Tech Story

MapmyIndia – India’s First Internet Mapping Digital Portal.

The times have gone when people used to buy paper maps and roam around the world. Technology has also impacted how maps are made and designed today. Several online map services have been launched, which have replaced the physical map due to the convenience these offer to their users. People are now actively using services such as Google Map, Apple Map, Bing Map, etc., which are available at users’ fingertips. One such revolutionary service is the MapmyIndia, which has a similar concept but is limited to only Indian territory and for the purpose of marketing and logistics operations. The map not only offers digital map data, but also provides telematics services, GIS AI technologies, and location-based SaaS services. The company is about 27 years old and has made its name among the leading digital map service providers.

About the Company

A couple from India, Rakesh and Rashmi Verma founded MapmyIndia in 1995. The company headquarters is based in New Delhi, India. MapmyIndia is a publicly-traded company, trading on NSE as MAPMYINDIA. The company majors in services like IoT, Navigation, Maps, and GIS Services in the Indian subcontinent only. CE Info Systems Ltd. is the parent company of MapmyIndia, and over 700 people are currently working for it. Apart from New Delhi, the company has established its offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru. The company has also opened offices overseas in countries like USA and Japan. Since the beginning, MapmyIndia has been offering services to various big tech, corporates, automotive, and government authorities. The major clients of the company include Amazon Alexa, Apple, ISRO, Uber, Facebook, Mercedes-Benz, Mahindra, PhonePe, HDFC, TVS, Airtel, etc.

The Founding

Rakesh and Rashmi Verma, an Indian couple, started CE Info Systems in 1995 in New Delhi. The founders started to develop a web mapping technology under the name of CE Info-Systems. The very technology was to provide marketing and logistics services to the client organizations. As soon as the company was successful in developing the technology, it bagged its first contracts from companies like Coca-Cola and Cellular One.

In 2004, MapmyIndia launched India’s first internet mapping digital portal. The portal provided location-based services on mobile as well as the web. The portal was also adopted by India’s MagicBricks. In 2007, MapmyIndia came with a pan-India GPS system, and in 2010, the company launched Road Pilot, a GPS navigation service, followed by the launch of another IoT, a GPS-based telematics platform in 2011.

MapmyIndia also partnered with ISRO as the latter integrated MapmyIndia’s online maps into its satellite imagery. In 2015, the company released a map and location API for the developers, and by the next year, it started to build transportation, logistics, and workforce automation platforms. MapmyIndia also integrated AI technology into its maps such that to offer 4D HD digital maps. It also brought the digital address and location system for pan-India in 2017.

In the following years, MapmyIndia released a geospatial analytics platform (2019), N-Case mobility suite for digital vehicle transformation (2019), location-powered Enterprise Digital Transformation suite (2020), as well as real-time maps of Covid vaccine centers on CoWIN (2021), etc.

In 2021, MapmyIndia went public on the Indian Stock Exchange. Since the inception of MapmyIndia, the company has raised over $34 million in venture capital through various rounds of funding.

The CEO at MapmyIndia

Rohan Verma is the current CEO at MapmyIndia. He has got a Bachelor’s Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a Master’s of Business Administration from London Business. While studying at Stanford (2004-2007), Verma worked at MapmyIndia and helped in creating India’s first interactive map portal. For the rest of the years, Verma remained on the boards of MapmyIndia.

Apart from MapmyIndia, Verma worked as a design technology intern at Intel and as a summer business analyst at McKinsey & Company. He has also worked at Microsoft and Visit for a few years. In 2018, Verma founded Infidreams and joined Cholamandalam Investment and Finance Company as its board member. In April 2019, Verma became the CEO of MapmyIndia.

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.

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Bechtle – A German-based IT Company That Took A Spark In The Campus Of Heilbronn University.

Bechtle AG is a multinational company with its headquarters based in Neckarsulm, Germany. The company mainly offers IT services in direct link with the sale of hardware and software IT products. Bechtle has a diversified client base, hence it is also responsible for the operation and maintenance of various IT infrastructures including the public sector. Founded in 1983, currently it has a massive business spread globally with 80 system houses. It has established e-commerce companies in fourteen European countries and nearly 70 different locations in german-speaking regions. The main business factor that makes a company adaptable for every type/size of business is its blend of IT product sales with integrations services.

Founding Bechtle

The idea of founding Bechtle took a spark in the campus of Heilbronn University with Klaus von Jan, Ralf Klenk and Gerhard Schick. These members of the university founded Bechtle GmbH EDV-Technik on 21st July 1983 as a microbusiness. They started the company from inside the campus and initially focused on programming technical calculation software for commercial purposes. In the first fiscal year, the company earned 66,000 German marks. After a couple of years, Bechtle became a certified IBM distributor and the team shifted to a bigger office. With six people running the company, the annual revenue climbed up to 2,245,000 German marks by the end of 1985.

Expansion

By the end of the 1980s, Bechtle already established itself as a market leader. IBM recognized the company as Quality Dealer of the Year three times in a row and it also expanded the team and became a company with a total of 37 employees. By the end of 1989, the revenue of the company became 13,015,000 German marks. With the advent of a new decade, the company focused on campaigning and branding as it was crossing regional borders. In 1992, Bechtle became one of Southern Germany’s largest system integrators. The number of employees became 85. One of the turning points in the history of the company’s growth was in 1993 as two of its main competitors were bankrupt. Bechtle seized this opportunity to expand in more locations and also hired executive members from prominent IT companies.

Two years down the line, Bechtle focused on taking the company online and launched its website. In the same year, Amazon and eBay were also founded in the US. After launching the company in the e-commerce market, it soon became a pioneer and also started making acquisitions. It expanded to a few locations like northern Baden-Württemberg and Leipzig and the outcome was a three-fold increase in the annual revenue. From 1995 to 1996, the company doubled its employees. In the same year, Bechtle was recognized as one of the top five IT system houses in Germany. Also, in the same year, Bechtle first opened an international office in Switzerland.

Present Days

In 2000, the company went for an IPO and the capital from the shares was used to expand in France and Belgium. In 2004, the company reached a new milestone of surpassing the 1 billion euros revenue mark. The company moved to its new headquarters in Neckarsulm. In 2004, it made four new acquisitions to add more locations to the company’s list. In 2008, Bechtle celebrated its 25th anniversary, and the business expanded to Ireland and Austria. The international expansion continued as it opened the business in Portugal, Poland, Hungary, and several other countries. In 2014, Bechtle became the top IT system house in Germany. Bechtle currently has more than 12,000 employees and it is impressively growing in terms of revenue even in the middle of the COVID-19 crisis.

Thomas Olemotz – CEO of Bechtle

Thomas Olemotz is currently the CEO of Bechtle and has worked with 11 different companies. Some of the companies where Olemotz worked before joining Bechtle are Deutsche Gesellschaft für Mittelstandsberatung, Delton AG, and Microlog Logistics AG. He joined the company in 2007 and became the CEO of the company in 2010. He also played his role as Spokesman of the Executive Board and CFO at Bechtle.

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.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

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

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Braze – The Trio Of Founders Came Up With The idea To establish Company At NYC Disrupt Hackathon.

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

Cloud technology is the most innovative and in-demand technology today. Hence the number of companies that require cloud services and the number of companies that develop cloud-based solutions has increased drastically in the past five years. Braze is another leading cloud-based software company that is not only popular in the American technology industry but also provides its service all over the world. The company is known for its customer engagement platform, and we can easily estimate the popularity of Braze based on how fast it has expanded to different corners of the world. Today, the company has established its offices in countries like San Francisco, London, Singapore, Chicago, and Tokyo.

About the Company

Braze is a mere a decade old company, which got its success through its customer engagement platform used by the business for multichannel marketing. The product is based on cloud technology, so provides the best user experience to the clients. It is a publically traded company and trades on NASDAQ as BRAZE. Mark Ghermezian, Bill Magnuson, and Jon Hyman founded Braze in 2011, and Bill Magnuson is the CEO of the company. The company headquarters is based in New York, US. The Customer Engagement Platform is the major product of the company and over 1000 people are working for it. Burger King, Babylon Health, HBO Max, Pure Gym, and Grubhub are some of Braze’s permanent clients.

The Founding of Braze

Jon Hyman and Mark Ghermezian participated in and won the NYC Disrupt Hackathon for Gilt-ii in 2011. The two met the third co-founder, Mark Ghermezian, of Braze at the same event, and the trio decided to establish a Company. The three founded Braze as Appboy in 2011, raising $3 million in investments from different investors. The very next year, the company released an iOS SDK, and in 2013, it raised $7.6 million in a Series A round of funding along with releasing an Android SDK.

In 2015, the company held a Series B round of funding and raised $15 million. The same year, Appboy also introduced an API. With a Series C round of funding in 2016, the company made bagged investments worth $20 million and opened a new office in London. The company ran with the same name for six years, and in 2017, it was rebranded as Braze Inc. after it led a series D funding raising $50 million.

In 2018, Braze launched Braze Alloys for email, and the next year it introduced Google AMP for email. With Series E funding, Company raised $80 million in 2018 and is valued at f $850 million. Forbes listed the company under the Cloud 100 list of 2019. Also, Inc. named Braze one of the Best Places to Work in the same year. By 2020, Company was delivering over 100 billion messages each month. The company was named one of the Best Places to Work for the second time in 2020.

In 2021, Braze recorded an annual revenue worth $200 million for FY21. The same year, the company launched Canvas, Skyscanner, and Apptopia. The company also partnered with Snowflake and Shopify in 2021. Braze went public on NASDAQ in October 2021 and started trading as BRZE. With the IPO, the company raised $520 million and was valued at $5.9 billion.

The CEO at Braze

Bill Magnuson is one of the co-founders and the CEO of Braze Inc. He went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he completed a B.S. in Computer Science and a Master’s in EECS. After completing his higher education, Bill started his internship at Google as a software engineer. In 2010, he started working as a software engineer at Bridgewater Associates. The next year, he, along with Jon Hyman and Mark Ghermezian, co-founded Braze as Appboy Inc. and became the CTO of the company. In January 2017, Bill was appointed as the CEO of Braze.

Yashica Vashishtha

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DOMO – Wise Usage And Management Of Data On Your Fingertips.

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

Today the world is all about data and managing the data. Taking about days earlier than twenty years, humans managed all the business data, and it was quite a hectic job. Slowly, with the more installation of the computers and increased availability of the internet, this job was made easy. And today, we have even more resources for this data management. Thanks to the cloud technology and various platforms, which are helpful in easy access and managing of data not only for the common people but also for the big business organizations as well as governments. American company Domo is also one of those leading companies which have been working on developing platforms for businesses so that they can have easy access to their data and combine and use it in real-time for their everyday business activities.

About Domo

Domo is only a decade old company, founded in October 2010. The founder of the company is Josh James, and the company headquarters have been established in American Fork, Utah, US. Being a cloud technology company, Domo offers its services worldwide and has a long list of customers, including Unilever, eBay, Cisco, NBA, Danaher, Emerson, Master Card, etc. Domo is a publically traded company and trades on NASDAQ as DOMO. The company provides products for business intelligence tools and data visualization. Domo Business Cloud is its flagship product, a low-code data app platform for businesses that allows them to combine their data and use it as they require. Talking about the revenues, as per the 2021 records, the company made $210.2 Million for the same financial year. The company is home to more than 800 employees.

The Founding

Domo has a similar founding story to many of the other technology companies. Josh James, the founder of Domo, is a veteran and had already founded three companies before Domo. One of those companies was even acquired by Adobe in 2006, and James continued to work in his company under Adobe’s name. While working at Adobe, he continued to conceptulising and raising money for new business, and in 2010 left Adobe.

James established Shacho Inc. in October 2010. Just in two months, the newly founded company acquired Lindon-based Corda Technologies, and Shacho was renamed Domo in December 2010.

As soon as Domo was established, it started to work on data connectivity and analytics for business. The company built a platform, which offered data integration, BI & Analytics as well as App Framework in one place, attracting multiple clients from almost every industry. The platform allows the users to manage all their data placed on different websites and apps. There is a dashboard available on the platform such that you can access Amazon Redshift, Oracle, Salesforce, Google Analytics, etc., from that single dashboard.

Trusting the capabilities of Josh James, investors like Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Ron Conway came forward for the initial investments in Domo. In 2011, the company received $20 million from Institutional Venture Partners. The company held a Series B round of investment and raised $60 million. The next year as Series C funding was hosted, and the company raised $125 million, followed by raising another $200 million in Series D financing with a $2 billion valuation in 2015. In June 2018, Domo went public on NASDAQ Global Exchange.

The CEO at Domo

John Mellor is the CEO and Director at Domo. He is a SaaS veteran and has over 25 years of experience working in the technology industry.

Mellor is a mechanical engineering graduate and has an MBA in marketing and finance from Brigham Young University. He has co-founded ViewPoint and led the company as the VP of marketing and business development. Mellor has also worked at companies like RichFX and was working at Omniture as the EVP of strategy and business development when Adobe acquired the company. With the acquisition, Mellor also joined Adobe and worked in various leading positions at the company. In 2019, He left Adobe and joined Domo to become the Chief Strategy Officer and was promoted to be the Chief Executive Officer and the Director at Domo in 2022.

Yashica Vashishtha

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