, etc. Its products are used in several different industries from entertainment to healthcare.

When the company was founded in 2014, it developed DeepID, a facial recognition algorithm that was the first of its kind to detect accuracy better than human eyes. SenseTime is working with the Chinese government on a project to make the country economically autonomous by 2025. Currently, SenseTime is a privately-held company.

SenseTime
Image source: wire19.com

Early History

In October 2014, Tang Xiao’ou and Xu Li co-founded SenseTime and in the founded year it unveiled the best algorithm for better detection accuracy than human eyes. This algorithm is called DeepID and it is even ahead of Facebook. The company also presented and published several papers on computer vision and they were accepted into the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

Within one year of its establishment, a total of 9 papers were accepted. In 2016, the company enrolled itself in the ImagineNet competition and it bagged the first price in several fields including object detection, video object detection, and scene analysis. The number of papers accepted in the CVPR Conference also rose to 16 by the end of the year.

Success Of SenseTime

In 2017, SenseTime broke all of the records of past company’s in the AI industry in terms of the highest rounds of financing. The number of publications kept on increasing and by the year-end, it surpassed both Google and Facebook with 43 publications. It was in the same year that SenseTime raised $410 million in the Series B funding. SenseTime started collaborating with several companies and government bodies of China. For example, in October 2017 it started a joint venture with Qualcomm followed by collaborating with Shanghai Municipal Government, and Honda by the end of the year.

In 2018, the company declared a collaboration with MIT for advanced research in the field of AI but after a couple of years, the program was canceled by MIT. In April 2018, a non-profit AI lab called HKAI Lab was founded to make Hong Kong a global AI hub. SenseTime founded this lab jointly with Alibaba and the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation. SenseTime was also named as China’s National Open Innovation Platform for Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence on Intelligent Vision in September 2018.

Recent Days

Since 2014, SenseTime has tried to develop more advanced AI technologies that are equally focused on the research and development side of the company apart from the business part. In 2019, it became the first company in the world to join MIT’s Quest for Intelligence Campaign. The company is planning to go public as it filed IPO this year on the Hong Kong exchange. Though the company has given the world’s largest computer vision model, the profit curve is not very impressive. SenseTime heavily invests in R&D (60% of funding) and plans to expand to more and more industries both in domestic and overseas countries.

About The Founders

Tang Xiao’ou, apart from being the co-founder of SenseTime is also an information engineering professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is an alumnus of MIT and worked at Microsoft Research Area for four years. In 2009, he received the best paper award at CVPR Conference.

Xu Li is the co-founder and current CEO of SenseTime. He studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong followed by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He has published more than 50 academic works in the field of computer vision and won many awards.

Wise

Wise – A Multimillion-Dollar Fintech Company That Emerged Out Of A Sudden Plan.

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Wise is a young fintech company based in Shoreditch, England. Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus founded the company in 2011. Earlier in 2021, Wise went public through a direct listing on London Stock Exchange and it was valued at $11 billion. The journey of Wise refers to one of those stories when two people meeting at a party started talking about their life problems. From figuring out a viable solution to making millions in revenue, Wise has achieved massive success in ten years. The company also received an impressive amount of funding since 2011 which could be because both the founders were already established in their professional careers.

The Idea Behind Wise

Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus both were living in London when they met in 2007. The two co-founders started a conversation at a party only to realize that they share a common problem. Both Kristi and Taavet send money back to their home countries and every month they need to convert the currency. Taavet used to convert his Estonian salary to pounds whereas Kristo converted his salary to Estonian kroon for paying his mortgage. So, initially, these two fellows devised a solution that was exclusively for both of them. Every month Kristo topped up Taavet’s bank account, setting the amounts according to the mid-market exchange rate while Taavet did the same for Kristo. This arrangement helped them make big savings but none of them decided to open up a company.

After Kristo and Taavet made arrangements for themselves the word traveled fast to other Estonian experts. Due to the huge amount of savings that came with the idea, they turned it into a business without any plan of doing it in 2007. In 2011, they officially established this money-exchange forum and it was called TransferWise. The business started flying only after 15 fifteen minutes of TechCrunch publishing an article. Kristo said that the transactions never stopped.

Wise
Image source: www.gavi.org

Executing The Plan

When Kristo and Taavet came up with this idea of overseas transfer, they were both working at different companies. In 2011 they decided to quit their jobs and for the first year, they self-funded the company. The company eventually started attracting many investors that also include the famous billionaire, Peter Thiel. Today, the company processes transactions for more than ten million active customers who save around $1.5 billion every year that goes as bank fees. The first year when Wise operated, the total amount from the transactions summed up to €10 million. The company gained popularity so fast that after a year it was named “East London’s 20 hottest tech startups.”

In 2012 the company was featured by several big magazines as one of the top startups in the country. Till 2013 the company also allowed its users to purchase bitcoin but due to pressure from banking providers, it was discontinued. The same year, a comparison site called Monito revealed that transactions in Wise are 83 cheaper on average as compared to big banks of the UK. In 2015, the company also made it to the top 10 on CNBC’s 2015 Disruptor 50 list. Later in 2015, Wise was named World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer. In February 2021, the company rebranded itself Wise from TransferWise. This rebranding wanted to reflect on the fact that the company has expanded its services as it goes beyond just international money transfers.

About The Founders

Kristo Käärmann is the famous co-founder of an extremely successful startup called Wise (earlier TransferWise). He studied mathematics and computer science and started his career as a consultant at PwC. Before co-founding Wise with Taavet Hinrikus, he worked at Deloitte for more than four years. He is also the current CEO of Wise, which filed its IPO in 2021.

Taavet Hinrikus is a famous entrepreneur and investor who started his career at Halo Interactive DDB. It worked at several companies before co-founding Wise that also includes being the Director of Strategy at Skype. After he and Kristo came up with the solution of overseas transfer, he spread the word on Skype which helps them gain a potential customer base before officially launching the company.

FactSet

FactSet – Solving All Financial Industry Problems Using The Latest Technology.

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The rise of the IT industry has given great opportunities to other fields to level up their game using technology and remain up to date and relevant in today’s changing trends. Thus from hospital industries to aviation, from hospitality to finance, every field has opted to include technology to achieve the required growth in lesser time.
Talking about the finance industry, there has been a rise in the number of fintech companies as well and companies that provide software solutions to such companies. FactSet Research Systems Inc. falls into the latter category, a financial data, and software company that chose a traditional way of working in the beginning, but today is offering services based on the latest technologies. The company is about more than forty years old, but it has tried to walk with the changing trends, and thus, today is known as one of the leading financial data and software companies.

About The Company

Howard Wille and Charles Snyder founded FactSet in 1978. The company is an American financial services company, with its headquarters based in Norwalk, Connecticut, United States. The company is responsible for data integrations, large-scale transitions, reporting, and research analysis, API integration, index services, portfolio data management, etc. It is a publically traded company and trades with the symbol FDS on New York Stock Exchange. In the past 43 years, FactSet has reached 22 countries and has set up offices in 48 different locations. It has over 10000 people working for it globally and made annual revenues worth US$1.49 billion in the financial year 2020. With high revenues in 2020, FactSet became a unicorn 2020.

FactSet
Image Source: financialit.net

Founding FactSet

Howard Wille and Chuck Snyder founded FactSet in 1978. The two co-founders used to be co-workers at Faulkner, Dawkins & Sullivan, Wall Street. At the beginning of the 70s, computers became quite popular for office work, and with the acquisition of Faulkner, Dawkins & Sullivan by Shearson, the two thought of founding a company of their own that would directly sell user data to their clients. Hence in 1978, they founded FactSet, a company that began with delivering data on paper to the clients under the program, “Company FactSet”.
During the early 80s, FactSet offered its clients the option to download data directly to their spreadsheets, making the process simpler for the clients. In 1989, the company also started a new and advanced service with the name Private Database Service. The service helped users directly include the proprietary data into their research information.
In the next decade, Company released its software for Windows operating system and expanded overseas by establishing offices in countries like London and Tokyo. During the mid-90s, the company was serving the top investment managers in the US. In 1995, FactSet was renamed FactSet Research Systems Inc., and the next year, it went public on NYSE in 1996. In further years, the company released platforms like Portfolio Management Workstation, Economic Analysis, and Company Explorer. Along with those platforms, it also introduced the DIRECTIONS interface and Online Assistant for those platforms. It also started a 24*7 customer care telephone service in 1999.
In the next few years, the Company included more products and applications such as SPAR, Data Central, Marquee, IBCentral, etc. Later, the company merged DIRECTIONS interface, Marquee, and IBCentral into one, to form FactSet, a more versatile product for the FactSet clients. In further years, FactSet made some acquisitions including of Thomson Fundamentals database (2008), Market Metrics (2009), StreetAccount (2012), Revere Data (2013), Code Red Inc (2015), Vermilion (2016), BISAM (2017), Data Managed Solutions (2017), Truvalue Labs (2020), etc., adding to the growth of the company.

The CEO At FactSet

F. Philip Snow is the current CEO of FactSet. He is a B.A. graduate in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley and holds a Master’s degree in International Management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Snow started his career by working at companies like Global Content Sales and Americas Sales. He joined FactSet in 1996 and served the company in different positions. For a long time, he handled the Asia Pacific regions for FactSet, operating from Tokyo and Sydney. In 2015, he became the CEO at FactSet. He is also a board member of the company.

SMIC

SMIC – The Largest Semiconductor Foundry Company in Mainland China.

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SMIC is famous as a leading semiconductor foundry company across the globe for its advanced technology and comprehensive semiconductor manufacturing services. SMIC was born in 2000 in the Cayman Islands and is currently headquartered at Shanghai, China. Richard Chang Ru-gin is the founder of the company and Haijun Zhao is the latest CEO. SMIC Group primarily focuses on providing integrated circuit (IC) foundry and technology services related to it on a specific range of process nodes (350 nm to 14 nm). SMIC is well known in international markets including Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and the US.

Founding History of SMIC

SMIC was founded out of strong desires of Richard Chang to invest in the Chinese market as he believed that a booming economy will reestablish harmony in the nation. Twenty years ago, the semiconductor industry in mainland China wasn’t superior in the market and didn’t have any international standards. Before Richard established SMIC, his main target was to make mainland China a superpower which advanced tech in manufacturing semiconductors so that it can match up to the nations who are leading in it.

SMIC
Image source: www.mobileworldlive.com

Richard had big plans for his nation and this zeal drove him to finally establish SMIC in 2001 at Shanghai’s High-tech Zhangjiang Park located in Pudong New Area. SMIC became the first successful leading company from mainland China in the semiconductor industry to expand its market even in international grounds. And with the contributions made by Richard Chang he is known as the “father of the Chinese semiconductors.”

Uncertain Times

Initially, when company was established it became a limited liability company in the Cayman Islands. SMIC operated in a way that it was not responsible for the capital costs and the municipal government took care of it. When the company was eventually growing in the Chinese market, the Taiwanese were threatened by a potential emerging semiconductor superpower. They tried in several unethical ways to bring down the reputation of both SMIC and Richard Chang.

Only two years after founding the company, TSMC (world’s largest semiconductor foundry) filed a lawsuit against SMIC accusing it of obtaining TSMC’s trade secret and other infringement. But, Richard on the other hand worshipped the Chinese semiconductor sector and no matter what he wasn’t ready to give up. Chang’s determination is one of the reasons why China can compete with big nations like the US in the semiconductor market.

Growth and Expansion of SMIC

SMIC started making significant progress from the last decade starting with embarking on a joint venture in 2013. Next year, SilTech Shanghai, a wholly owned subsidiary of SMIC along with JCET, and China IC Fund signed a co-investment agreement for forming a consortium. This was formed for the proposed acquisition of a very valuable acquisition of STATS ChipPAC, a Singapore-based company. In 2015, SMIC entered into another joint venture with Huawei, Qualcomm, and IMEC International to form SMIC Advanced Technology Research & Development Corporation. SMIC built a very advanced R&D facility which aimed at designing China’s most advanced integrated circuit (IC). The partnership of company with other three companies mainly focused on developing 14 nm logic technology.

In 2016, company acquired 70% of the corporate capital of LFoundry S.r.l. €49 million. SMIC throughout the following years have focussed on establishing and maintaining strong relationships with other semiconductor corporations especially the ones based in China. The very idea behind founding SMIC was to strengthen China wholly as a superior semiconductor entity and it will continue if the companies remain united. In 2018, SMIC was investing 16 percent of sales in R&D and the company started building China’s first ever plant which aimed to use 14 nm production technology. Last year, China National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund and the Shanghai Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund made an investment of $2 billion in the company as a part of the Made in China 2025 Program.

About Richard Chang Ru-gin

Richard Chang is a famous person who is single handedly responsible for uplifting the semiconductor industry in China. At a very young age, Richard moved from Shanghai to Taiwan and later went to the US and acquired his PhD in electrical engineering from Texas. In 1977, Richard joined Texas Instruments ton emrak on his chipmaker career and was involved in the operations of the company in several nations. After entering the chip industry, his one and only goal was to make China catch up with the rest of the world in terms of cutting edge tech. So, in 1997 he came back to Taiwan and a few years later he established SMIC and created an empire for mainland China to embrace forever.

Snowflake Inc

Snowflake Inc – An Eight Years Old Cloud Computing Company to top the Forbes Cloud 100 List

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Cloud Computing in today’s era is a very promising field to both launch a business and get employed. Data storage based on cloud computing has escalated first and it makes access centralized for big enterprises as well as for individuals. Snowflake Inc is a very successful company in the sector of cloud computing-based data warehousing. Benoit Dageville along with Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Zukowski formed the company in July 2012. The company, however, was in stealth mode for two years and was officially launched in 2014. Currently, the company provides cloud-based data storage services and runs on Google Cloud Platform since 2019.

About Snowflake Inc

Benoit along with the other co-founders worked from scratch to build a data platform that will harness the power of cloud storage. The company claims that its platform leverages the two most important elements of the general cloud platform,i.e., elasticity and performance to develop a more flexible product. Snowflake makes sure that the customers can share data both in and out of their organization with the utmost security and without actually copying or moving the data.

Snowflake Inc
Image Source: siliconangle.com

The platform of Snowflake is used by many renowned companies including Adobe, Overstock, Capital One, etc. Over the years, the company has expanded on international grounds and currently, it has more than 1300 partners helping to strengthen the presence of Snowflake Inc. According to the statistics of last year, it had 3,400 active customers in 2020.

The Beginning of Snowflake Inc

Benoit and Thierry knew each other before co-founding Snowflake as they were colleagues while working for Oracle. Back in 2012, Benoit and Thierry discussed how the development of Hadoop will bring change in scenarios for processing large datasets. It was most likely to make the work of Benoit and Thierry obsolete that they were doing in Oracle. So, these led both the co-founders of Snowflake to think about the future and how big data was gradually taking over the data storage service sector. Benoit also realized that even Hadoop is having a few shortcomings like missing key features and overall less efficient. This led to the idea of building a new platform that would overcome both the shortcomings of Hadoop and data warehouses back then.

So, Benoit, Thierry, and Marcin started working on this new data platform from zero and were finally successful in developing it. The system that they created ran ten times faster as compared to any other data storage platform back then for the same cost. After they created the product, they gradually moved forward to the next step and founded Snowflake Inc. The company was named Snowflake because all the co-founders have a love for winter sports. Though the product was successfully developed in 2012, it was two years later that the company was launched publicly by Bob Muglia. In 2015, the product was eventually available and 80 organizations used it back then.

Success of Snowflake

Snowflake has always been one of the top companies in the data storage sector to continuously evolve their product. They are well known for their work culture and innovation that has kept them in business with a strong ground. When the product was developed in 2012, the co-founders started looking for investors and it was a bit difficult to convince people how a data storage platform will evolve in the future and why their system was superior. But, both Benoit and Thierry had a professional background which strengthened their game of networking. So, in August 2012 the company was successful in raising $5 million in Series A funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures.

After it came out of stealth mode in 2014, the company raised another $26 million followed by $45 million in 2015. The next two years were followed by raising a huge amount of money and in 2018 the company’s net valuation became $1.5 billion. Snowflake reached unparalleled heights as it gained unicorn status only after four years of the official launch. Last year, the company became public via an IPO and raised $3.4 billion.

Due to its innovative products, Snowflake has been the recipient of multiple awards and honors including “Cool Vendor” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, acquired the first position at the 2015 Strata + Hadoop World startup competition, ranked No. 1 on LinkedIn’s 2019 U.S, etc.

The Founders

Snowflake Inc Founders
Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Żukowski
Image Source: twitter.com, qconsf.com, and cwi.nl

Benoit Dageville is a French computer scientist who started his career at Bull Information Systems. Before co-founding Snowflake Inc, he worked at Oracle for more than fifteen years. Thierry Cruanes is also a computer scientist who worked at two leading companies, IBM and Oracle before developing Snowflake. Marcin Zukowski also has a very impressive professional career which includes working in multiple companies like Microsoft, Google, CWI, Actian Corporation, etc. Apart from co-founding Snowflake, he also founded Vectorwise.