Tech Story

Avant – A Fintech Company That Started As A Product Of The Y Combinator Startup Program.

Avant is a financial technology company based in Chicago, Illinois, US. The company was formerly known as AvantCredit and was established in 2012. Avant mainly focuses on two primary products, personal loans for middle-income borrowers and Avant Credit Card which come with a credit limit of $300 to $1000. The grew as AvantCredit and created a very strong brand name for customer lending services. The founders of Avant are Al Goldstein, John Sun, and Paul Zhang. Avant is a very young company and currently, it serves customers in the US and the UK only. It is a private company with 550 employees and the CEO of the company is Matt Bochenek.

About Avant

Founded in 2012, Avant’s target was to provide loans to customers who belong to the middle-class tier of our society. These are the people that need help with home improvements, high-interest debts, etc. Avant grasped the market so quickly that it is one of the few Chicago-based startups that has gained unicorn status and is still a privately-held company. Avant’s valuation has nearly touched $2 billion. In 2013, the company issued its first personal loan and used its propriety technology to determine a person’s creditworthiness.

There are various factors that help Avant determine the amount, time, etc at which the money can be borrowed. From machine learning protocols to various analytical tools, Avant rigorously checks a customer’s profile. Avant has also built a fully online process for its customers to eliminate the need for several physical branches and simplify the overall borrowing process. The company is supported by numerous big investors like Tiger Global, August Capital, General Atlantic, Victory Park Capital, etc. When the company began offering loans, it just started with 16 states but soon expanded to Canada and the UK.

Story of Avant

Avant’s customer base includes those people who generally don’t get loans from regular banks but at the same time have decent enough income to repay loans at sizable interest. This is the reason Avant’s technology determines a person’s creditworthiness in every way possible. In 2012, two of the Avant’s co-founders Sun and Zhang were looking forward to building their business, Debteye after graduating from the Y Combinator startup program. The business was about designing a platform that would help individuals manage debts after analyzing their unique financial situation.

In the pursuit of opening a business, Sun decided to take a personal loan from a traditional brick and mortar establishment because he had no income. But, he found that the entire process of applying and the loan getting sanctioned is very time-consuming and inconvenient. So, with the idea of the new venture combined with finding a solution to smoothen the process of loan sanction, Avant emerged. Sun and Zhang were former interns of Goldstein, seeing this as an opportunity they built a product in December 2012. Avant had a very strong financial backup from the beginning as it raised $1 million in seed funding. Within the next three years, the total funding of the company touched $1 billion.

Success

Avant received a lot of awards and recognitions only within a few years after it issued the first loan. In 2015, the company ranked 6th in Forbes America’s Most Promising Companies and in the Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups. Paul Zhang, the co-founder and the Chief Technology Officer of Avant was featured in Inc Magazine’s 30 Under 30 list. In the same year, the company also acquired ReadyForZero, a debt management platform, and rebranded it as Avant. In 2014 company successfully raised $225 Million in equity between Tiger Global Management, Peter Thiel, and KKR. But only after a year of the acquisition, Avant announced the shut down of ReadyForZero’s credit score and debt planner tools.

Matt Bochenek – CEO of Avant

Matt Bochenek joined Avant in 2013 in the Strategy & Operations department and after that served in many other roles. He became the CEO of the company in May 2021 and before that served as the COO for one year. Before joining Avant, he worked at Superfund Asset Management as the Managing Director of Business Development and Strategy. Matt went to the University of Chicago.

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

Absolute Software Corporation: The Leader in Endpoint Resilience

Stealing can be of any type, with the intention to damage or just to make free money. But the person who loses his/her device or data is always at loss. There have been methods applied to track down those thieves, which are not always successful, and we are stuck with the same problem we began with. This same problem had ignited an idea of developing an end-point tracking system in the minds of the founders of Absolute Software Corporation. And today, the company is the only firm-ware-embedded visibility and control platform developer helping companies track and trace the lost products.

About the Company

Founded in 1993, Absolute Software Corporation is the first of its kind. The company develops software products to provide endpoint and zero-trust security to its clients. Absolute Software is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, and has established two more headquarters in Canada and Austin. Healthcare, government sector, K-12 education, professional services sector, higher education sector, finance are the main areas of service for the company. It operates through device manufacturers, independent software vendors, resellers, and managed service providers, such that it can offer efficient services worldwide effectively.
Absolute Software Corporation is a publically traded company and trades on Toronto Stock Exchange and Nasdaq as ABST. The company is known for its flagship product, Absolute Platform and Persistence technology, a platform protecting devices, data, applications, and users both on and off the corporate network. Today, Absolute Software has over 140 registered patents and more than 13,000 clients rely on the company for their data security purpose.

The Back Story

Absolute Software Corporation was founded with a unique idea, i.e., to manage, track and secure computers despite their physical location. This was simply the result of a laptop theft that led to data loss as well. Leading to the solution of such a problem, Absolute Software started to work on a track-and-trace software solution, such that even despite the theft or any damage to the device it could be tracked by the owners.

This was only possible with some great partnerships, and at the beginning of the 2000s, Absolute Software started to build ties with device manufacturers, such that the Absolute software was embedded into those devices on the BIOS level. This way, even if the thief wanted to remove the tracking software, he could not find it in the first place.

In the year 2000, Absolute Software went public on Toronto Stock Exchange. The company also started to expand overseas, as it opened its first European in Newbury in 2006. Further expansion included the establishment of offices in the UK, Austin, Malaysia, etc. Absolute Software then partnered with Microsoft and achieved the gold certification as a partner from the latter in the Microsoft Partner Ecosystem. The Absolute Software growth also included some major acquisitions such as LANrev product suite (2009), some assets of LiveTime Software (2012), Palisade Systems (2013), etc. This way, the company was able to enhance the features of its products. The company got listed in the Forbes list of cybersecurity companies in 2020.

The CEO at Absolute Software Corporation

Christy Wyatt is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Absolute Software Corporation. With more than twenty years of experience in the field of cybersecurity and IT, Wyatt has worked in different prominent positions in big-name companies, including Apple, Palm, Sun Microsystems, Motorola, and Citigroup. She also served Dtex Systems as the CEO. Christy was also the Chairman, President, and CEO of Good Technology. In 2019, she was among the Top 50 Women Leaders in SaaS and also got listed in the Top 50 Women Entrepreneurs of America by Inc. Magazine.

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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Nuix – An Australian Company Founded With The Goal To Extract knowledge From Unstructured Data.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Nuix is a publicly-traded company that was founded in 2000. The company’s main goal is to collect vast quantities of unstructured data to extract useful information from it. Every organization, big or small, needs to study data to understand every aspect of the business from the consumer market to market regulations. So, the solutions of this company are very useful especially to big corporations that have millions of customers across the world meaning more unstructured data. Some of the biggest clients of Nuix are Airbus, Amazon, American Express, Barclays, AIG, etc. Nuix currently serves more than 2,000 customers in 79 countries.

About Nuix

Nuix is a software development company with its headquarters based in Sydney, Australia. The company develops innovative software to harness the power of unstructured data to its full potential. Nuix’s technology is used for various purposes in the digital world including data privacy, data governance, financial crimes, digital forensics, regulatory compliance, etc. Nuix has been the recipient of several prestigious awards because of its innovative technology. The company currently has around 400 employees and the numbers didn’t change much since 2006. Apart from Australia, the company has headquarters in Asia, the Middle East, North America, and Europe.

Truth be told, though organizations keep records of every employee, every customer in an organized way, the amount of unstructured data exceeds the structured data. The data received from social media, online communications, etc are messy but they are important. And, Nuix’s technology helps in visualizing and analyzing this chaotic data into something more meaningful that businesses could use to increase their growth. The six primary products of the company are Nuix Adaptive Security, Nuix Automation, Nuix Discover, Nuix Investigate, Nuix Enterprise Collection Center, and Nuix Workstation.

David Sitsky – Brain Behind the Technology

David Sitsky is the main brain behind founding Nuix. He had immense knowledge in complex operating systems and large-scale parallel computing. He dedicated his career to developing algorithms that could search through search and analyze through the unstructured and messy data from emails and any social platforms. He understood that his idea has good potential when one of the largest employers in Canberra used his algorithm to find some inappropriate image that was attached to an email. After the attempt was successful, it became the first evidence that Sistky’s algorithm is very powerful and it could find things with forensic accuracy. Even today people of the company believe that Sitsky was able to build software like this because he was able to imagine the amount of unstructured data that will generate in the future.

History of Nuix

Nuix has grown beautifully over the last twenty years. From a one-man operation, today fifty software developers and ninety software engineers work in America in sync with employers in Sydney. America is a huge market for Nuix’s technology especially for the tech giants that are dominating the digital market across the world. For the unique and impactful work done by the company, Nuix was offered a contract by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2010.

In 2012, the company bagged the Australian Export Awards for the Information and Communication Technology category and also won the Premier’s NSW Exporter of the Year Award in 2015. Nuix was also made an Industry Partner of the International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Threats. It was only in 2020 that Company decided to go public and filed its IPO. It is currently listed on the Australian Securities Exchange and the largest shareholder of the company is Macquarie Group.

Jonathan Rubinsztein – CEO of Nuix

Jonathan Rubinsztein is the new CEO of Nuix who was appointed in December 2021. Before that, he was the CEO and Managing Director of Informedia Ltd. He is also an entrepreneur who founded DXC Red Rock and served as its CEO for more than sixteen years. Rubinsztein is also the founder of RockSolid SQL, a company that developed a database management product. After his post-graduation, his career started with Accenture where he joined as a consultant.

Annasha

Inspur – The Third Largest Server Providers In The World.

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

There have been times when many things were considered impossible, like having a personal computer in every household or people walking and talking on the phone at the same time. And, looking at the past twenty years, these have been the most amazing years for the IT industry, as in those two decades we have moved from PCs to laptops, from landlines to smartphones, and multiple people are able to work on the same project on the cloud without being at the same place. Cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence are the current hot topics, and companies working on them are doing the most innovative work of all. Inspur Group Co. Ltd. is one such company that is using its innovative ideas to improve the cloud and server technologies to achieve excellence.

About the Company

Inspur or the Inspur Group is the cloud computing and big data IT conglomerate that has been in the industry for the past 77 years. It was founded as Langchao but had a name change in 2006 with the name Inspur. The company belongs to the IT industry working on computer hardware, software, and servers. The major products by the company include cloud computing, servers, storage, artificial intelligence, etc. Venezolana de Industria Tecnológica, C.A. is one of the subsidiaries of company, and its various working divisions are Inspur Information, Inspur Software, Inspur International and Huaguang Optoelectronics. The company is a publically traded company and trades on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, Shenzhen Stock Exchange, and Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. As per the 2015 records, the company made revenues worth 63.2 billion yuan for FY2015.

The Founding

Inspur Group was founded in 1945 in Shandong, China, and has its headquarters based in the same city. The company has four wings, i.e., Inspur Information, Inspur Software, Inspur International, and Inspur Huaguang, which works on technologies like cloud data centre, cloud services & big data, smart city, and smart enterprises. Though the company is 77 years old, it started its technology journey 40 years ago.

Inspur built China’s first PC in 1983. It also started to make servers in the early 90s, where it released a series of computers for China and the international market. In 1993, the company built China’s first micro-server. Later, in 2005, the company received investments from Microsoft as well as signed a contract with VMware to work on the emerging cloud computing technology. In the same year, the company also won the top prize in the “Information Industry Major Technological Invention Award”. The company also acquired Qimonda AG’s research division in 2009 for a sum of around US$4 million.

Inspur introduced China’s first 32-socket high-end fault-tolerant computer in 2011 and became the world’s fifth company to make such computers independently. In 2015, the company recorded annual revenues worth 63.2 billion yuan. It also joined multiple open computing organizations as a member, including SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (2014), OpenStack (2014), OCP Open Compute Project ( and 2017), ODCC (Open Data Center Committee), etc. The major clients of the company include big-name enterprises and many governments belonging to more than 100 countries and regions.

The CEO at Inspur

Sun Pishu is the current CEO of Inspur. He is a native of Shandog Province and was born in 1962. Sun Pishu has been working with Inspur since the time it was called Langchao. In 1996, he became the General Manager and the next year, the Deputy Routine President of Langchao Group. Sun Pishu also served the company as the Vice President for a long time. It is Sun Pishu’s leadership that the company has become the number one server provider in China and number third in the world.

Yashica Vashishtha

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Axway Software – An American IT Company That Originally Emerged As A Part Of A French Conglomerate.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Axway Software is an American IT company founded twenty years ago. It is a publicly-traded company with its headquarters based in Phoenix, Arizona, US. There are more than 1,800 employees in the company serving approximately 11,000 customers who are spread across 100 countries. Axway, apart from America, has offices in various parts of Europe (Lyon, Paris, Bulgaria, etc) and support centers in India. Since Axway was originally a part of a French software company, Sopra Steria, the company has another headquarter in Puteaux, Paris. Axway was spun-off from Sopra as a subsidiary in 2000. The company has come a long way from there as once from Europe it built a vast business in the lands of America.

About Axway Software

Axway Software is known for providing software tools for various applications. Some of them are enterprise software, business analytics, and activity monitoring, mobile application development, API management, etc. Last year, Axway Software was recognized as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management for the sixth time. Axway, in twenty years, has filed more than 100 patents in technology innovation.

In 2011, the company was listed in the Compartment B of Euronext Paris meaning it had market capitalization between €150 million and €1 billion. The company is also named a leader in the Forrester Wave for API Management Solutions Q3 2020. Though API offers several products, its Amplify API Management Platform is the main product and the company has received several recognitions for the same. Other products are Axway B2B Integration, Axway Managed File Transfer, and Specialized Products for supply chains and other purposes.

Major Events in the History

Axway was officially incorporated as an individual company on December 28, 2000. The company was originally the software infrastructure division of Sopra, a French IT company. But, Sopra decided to spun-off the division as an individual entity (a subsidiary of the company). After the spin-off, Sopra used Axway Software as a means for expanding into the Enterprise Application Integration market. Right after Axway was incorporated it started to make multiple acquisitions from the early 2000s. In 2002, Axway acquired a Swedish company called Viewlocity.

The series of acquisitions continued and in January 2006 Axway acquired US company Cyclone Commerce after which a huge part of the executive management team and the operations moved to Phoenix. Next year in February, Axway acquired Atos’s B2B software business in Germany and Tumbleweed Communications, a US-based company in 2008. In 2011, Axway Software detached itself completed from the Sopra Group and was listed in the Paris Euronext. Some of the companies acquired in the next few years are Vordel, an Irish company, SCI Soluções, a Brazilian company, assets of Information Gateway in Australia, and a French company called Systar. The company went public in 2011 and since then both its annual revenue and profit have increased steadily. But, recently, the company’s growth hasn’t been very impressive and its stock has declined by 22% in the past few months.

In 2015, Christophe Fabre stepped down from the position of CEO of the company which he was holding from 2005. Axway acquired many more companies in the recent year starting with Appcelerator, a US-based mobile technology company whose main product is Titanium, an open-source platform for mobile app development. In 2017, Axway acquired another US company called Syncplicity, a company that develops solutions for sharing and synchronization of files. Though Axway Software operates as an independent entity, Sopra Steria acquired an 8.62% stake in the company in 2006.

Patrick Donovan – CEO of Axway Software

Patrick Donovan is the CEO of the company since 2018 and he replaced Jean-Marc Lazzari for the position. Before becoming the CEO of Axway Software, he served as the CFO of the same company. Donovan being an American citizen has spent several years in France which gave him a good idea about both the American and French scenario of Axway. Donovan mainly oversees the company’s financial and legal functions and has in-depth knowledge about the business model of Axway.

Annasha

Livechat Software – The Leading Help Desk Software Developers.

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

Today, the customer relationship has become the centre of every business, and to maintain that companies, big or small, have set up a separate division called Customer Care to resolve all the queries from their valuable customers. The rise of the concept of customer care has also encouraged software companies to develop dedicated software for companies to make the customer service and maintaining the data easier. Companies like Livechat specialize in the named stream and have been developing helpdesk software for its clients for twenty years now. The company is one of the leading software companies in the field and includes names like Adobe, Best Buy, Huawei, and PayPal as its major clients.

About the Company

Livechat Software is a more than twenty years old company, founded in 2002 in Wrocław, Poland. The company headquarters is based in the same city, and it serves its clients all over the world. LiveChat specializes in online chat and helpdesk software, and ChatBot, HelpDesk, Knowledge Base, and LiveChat are its flagship products. The services by the company include Chatbot platform, Help desk software, Live support software, etc. These help desk software products help maintain customer relationships by solving their problem most effectively, maintaining the customer and the company’s data securely, managing the team, boosting the company’s credibility, and establishing trust among the customers for the company.
LiveChat is a publically traded company and trades on at Warsaw Stock Exchange as WSE. The company is an example of constant growth, and as per the 2018 records, it made annual revenues worth 89.4 million zł for FY2018.
LiveChat is also known for its expansion as it serves in over 150 countries and has got more than 28,000 paid customers, AirAsia, ING, Huawei, Adobe, Orange, and PayPal being the major ones among them.

The Founding

The LIveChat’s history dates back to 2002 when a team of developers decided to change how businesses communicated with their customers. They wanted to create a live chat software and eventually, were successful in doing that too. The idea behind the company was far from reality at that point, as no one could believe that the live chat for customer services may become an important communication channel in the coming future. In the beginning, LiveChat developed a simple app to make people add new communication channels to it.
Despite all the struggle, the company software started to become popular, but till 2010, the company operated as a stock company. In 2011, the company management had management buy out and took most of the control into their hands. The same year. Tar Heel Capital joined LiveChat and bought 40% shares in the company, making a 60-40 ratio between the LiveChat management and Tar Heel Capital. At the same time, the company had reached thousands of paid customers as well.
LiveChat went public on Warsaw Stock Exchange in 2014, and the next year, it recorded 10,000 paid customers (companies) registered to it. In the next two years, the numbers were increased by double. Today, the number has reached 28,000 customers from across the world.

The CEO at LiveChat

Mariusz Cieply is the CEO at LiveChat. He has been with the company from its inception, as he was one of the first software developers of the company. Cieply has got a Master’s of Science in Computer Science from the Technical University of Wroclaw. He started to work at LiveChat as a software developer and then was promoted to be the project manager. Cieply was elected as the President of the Board in 2010, and today, he serves LiveChat as the CEO.

Yashica Vashishtha

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