Tech Story

Momentive, The company that was earlier known for its popular product SurveyMonkey.

Though the word of mouth has been the most effective way of marketing, people before the internet did not have any reliable source to actually get through those experiences based reviews on things, rather going through TV ads or Newspapers. After the internet came into being and computers reached every household, people came with the idea to build websites and software that can help people get through authentic reviews on things and such that those people could make up their mind on what they should buy or leave. Momentive Inc. is a company that works on a similar idea and develops cloud-based experience management software for companies so that these companies can offer their clients genuine reviews on things like market insight, brand insight, company atmosphere for aspirants, and customer experience, etc.

About Momentiv Inc.

Momentive is a 22 years old software development company founded in 1999 by Ryan Finley and Chris Finley. It is a publically traded company that develops software for experience management. The company trades on Nasdaq as MNTV, whereas the headquarters of the company is based in San Mateo, CA, United States. The company has its regional offices set up in locations like San Mateo, Portland, Seattle, Dublin, Ottawa, London, Sydney, etc, and serves its customers worldwide. Momentive provides cloud-based experience management and survey software services, Momentive, GetFeedback, and SurveyMonkey being the most popular products by the company. As of 2020, 1,220 people are employed at various Momentive offices, and it made annual revenues worth US$233.5 million in the same year, with 25,000,000 registered to its services.

Founding Story of Momentive

Ryan Finley and Chris Finley founded Momentive Inc. as SurveyMonkey in 1999. The company was one of its kind and launched its first product, a consumer-oriented survey platform. Due to the unique idea of the company, it became successful from day one. The service it provided was free, and many of its services remain free till today.
In the year 2009, Dave Goldberg joined SurveyMonkey as the CEO, who helped the company grow really fast. The same year, Spectrum Equity and Bain Capital took over some of the majority shares in SurveyMonkey. In 2013, the company raised $800 million in debt, and the company became a unicorn with a valuation worth $1.35 billion. The next year, MonekySurvey received $250 million from companies like Google Capital and Morgan Stanley, etc.
In August 2014, SurveyMonkey acquired Fluidware, a competitor survey company based in Canada. This purchase was followed by the acquisitions of TechValidate in 2015, Usabilla, and GetFeedback in 2019. The company also acquired some survey tools, including Precision Polling, Wufoo, and Zoomerang, etc., for the purpose of adding some more features to its existing platforms and other products to its product line.
In June 2021, SurveyMonkey changed its name to Momentive. The news of the acquisition of Momentive by Zendesk Inc. also came in October month of the same year. Though the merger is still to happen, the amount is already decided, and that is nearly $4 billion.

The CEO at Momentive

SurveyMonkey, aka Momentive, had seen the most growth in the leadership of Dave Goldberg as the CEO. But after his death in 2015, Zander Lurie was named the CEO of the company. Lurie is a native American who is also known as one of the leading business executives as well as a board member of GoPro. He has a graduate degree from the University of Washington and an MBA from Emory University. Lurie has worked at companies like GoPro as the Senior Vice President and CBS Interactive as the CFO. He also co-founded CoachArt in 2001. In 2015, he became the chairman of the board of SurveyMonkey 2015, and in 2016, he was named the CEO of the company.

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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Altium, 35 years old PC-based electronics design software development company.

Integrated Circuits are the biggest discovery in the field of IT and electronics. This little device has helped the IT industry to grow rapidly and computers reach every home as PCs. These circuits are small in size, but there is a lot of work done over it. These are built on printed circuit boards with thousands of lines of code written on them. So building an IC is a huge task, which includes multiple phases. Many software companies write codes for ICs and without these companies, it will be really difficult to make a single IC chip. Altium is one of those software companies that build software for companies that make printed circuit boards. The company is one of the leading software development companies, serving companies based in different parts of the world, including the US, Australia, China, Japan, etc.

About Altium

Altium is a more than 35 years old PC-based electronics design software development company. Nick Martin founded Altium in 1985, and today, the company is known as one of the leading EDA/FPGA software development companies. It is an Australian company with its regional headquarters based in countries like the United States, Australia, China, Japan, and some countries of Europe. The company develops software products for industries that build EDA, Printed circuit boards, FPGA, Embedded Systems, Electronics Design, etc., including telecommunication, automation, aerospace, and defense, etc. Altium Designer is the most popular product by Altium. Apart from that, the company is known for its products like Altium Concord Pro, Altium NEXUS, Vault, CircuitStudio, CircuitMaker, TASKING, Octopart, Ciiva, Upverter, etc.

Founding Altium

Nicholas Martin founded Altium as Protel Systems Pty Ltd in 1985, while he was already working at the University of Tasmania as an electronics designer. The idea of his company came to him when he was working at the company and thought of making more affordable electronic products for people. He merged the electronics design into PC platforms and launched the first DOS-based printed circuit board layout and design tool in 1985. The next year, Protel Systems partnered with HST Technology Pty Ltd. and started its international journey, too. The same year, the company partnered with ACCEL Technologies, Inc. to provide customer support to clients based in the US, Canada, and Mexico. The company brought new software in the following years, including Protel Schematic for DOS, Autotrax, and Easytrax, etc.

At the beginning of the next decade, Compay started to develop FPGA, PCB, and embedded software under its single data model project. In 1991, the company came with the first Windows-based PCB design system for Windows, named Advanced Schematic/PCB 1.0. In 1999, Altium went public on the Australian Securities Exchange. The company changed its name from Protel Systems to Compay in 2001 and made some important acquisitions like Tasking (2001), Hoschar AG (2002), Morfik Technology Pty Ltd. (2010), Octopart (2015), Ciiva (2015), Perception Software (2016), Upverter (2017), etc.
In the past few years, the company has expanded to Asia, Europe, Canada, and the US. As of 2019, the company made annual revenue worth US$171.8 million. The company is currently serving industries including automotive, aerospace, defence, and telecommunications, etc.

The CEO at Altium

Aram Mirkazemi is the CEO of Altium. He is a native of Iran and had come to Australia as a Refugee in the 80s. Though he wasn’t good at English at that time, it was Maths in which he excelled and got admission to the University of Tasmania. In the later years, Mirkazemi found his interest in computers and artificial intelligence as well. While he was still studying at the university, he received an offer from Nick Martin to join Altium (then Protel). For the past 30 plus years, he has served Altium in various positions, including the company’s CTO, senior executive VP of engineering, etc. In 2014, Mirkazemi became the CEO of Altium. He also founded Morfik, a software company that Altium acquired in 2010.

Yashica Vashishtha

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Instructure, Best known as the publisher of Canvas providing a web-based educational solution.

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

We must admit that the past two years have been the toughest for the education sector. Schools and colleges being closed have raised many questions about the future of the young generation. Every government has tried to keep up with the education for schools and higher education institutions, but the best solutions came from the private sector in the form of educational software (LMS) and online websites. Companies that have been promoting online education through LMSs have come to the rescue and have helped the students to stay updated with their educational needs. Not only for the schools and other educational institutes but for the small to big companies, these LMSs have been like a boon. One of such LMS development companies includes Instructure.
Best known as the publisher of Canvas, Instructure is a thirteen years old American educational technology company. The company provides a web-based educational solution for K-12 students to students pursuing higher education as well as for corporate training.

About the Company

Instructure is an Educational Technology and Learning Management Systems provider from the US. The company headquarters is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, US, and it operates from seven different locations in the US, serving its clients from all over the world. As per the 2019 records, over 1200 people are working for Instructure, and the company made annual revenues worth $209.5 million in 2018. The Instructure educational products include Canvas, Catalog, Studio, Portfolium, MasteryConnect, Videri, CASE Benchmarks, and Item Bank, Navigate Item Bank, Academic Benchmarks, Certify, DataConnect, Program Assessment, Pathways, Canvas for Corporate Education, etc. Among all the products by Instructure, Canvas is the most popular product of the company.

The Back Story

Brian Whitmer and Devlin Daley founded Instructure in 2008 when they were still at college. They were graduate students at BYU. The idea of Instructure came from the bad experience that the two co-founders had with the existing LMSs. They thought the existing ones were outdated, and no LMS developer companies were planning to upgrade them. Thus the two developed a new LMS under their newly built company, Instructure.
Josh Coates, the founder of Mozy, was the first investor the company got. He also became the first CEO of Instructure for the years 2010-2018. Instructure bagged its first big contract from Utah Education Network (UEN) in 2010, replacing Blackboard (one of the most preferred LMS of that time) in almost every college and university in the Utah area.
In 2011, the company launched officially Canvas LMS and made it available as open-source software for free. The software was also launched for iOS and Android devices. By 2013, the company reached almost 300 schools and colleges and built a customer base of 9 million users. The same year, Instructure held a Series D Funding raising $30 Million.
In 2015, Instructure came with its corporate LMS named Bridge and held a Series E funding raising $40 million. The company went public in November of the same year and started trading on New York Stock Exchange. The next year, the company was ranked number 4 on its Best Places to Work list by Glassdoor, whereas in 2018, it was ranked number 6 in the “Top Work Places” for large businesses list by Salt Lake Tribune. In March 2020, Thoma Bravo acquired Instructure for a sum of $2 billion. Thoma Bravo operates as its parent company, whereas Instructure operates as an independent company.

The Founders

Steve Daly is the current CEO of Instructure. He has a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from Brigham Young University (BYU). Daly has also got an MBA in Strategy and Finance from the same university. He started his career as a Mechanical Designer at Glumac and Associates. Later Daly became the Director of Marketing at Intel and stayed at the company for ten years. After leaving Intel in 2002, he joined Soronti in 2003 as the CEO but then switched to Avocent Corporation to become the Senior Vice President, Corporate Strategy in 2003. He has also worked as the chairman and CEO of Ivanti for ten years. In July 2002, Daly joined Instructure as its CEO.

Yashica Vashishtha

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Anthony Bakker, From banker to establish a software company that works for social good organizations.

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

There are an infinite number of software development companies all over the world, but how many are there that are working dedicatedly for social good organizations. Blackbaud is one such company that develops software only to serve the social good communities, like nonprofits, healthcare organizations, fundraisers, etc. The company promotes the idea of strengthening the social economy, and for that, it develops software that would be useful for communities that work for social welfare.

Blackbaud has been there for almost 40 years and has gone through a great growth transition. It started from building a small billing system for a school, and today it is producing similar but advanced cloud-based software. The company products include software for analytics, financial management, fundraising and relationship management, grant and award management, marketing and engagement, organizational and program management, payment services, and social responsibility, etc. Blackbaud also promotes philanthropy by encouraging its employees to join and volunteer in community services. It specifically offers paid vacations to its employees, so that they can volunteer with full heart in such services.

About Blackbaud

Blackbaud is a cloud computing provider and software publishing company founded in 1983, in New York. The company headquarters is based in South Carolina, United States, whereas it serves in about 60 countries, including England, Australia, and Canada, etc. Blackbaud is mainly known for its flagship software named Raiser’s Edge. It is a fundraising SQL database software used by many companies globally. Apart from that, the company builds software like Customer Relationship Management software, Marketing Campaign software, Fundraising as well as Finance and Accounting software, helping communities working for social good. Anthony Bakker is the founder of Blackbaud and Michael Gianoni is the current CEO of the company.

Founding Blackbaud

Anthony Bakker, the founder of Blackbaud, before founding the company worked as a banker. He first developed a billing system for a school, based in Manhattan, New York, in 1981. By 1982, the software became quite popular among a few other clients. This led Bakker to leave his job and start Blackbaud Microsystems in 1983. As a company, Blackbaud launched a student billing system as its first product. The famous Raiser’s Edge is the advanced version of the same student billing system by Blackbaud.

In the year 1989, Blackbaud shifted its headquarters from New York to South Carolina. The company then released its software for Windows 95 in 1995, raising the number of clients for it. The company also made some important acquisitions during the same time, including ACOMS, Master Systems Inc. as well as Master Software.

Blackbaud had its first IPO in 2004. It trades on Nasdaq with the symbol BLKB. Some more acquisitions took place in the further years, Campagne Associates (2006), eTapestry (2007), Target Analysis Group (2007), Target Software (2007), and Kintera (2008) being the most important ones among them. In the next decade, Blackbaud acquired names like Convio (2012), MicroEdge (2014), JustGiving (2017), Reeher (2018), YourCause (2019), etc. Blackbaud has been Forbes Most Innovative Growth Company multiple times.

The CEO at Blackbaud

Michael Gianoni is the current President and the CEO at Blackbaud. He grew an interest in engineering when he was in high school and attended a one-day engineering class. After graduating from high school, he opted for Electrical Engineering from Waterbury State Technical College in 1979. He then joined Charter Oak College to study business and received a master’s degree in Business Administration from the University of New Haven in 1992. He has also been awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Business Administration from the University of Haven in 2014.

Gianoni has worked in some big-name companies in prominent positions. He was the Senior Vice President of DST. He also served Fiserv for seven years as the President and the Group President. Gianoni joined Teradata as the Chair of the Board of Directors in 2015 and still continues to serve in the same position. In January 2014, Gianoni joined Blackbaud as the CEO.

Yashica Vashishtha

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Ragy Thomas started coding in his spare time to build a famous software company.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Ragy Thomas, an Indian-born American entrepreneur founded Sprinklr, a software company in 2009. The company’s headquarters is based in New York City and has more than 2,400 employees. Earlier in 2021, Sprinklr got listed on the New York Stock Exchange and started trading as a public company. Sprinklr specializes in SaaS customer management experience (CME) platform and combines different applications for social media marketing and monitoring, content management, collaboration, etc. Many multinational conglomerates like Nike, Cisco, Microsoft have signed up over time for the services of Sprinklr.

About Sprinklr

Ragy founded Sprinklr from his spare bedroom in 2009 and officially launched the company in 2010. He launched the company after successfully landing his first customer but in no time many big companies signed up for Sprinklr’s platform. The idea behind Sprinklr’s platform for managing customer experience on the modern channel is something the companies will look up to during the 21st century. Thus, it became very popular in a little time. Over the years, Ragy has brought experienced executives onboard from companies like BMC, Salesforce, Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, etc. Sprinklr currently has offices in 25 countries and two other headquarters in London and Singapore respectively.

Early Days

Before Ragy founded Sprinklr, he had years of experience in the IT sector. When he moved to America, Ragy started working in IT consulting for AT&T and Bell Labs. But soon there was the dot-com bubble burst and he decided to spin out the company’s email marketing unit that he was working for. The new business (after spin-off) acquired Bigfoot Interactive and took its brand name which was later acquired by Alliance Data System in 2005. During this time he completed his MBA in a part-time program from New York University.

Eventually, Ragy witnessed the landscape of business changing as online marketing shifted to social media from emails. So, in his spare time, he started to code social media publishing tools and finally was able to build a dashboard for all social platforms. This marked his entrepreneurial journey and he named the company Sprinklr. During the first couple of years, Ragy self-funded the business and after he was able to land some big clients like Cisco and Dell, his brand gained popularity.

Success

In 2012, Sprinklr received its first funding from external sources, and eventually, the numbers kept rising. After a couple of years, Sprinklr raised $40 million in a funding round after which the company’s valuation became $500 million. It also acquired the Dachis Group to stretch the abilities of the Sprinklr platform. In 2014, Sprinklr acquired two more companies, namely, TBG Digital and a brand advocacy company called Branderati. Next year, the company raised another $46 million in Series E funding, and by this time the company valuation crossed $1 billion. It also launched a brand new product called Experience Cloud platform where companies can manage interaction for 23 different social media and channels. Sprinklr acquired two more companies, NewBrand and Booshaka.

In 2016, the company raised $105 million in a funding round leading its valuation to $1.8 billion. The company decided to launch new products for its Experience Cloud platform and thus expanded from social media management to customer experience management. In 2018, the company released another new product called Sprinklr Intuition (an AI-based solution) for the automatic collection and analysis of data from social media platforms. Next year, it released another AI-based product called Product Insights which can segregate various customer comments and reviews related to design, features, etc. In 2020, another funding led the company’s valuation increase to $2.7 billion.

Ragy Thomas – Founder and CEO of Sprinklr

Ragy Thomas was born and raised in India but his parents moved to Nigeria due to work purposes when he was very young. Later, he again shifted to India and attended Pondicherry Engineering College, and started working at TCS. Later, he moved to New Jersey and started working in the IT consulting sector. Currently, Ragy is the CEO of his company Sprinklr and is also present in the Board of Directors.

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

Pluralsight, Story of company that started from classroom training to a famous online platform.

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

Pluralsight is an online platform that offers video courses and certification to gain knowledge that will help one stay updated in the 21st century. From various courses on software development to gaining creative knowledge, Pluralsight has made everything available. Aaron Skonnard, Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, and Bill Williams founded Pluralsight in 2004 as a classroom training company. But, to keep up with the time it evolved eventually to an online platform similar to Coursera and Udemy. The company’s headquarters is based in Utah, US and it is owned by Vista Equity Partners.

About Pluralsight

Back when the company was founded, Pluralsight used to send instructors to a business or training event. But today, with the help of an online learning platform, it is making the training courses available for everyone. Pluralsight uses a subscription-based model and focuses mainly on training tech-based professionals like software and security developers, IT professionals, product managers, etc.

Pluralsight has split its training approach into two paths, skills and flow. In the skill path, the platform lets the users learn and adapt new skills, upgrade skills according to needs, etc. In the flow path, a person can compare between old and new codes, fix bugs, use data to measure each team member’s contribution, etc. The minimum cost of the Pluralsight platform starts from $29 per month.

Brief history

The company started as a classroom training service in 2004 but after three years shifted its focus to online video training. Pluralsight started making huge profits in 2011 and it is also in the top 20 list of Utah companies. Inc 5000 also named it as one of the fastest-growing private companies and one of the top education companies. In 2012, the company went into a partnership with Microsoft such that the courses of the company were available for the MSDN subscribers. Pluralsight also launched a free programming coding boot camp that focused on offering coding classes to kids who are 10 and above. The company also provided a free one-year subscription to its training library for the Utah K-12 teachers.

In 2017, Pluralsight ranked #20 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list and also made it into the list of Great Place To Work’s 2017 Best Workplaces (for small and medium-sized companies). Next year, Pluralsight filed for its IPO and began trading publicly but in December 2020 it was acquired by a private equity firm called Vista Equity Partners. The deal was closed by $3.5 billion. In the past decade, Pluralsight has successfully landed many corporate clients, and the majority of them are Fortune 500 companies.

Funding

When Pluralsight was started, it was a self-funded venture as each of the four founders contributed $5000. For a very long time, the company didn’t receive any external funding until December 2012 when the Series A funding round was conducted. In the first funding round, Pluralsight raised $27.5 million from Insight Venture Partners and received an additional $2.5 million later. In 2014, Pluralsight raised another $135 million in Series B funding when some new investors like ICONIQ Capital and Sorenson Capital joined in. During that time, Pluralsight became the first Utah-based company ever to receive that much amount of funding. After the Series C funding round in 2016, Pluralsight became a billion-dollar company.

Acquisitions

Pluralsight started acquiring a series of companies from 2013 starting with e-learning and education businesses. It acquired PeepCode in July 2013 followed by TrainSignal and Tekpub in the same year. In 2014, it acquired Digital-Tutors expanding Pluralsight’s training courses to media and design. Later in the same year, it acquired an online skill assessment platform called Smarterer. Some of the other companies it acquired in the last few years are Train Simple, GitPrime, Next Tech, etc.

About Aaron Skonnard – CEO and co-founder

Aaron started to code from a very young age when his father bought him an Apple II computer. He completed his studies in Computer Science from Brigham Young University and worked at various companies like 3M, Intel, and Axiom Technologies. He also published a few books and invested in start-ups that emerged in Utah.

Annasha

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