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CustomerGlu

CustomerGlu Helping Companies Give Customers What They Want

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Artificial Intelligence has picked up tremendously over the last few decades, becoming an integral part of the digital world. Several Indian AI start-ups have been able to make a name for themselves in this highly competitive tech space. The market comprises several niches including, retail, computer vision, image processing, and automation. One particular area wherein AI has tremendous scope, which has not fully materialised yet is in improving e-commerce platforms. CustomerGlu is a company hoping to change all that, by revolutionising the way eCommerce businesses run offers that save money while converting more using AI. Here’s a look at what the company does, and how it has quickly grown to become a leader in the space.

Giving Customers Incentives while improving profitability

The company, formerly known as Marax.AI burst into the scene with their SaaS platform named Mars in 2019. The tool was the first of its kind, helping businesses optimise and personalise their discounting budgets. Using Artificial Intelligence, the platform helped companies run the most optimised discount campaigns for their products. It also used a privacy-first model, assisting companies in reaching out to their target audience across niches and devices. The tool nudged customers into completing a transaction or purchase by providing them with the right discount rate based on a budget.

AI-Driven Approach

The Mars tool utilised deep reinforcement learning principles to recommend and allocate the right discount rate for different users. Furthermore, the software allowed companies to improve their overall marketing, purchasing, and discount experience for users. Also, it did all this without intruding or invading user privacy, making it the perfect tool to reach out to larger audiences. The AI engine monitors data points from the user’s cycle, studying their interactions and behaviour. It then gains an understanding of their intent and engages them through a multistep recommendation process – while considering the cost control constraints for the business. The product aims to help e-Commerce companies improve their net revenues while saving money. CustomerGlu does that by allowing companies to do the following:

  1. Personalise offers, discounts and recommendations on categories, brands, and products for individual users.
  2. Reduce the cost of Offers by optimising the offer’s budget and the product’s discount margins.
  3. After initial integration, users have access to a built-in library of Offer UIs for easy application.

The company now uses Microsoft’s Azure platform to run its SaaS platform which enables it to provide customers with the most competitive prices. CustomerGlu received a grant of $120,000 in credits as they are a part of Microsoft for Startups initiative.

Early Steps

The company came to be in 2016, intending to help online businesses solve issues they had related to churn rates. Since then, the company has grown tremendously, aiding the likes of Rapido in optimising their discount experience. The initial team consisted of Prateek Gupta, Raman Shrivastava, and Sumant Subrahamanya. The team has raised their seed round from the likes of Amit Singhal(Former Head of Google Search), SmartStart, and Artesian.VC. The Bangalore-based offer marketing and AI-powered SaaS start-up also has an office in Palo Alto, California. The main mission of the company is to help businesses improve their net revenues while reducing the cost per transaction. By offering users personalised & optimized offers and discounts, the tool helps eCommerce businesses become more profitable.

Funding and Growth

Marax.AI incubated at a start-up accelerator and seed fund named Axilor. Kris Gopalakrishnan and SD Shibulal, who co-founded Infosys were the brains behind Axilor. The rise in the importance of applied reinforcement learning in marketing to connect analytics with automated actions at the segment of one is what pushed the founders to start something like Mars, which helps companies improve profits on every transaction. The tool solves this problem by contextualizing the offers for higher conversions while reducing the cost per transaction.

Clients and Success

In fact, the use of the Mars tool helped DailyNinja(now acquired by BigBasket) reduce churn by around 17%. CustomerGlu is currently in use by a curated set of early adopters like a preventive healthcare app GOQii(Mumbai) to improve net revenue by 10-30%, and cutting costs by 50-77%. Mumbai-based cosmetics e-commerce company Purplle and Jakarta-based delivery service named Sealog are beginning to use the platform.

Investors and Advisors

The company has also raised funds from Amit Singhal(Former Head of Google Search), SmartStart, and Artesian.VC, and are in talks to raise their next round. They also plan on improving their ML and AI model and want to expand their team to scale their company to broader enterprise markets. The firm also receives support and business advice from PK Gulati, who is the Chairman Emeritus and Founder of the TiE Dubai Chapter and Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni, who has a PhD. in AI from the University of Alberta, assists the team in improving the design of their Reinforcement Learning engine.

From Marax.AI to CustomerGlu

The four-year-old start-up recently repackaged their offerings and launched under the name of CustomerGlu in March 2020. Since the company’s primary aim is to help e-commerce players improve net revenues while reducing the cost per transaction, the new name seems to ‘stick’ well.

What’s next for CustomerGlu?

CustomerGlu takes care of both budgetary constraints and retention goals. By striking the right balance between optimizing profitability and making offers contextual, the company has proven to be a massive success. By 2021, experts predict that over 2.5 Trillion transactions will occur through mobile devices bringing in revenue worth more than $3 Trillion. CustomerGlu aims to help businesses improve their margins by 10-30% leading to billions of dollars in profit. It will be interesting to see how the company expands, reaching out to more businesses, and helping them give their customers exactly what they need!

Vocal for Local Campaign

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced several businesses to focus on digital growth and expansion. Many brick-and-mortar stores and retail outlets are now taking their business online, and foraying into the e-commerce industry. The Indian government’s push for “Vocal for Local” encourages the sale of Indian products and brands. Therefore, Indian companies now have an opportunity to pledge their support for local industries and accelerate the initiative of Atmanirbhar Bharat, or Self-reliant India. CustomerGlu can work with such e-commerce companies and help them with improving conversions and boosting their ROIs.

By using a plethora of strategies and campaigns like Cart Discounts, Product discount recommendations, Reward, and Activity UI programs the company helps companies drive their profitability.

BlueDot

BlueDot is the company to bring a revolutionary change in the healthcare world using AI and ML

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In 2015, Bill Gates while giving a speech at Munich mentioned that nothing is worse for mankind than an outbreak. An infectious pathogen can harm the entire world that no nuclear weapon or natural disaster can do. Looking at the scenario of 2020, the outbreak of COVID-19 has proofed every world of him is true. It’s been around five months that people around the globe have been traumatized by a virus turning our life upside down within a few days. The world will be highly benefited if the probability of such infectious diseases can be predicted with accuracy. BlueDot, a company based in Toronto, Canada has been striving to accomplish it using advanced AI and ML. We are living in a data-driven world where everything is based on the amount of data we receive and transfer every day.

BlueDot is famous for building technology exclusively based on data analysis to predict the risk of such outbreaks. With the help of data science, they create models to observe different areas and timing depending on various factors where a chance of any kind of infectious outbreak is high. They help the government and hospitals to take precautionary measures to minimize the risk of any damages.

Who founded BlueDot?

Kamran Khan is the founder of BlueDot Inc. He founded the company in 2009 and delved deeper into the unexplored world of data science to bring a massive change in the medical world. Kamran Khan has a very strong medical background and that is probably the reason he wanted to do something innovative to save the world from infectious diseases.

Kamran khan has a degree in Doctor of Medicine from the University of Toronto and graduated in 1996. He went to Columbia University in the City of New York and received a degree in Master of Public Health. He started practicing as a Clinician at St. Michaels Hospital from 2003 and still working there. In 2010, he joined the University of Toronto as an Associate Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases. The same year, he also joined the World Health Organization as a Medical Advisor. After three years, he founded BlueDot comprising of a talented bunch of scientists, engineers, data analysts, and experts from other fields to improve global health conditions.

Journey of BlueDot

While working at St. Michaels Hospital, Kamran launched a scientific program called BioDiaspora. This program’s main objective was to study how the spread of infectious diseases is correlated with commercial air travel. Thus, he studied its impact on different populations worldwide. In 2009, the result of this program was implemented to predict the first influenza pandemic of this century. The model of BioDiaspora helped to predict the degree of impact on a global level. The company found out that the air travelers from Mexico were carrying novel influenza without their knowledge to various cities around the world.

In 2012, the company jointly worked with Public Health England to estimate and take precautions at a local level from foreign pathogens. This year, the main field of their research was the spreading of infectious diseases in mass gatherings and how to predict it via mathematical modeling. In 2013, the BioDiaspora received plenty of support from St. Michaels Hospital and MaRS Innovation and got incorporated as Certified B Corporation.

BioDiaspora started expanding slowly and with seed funding from Horizon Ventures, the company established itself rigidly and renamed it as BlueDot. With the help of data science and mathematical modeling, BlueDot in 2014 successfully predicted the migration of the Ebola virus out of West Africa. After a couple of years, the risk assessment models of BlueDot successfully predicted an outbreak of Zika in Florida months before it took place.

Launch of George

Over the years BlueDot received impressive funding. In Series, A funding round the company raised $7 million making its total funding to $9.5 million. Throughout the years, BlueDot has been helping government and healthcare professionals by predicting risks way ahead of time. But, in 2017, BlueDot launched the software George to help common people protect themselves from infectious diseases. This software was mainly launched for travelers who send personalized alerts based on location and how to take preventive measures.

Prediction of COVID-19 outbreak

The algorithms of BlueDot are so brilliantly designed that it was one of the first companies to predict the outbreak of novel coronavirus. In the New Year’s Eve of 2020, BlueDot spread out an alert that an infectious flu-disease has broken out in the city of Wuhan, China. They went through several medical reports, news bulletin, and livestock reports to confirm the prediction. BlueDot is truly doing a commendable job and maybe it would stop the world from witnessing such outbreaks in the future.

ITProTV

Tim Broom and Don Pezet’s ITProTV is providing best IT courses to improve your career

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The IT industry is the most demanding and top-notch sector to find a career opportunity in the 21st century. After a few years from the hyper craze to work in an IT industry many people thought it might reach the saturation level anytime soon. But, with the era of digitalization and the importance of data in our lives that isn’t going to take place for many years. The IT industry has ample job opportunities in various fields like a developer, security, project manager, etc. So, the demands for taking up short-term courses are high especially to gain knowledge on a specific field related to your job role. Responding to the situation where millions of students and young professionals can be benefited, Tim Broom and Don Pezet founded ITProTV in 2012. ITProTV provides online IT training and streams live video every day and video on demand as well. The company provides certification for many IT courses and trainees can choose from a vast no of choices based on their job role, certification type, etc. ITProTV is a subscription-based learning platform.

About Tim Broom and Don Pezet

Tim Broom studied economics from the University of South Florida and graduated in 1990. He also went to Florida Southern College to obtain a bachelor’s degree in Marketing (BS). In 2009, Tim Broom became the President of Mary Mae Financial and after a couple of years founded ITProTV with Don Pezet. He is the CEO of the company.

Before co-founding ITProTV, Don Pezet worked as a Training Manager at New Horizons Computer Learning Center of North Florida. He was associated with that job for twelve years and left in 2013. Currently, he is an Edutainer at ITProTV and Shows Host at EdutainmentLIVE.

How ITProTV was founded?

Before founding ITProTV, both the founders were running some authorized brick and mortar training centers. But, their goal was to build a larger business with recurring revenue. And, it wasn’t going to happen with brick and mortar business. So, they planned a second business idea and shifted to that though they put a lot of hard work on their former business. The second business was founding ITProTV, a SaaS start-up to deliver online IT training.

The company till today is based on Gainesville Florida. To study their new business, Tim and Don sold the brick and mortar company. It is a self-funded business and after four years the annual run rate of ITProTV turned out to be $9 million.

How the platform of ITProTV works?

According to Tim Broom, ITProTV is like the Netflix of the IT industry. We get access to all shows by paying a very small amount monthly or yearly basis. In the case of ITProTV, there’s a huge library with plenty of IT training videos for different roles that are advantageous for job roles as well as new career opportunities. So, after you pay the subscription fees they are all available for a certain period.

Tim also says that they always like to keep the library updated and add new content. According to him, content is the king and since there is new technology coming in the market every day, updates are necessary. The platform of ITProTV contains many high-quality training videos that received Microsoft and similar level certifications. This is one of the reasons why more customers are attracted.

Business Strategies

At first, when they started with a small library of training videos, the subscription fee for a month was $57 and the annual subscription fee was $570. But, in the beginning, they rolled out an impressive 50% discount offer thus bringing down the cost to $28.5 and $285 respectively. They noticed that most of the customers went for a yearly subscription thus paying $285. And, this helped the company to make a million sales.

From 7,000 members in 2014 the number became thrice next year and by the end of 2016, they had 46,000 members. B2B features were launched this year as well. Next year, the number of members almost doubled summing up to 90,000. The company also opened a regional office in 2017. In 2018, ITProTV came in the Inc 500 list and next year it became one of the best companies in Florida.

Currently, the company is providing the knowledge of IoT to its customers in partnership with Certnexus. It started with four courses in 2019 and they are eventually going to add on. Since IoT is an industry worth $450 billion it will scale up the revenue of ITProTV.

spothero

How SpotHero Gave People the Space They Needed Efficiently

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Anyone who has ever had to park a car in a city knows how difficult it is to find the right spot. When SpotHero came out in 2011, it revolutionised the way people looked at parking. No longer did you have to go around town looking for a space to park your car. This digital parking reservation app or service helped people find spots with the click of a button. Drivers no longer had to fight for good spots, or waste time scouring for the right area. So, how did three guys from Chicago change the way people parked their cars? Here’s a look at how SpotHero grew to become one of the best valet services of all time.

About the Service

SpotHero is essentially a digital system for parking reservations. It connects drivers who need a space to park their car, with driving lots, rental areas, and other parking garages. The service has both a mobile-based application and a fully functional website. Since launching in 2011, the service has grown to over 300 cities all around the US and Canada. The company began as a part of Excelerate Labe, which is a tech-incubator based in Chicago. Entrepreneur Troy Henikoff heads operations at Excelerate, helping provide much-needed guidance and support to companies like SpotHero.

Early beginnings

Mark Lawrence spothero
Image Source: Startup Grind

SpotHero was the humble effort of founders Mark Lawrence and Jeremy Smith. Based in Chicago, the duo got the idea for such a service when they saw just how difficult it was for people to find the right spot to park. Co-founder Larry Kiss joined the company soon after, completing the trifecta. The company began as a parking marketplace that helped connect people and rapidly grew into something more substantial. Initially, it helped people rent out their spaces as parking lots, before eventually partnering with existing garages and parking companies.

Funding Rounds

The company raised over $2.5 million through venture capitalists in December 2012. The companies that led that round were Battery Ventures, Bullet Time, OCA Ventures, Lightbank, and New World Ventures. During that time, the service had places and spaces only in Chicago and Milwaukee. Two years later, the company raised an additional $4.5 million and even announced new Directors. In June 2014, the company announced that LinkedIn’s Mike Gamson, VC Sam Guren, and Match.com’s Sam Yagan.

In April 2015, they acquired ParkPlease, which was a parking marketplace based in San Francisco. The same year, they raised through a Series B funding over $20 million, following it up with an additional $30 million through Series C round in July 2017. In the same year, they also acquired Parking Panda, which is an event parking company based in Baltimore. This acquisition helped the company expand its services into Canada, raising the number of locations they had to an excess of 5,000. In 2018, SpotHero raised another $10 million, bringing its grand total to $68 million. However, they outdid themselves and raised another $50 million in August 2019 through a Series D funding. This last round was led by Macquarie Capital, with the total funding raised amounting to $118 million.

Subsequent Growth and Expansion

Within a span of two years, from 2011 and 2013, the company grew from having just five employees to a team of 22. Furthermore, within the same span, they expanded to seven cities, adding Washington, New York, Newark, Baltimore, and Boston to the list. They also opened their own office in New York the same year. Two years later, they had expanded to Denver, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and New Orleans. Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Jeremy Smith left the company in 2015, to take time off for himself from a busy work schedule. In 2016, they added LA, and a year later had another 13 cities in their roster, including Miami, San Diego, and Austin. Since then, SpotHero has grown tremendously, branching out into over 300 cities across North America, partnering with more than 6,500 spaces and garages.

Later Launches

In 2017, they launched SpotHero for Business to help users with business-focused services. It allowed customers to pay, manage and organize all their parking expenses. Furthermore, the company launched a developer platform to enable businesses to integrate their services with their applications. In May of the same year, SpotHero partnered with WageWorks, which is a commuter-employee benefits service provider. This partnership allowed customers to pay for daily parking spots. They also cooperated with Hertz and Google Assistant to ready over 500 parking areas for driverless cars in Chicago.

Last year, they teamed up with Moovit, which works within the transit space to offer parking near stations in San Francisco. The move went a long way in helping ease the traffic congestion due to delayed parking in the Bay Area. The company is also in talks with Google’s navigation app Waze, to integrate their navigation and parking in a bid to improve user experience.

Thanks to their consistent efforts, parking around the US has become less stressful and easy. By helping over 10,000 people in every city they service, SpotHero has brought on a parking revolution that is giving people the space they craved for, simply and effortlessly.

eleks

Eleks- The best Ukrainian company to bag the IoT App Development award 2020

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Hearing thousands of success stories every day, reading inspirational biographies of successful businessmen, but how many of them are Ukrainian? Yes, it is true that though many multinational companies emerge out from the lands of the U.S.A and Europe, we haven’t heard much about the success stories of Ukrainian business tycoons. To be honest, how much we do know about their economical growth at all? So, today let’s talk about one of the most successful IT companies in the country, Eleks. Eleks was founded back in 1991 by Oleksiy Skrypnyk and his son Oleksiy Skrypnyk, Jr. The journey of almost three decades has witnessed a roller coaster ride. Today, the company’s headquarters are based on Lviv, Ukraine. Once started as a small team, Eleks today has around 1,500 employees.

What is Eleks?

Founded in 1991, Eleks is a software company that is famous for providing customized software engineering and consulting services. The company has a significant presence in many places outside Ukraine such as Canada, Germany, Poland, United Kingdom, etc. The clients of Eleks are rich in diversity coming from fields like healthcare, finance, entertainment, retail, and many more.

Apart from custom software development, the company also builds and excels in technologies like virtual reality, designing drones, data science, and high-quality research. With time, the company has bagged many prestigious awards as well.

About Oleksiy Skrypnyk, Jr

Though founded by Oleksiy Skrypnyk, Eleks was mainly built and taken over by Oleksiy Skrypnyk, Jr. Born on 8th March 1964; Oleksiy belonged to a family of scholars and researchers. Oleksiy went to Lviv Polytechnic Institute and graduated in 1986 from the Faculty of Electricity. After graduating, Oleksiy was the Engineer of the Central Dispatcher Service followed by Deputy of CDS on ASDC (Lvivenergo).

In 1991, Oleksiy along with his father and mother built the software company ELEKS. For nine years, he was the Technical Director at Eleks followed by becoming the Director and then CEO in 2010. After four years, he resigned from the company and showed interest in a parliamentary election. Apart from political life, Oleksiy shows a high interest in new technologies and entrepreneurship.

Journey of Eleks

Founding Eleks in 1991 was a sign of an independent Ukraine that was going to flourish in every aspect of the upcoming years. Back in those days, common people hardly knew about the internet and how can IT companies bring a big revolution, that is, digitalization. So, Oleksiy built Eleks with the motive to solve the real-world crisis with the application of science and upgraded technology. Little did he know that his products will be used worldwide after a few years from then?

Eleks became famous especially among the over newly independent Soviet states after launching DAKAR, a product to solve the complex power grid. DAKAR helped large power systems to do real-time analysis and provide stability. The product became very famous, especially among Eastern European power companies. Some of the products of Eleks are so flexible that they are still in demand though created twenty-five years from now.

Eventually, the start-up culture started gaining appreciation worldwide and the demand for Eleks’s custom made software increased simultaneously. It started gaining customers from a variety of niche starting from business analytics firms to agriculture. Today, Ukraine is in a position way above from where it started back in the 1990s.

Expansion and Success

Eleks is not only one of the top IT companies in Ukraine but also among the world’s top 100 best outsourcing companies. The area of interest of Eleks keeps on expanding as innovation fuels the spirit of the company and this is one of the best characteristics of the company. Though it is an outsourcing company providing consultancy, building apps, and other software products, the company provides equal attention to R&D.

Eleks’ R&D is the core foundation of their business and probably the main reason why their products are making gigantic success. In 2016, the company said that they are not only experimenting with new technologies but also with the business model. This will help the company offer ideas from R&D as a new service as well. Moreover, every enterprise is unique in its way of dealing with unique clients with needs different from others. So, building a product for the common mass is helpful but only up to a certain level. Creative technology and strategies exclusive to a particular client are what attracts them in the first place.

According to Eleks, responding to the huge diversity of clients with their proper needs is what makes them bigger and better every day. So, the company also chooses to hire employees who have a deep interest in R&D and would invest significant time in new projects.

Awards and Recognition 

Some of the biggest awards that Eleks has received are National Winner in the 2017-18 European Business Award, Bronze Stevie Award in 2018 International Business Awards, Top IT Outsourcing Companies in USA & Europe (2019), Top IoT App Development Companies and Developers 2020, etc.

TeamViwer

TeamViewer – A German start-up to make significant progress in the Internet of Things (IoT)

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The demand for IoT will not have a flat curve for any time as soon as progress in digital communication is expanding. With the advent of the internet followed by the massive revolution by digitalization, the entire idea and system of communication have transformed. Today, transferring data is the most important procedure for carrying out any kind of communication. And, that is where the concept of IoT marches in. Internet of Things (IoT) is a broad system that connects any kind of device with internet access. From a computer to a smartphone, from a smartwatch to a virtual assistant, everything is part of IoT. In a simpler word, it is a network like TeamViewer that doesn’t need human interaction to transfer signals or messages (data more precisely).

What is TeamViewer?

TeamViewer, a German-based start-up founded in 2005 has built proprietary software for carrying out tasks like remote controlling, desktop sharing, file transferring between two devices, etc. With the help of a web browser, one can have access to any equipment that is running the TeamViewer software. Tilo Rossmanith is the developer of the software.

The software is available for Chrome, iOS, Android, Windows RT, Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows, Blackberry operating systems, etc. TeamViewer provides encryption mainly based on 2048-bit RSA private/public key exchange and AES 256-bit session encryption. The software also includes two-factor authentication, enforced password reset in case of any unfamiliar activities, etc.

About Tilo Rossmanith 

Back in 2005, Tilo Rossmanith built the software for his personal purpose. But, by the end of 2019, TeamViewer was installed in more than 2 billion computers. The software received a huge response from around the world and somewhere enlightened the face of the nation. Tilo became famous after building TeamViewer and he is currently on the Board of Directors at TeamViewer GmbH.

TeamViewer and IoT

When the internet was invented it was expensive and out of reach for common people. The same rule applies to computers and smartphones as well. But, many companies are trying to manufacture smart devices that are affordable for the entire world. Eventually, the price for such fancy things has come down and today almost everybody owns a computer, a smartphone, etc. For example, you can find a desktop in supermarkets for the ease of billing more efficiently. This contributes to IoT and with such progress, the demand for TeamViewer increased significantly.

By the end of 2017, out of the billions of IoT devices around 37 million were connected through the network of TeamViewer. It was in 2010 that TeamViewer stepped out of Germany and went international with subsidiaries in Australia and the U.S. In 2015, Permira invested around $1 billion in the company, and eventually, it became a part of the uniform club. There are very few companies in Germany whose total worth exceeds a billion.

TeamViewer’s software is also used in space especially by the Space Station medical team. The communication is encrypted between the linked devices and ensures safety. The company says that ensuring security is the most important purpose of the company which also provides real-time status alerts, early insights, etc. Apart from remote operations, the software also provides remote assistance to solve an issue without the need for a technician. And, remote alarming helps the clients receive alert notifications given that one sets up predefined conditions.

Other products and solutions of TeamViewer

The remote support provided by TeamViewer is enhanced with augmented reality called TeamViewer Pilot. The product helps the customers to fix bugs beyond the screen at the right time. You can contact any TeamViewer expert with the help of TeamViewer Pilot and show the problem with the help of your camera.

Another great product of the company is TeamViewer Tensor which is of great advantage for big enterprises. It helps to connect more than 2 billion devices globally around the globe and provide real-time support. It is a cloud-based connectivity platform that has remote access and device control SaaS solutions. Apart from these it also provides a platform for online meetings, support for mobile devices, etc.

TeamViewer in response to the COVID-19 pandemic

Since the service and product of TeamViewer both ensure fast connectivity and security, the demand for its products escalated amongst the pandemic. In February 2020, when the pandemic started spreading its root, the demand especially increased in China. The company expects that the profit would increase by a third at the end of this year.