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SoftBank Group

SoftBank Group – The Famous Multinational Conglomerate Founded By A Young Japanese Entrepreneur.

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Founded in 1981, SoftBank Group is one of the largest multinational conglomerates based in Japan. The company generates annual revenue of more than $50 billion and employs approximately 80,000 people worldwide. Masayoshi Son, a Japanese tech entrepreneur, founded the company when he was 24-year old. Currently, the headquarters of the company is located in Minato, Tokyo and it mainly focuses on investment management. The major sectors where SoftBank mainly invests are finance, energy, and tech. SoftBank Group is also responsible for running the world’s largest tech-based venture capital fund, Vision Fund where the main investors belong to the Middle Eastern countries.

Early Days Of SoftBank Group

SoftBank Group, today, is the second-largest publicly-traded company in Japan after Toyota. Back in 1981, when Masayoshi Son founded SoftBank, it operated as a software distributor. After a year, SoftBank entered into the publishing business and launched a couple of magazines about NEC and Sharp computers. By 1989, SoftBank became the largest magazine publisher in the computer and tech category. The company decided to go public in 1994 when the company was valued at $3 million. Next year, it acquired a publishing company. Ziff Davis for $2.1 billion and expanded its market to the US.

After buying Ziff Davis, the company bought COMDEX for $800 million and later sold it to Key3Media. Masayoshi Son made a huge investment in internet services during the 1990s and entered into a joint venture with Yahoo! In 1996. This partnership led to the creation of Yahoo! Japan, a very popular website in the country. SoftBank became a holding company in 1999 and in 2000 it invested a huge amount in Alibaba that turned into a big profit. In the 21st century, Son decided to expand the Asian market and started with an investment in multiple Korean companies that provides internet services.

SoftBank Group
Image source: wccftech.com

Expansion And Acquisition

Since Son was heavily investing in the internet and telecommunication market, SoftBank Group decided to acquire Vodafone Japan in 2005. This acquisition made SoftBank a very dominating company in Japan’s telecom operator’s business. After acquiring Vodafone Japan, SoftBank also acquired a 23% stake in Betfair and entered a collaboration with Tiffany & Co. In 2010, SoftBank acquired a 13.7% stake in Ustream. After a couple of years, the company announced that it is planning to acquire Sprint Nextel (70% stake) which during the final agreement became 78%. Later, the company acquired more shares and owned 80% of the company.

In 2013, the company acquired a 51% stake in Supercell and heavily invested in OlaCabs, Snapdeal, and Housing.com. The same year, it acquired a controlling stake in Aldeberan Robotics and renamed the company SoftBank Robotics. In 2015, Son decided to bring Nikesh Arora, a former Google Executive onboard and made him the Representative Director and President of SoftBank. Since SoftBank was investing in Korean companies, the company decided to invest $1 billion in Coupang, a Korean e-commerce website. In 2016, SoftBank announced the plans to acquire ARM Holdings for $32 billion which was the company’s largest deal in its history. The same year Son had a meeting with Former US President, Donald Trump after which SoftBank decided to invest $50 billion in the US market to create jobs.

Present Days

In 2021, SoftBank announced a huge profit of approximately $37 billion from its Vision Fund and the Korean e-commerce website, Coupang. The annual profit of SoftBank in the financial year 20-21 was the largest recorded profit in the industrial history of Japan. The company has planned a series of acquisitions in 2021 which includes the acquisition of stakes in AutoStore, Yanolja (a Korean hotel booking platform), etc. SoftBank has also decided to sell its T-Mobile US shares to Deutsche Telekom.

About The Founder

Masayoshi Son is a famous Japanese billionaire, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He received Japanese citizenship in 1990 and he was born on a Japanese island, Kyushu in 1957. Currently, Son is the second richest man in Japan and the 68th richest man across the world according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. At the age of sixteen, Son left for California and studied at the University of California, Berkeley. While he was a student, he was interested in technology and entrepreneurship and created his first electronic translator and sold it to Sharp Corporation.

Alteryx

Alteryx – An American-based Software Company That Develops Products For Data Science And Analytics.

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Founded in 1997, Alteryx was established as a software company in Irvine California. The products of Alteryx are used for making significant advancements in data science and analytics that help several organizations. The company offers a series of products as a part of its platform including Alteryx Connect, Alteryx Designer, Alteryx Promote, Analytics Hub, etc. It also hosts a cloud-based website which is called Alteryx Analytics Gallery. In the last two decades, Company has expanded worldwide with approximately 1,200 employees. Currently, the CEO of the company is Mark Anderson. Under his leadership, the company has acquired a lot of companies.

History Of Alteryx

The foundation history of Alteryx began with the establishment of SRC LLC in 1997. This company is the predecessor of Alteryx as the name of the company was changed in 2010 after its core product. Dean Stoecker, Duane Adams, and Ned Harding are the three founders of the company. When the company was newly launched, SRC was building a data engine that was the first of its kind to deliver demographic-based mapping with a very short reporting time. After one year, the company released Allocate, a new product 1998, It was a data engine that incorporated geographically organized US census data. This data engine allowed the users to analyze, manipulate, and map data.

The product line of the company eventually started growing as it rolled out another product, Solocast in the same year. This product was developed for the main purpose of customer segmentation analysis. After two years, a modified version of the Allocate software was developed as per a contract between SRC LLC and US Census Bureau. The bureau used the updated software to integrate on the CD-ROMs of Census Data. In 2006, the company developed a new product called Alteryx. This product had both spatial and non-spatial data environments for building various applications based on analytics.

Alteryx
Image source: medium.com

Expansion And Acquisitions

After the rollout of Alteryx, it became the core product of the company, and thus in 2010 SRC LLC changed its name to Alteryx. The funding received by Alteryx started escalating during this time as in 2011 the company raised $6 million from the Palo Alto investment arm of SAP Ventures. After two years it again raised $12 million from SAP Ventures and Toba Capital. The company conducted its Series B funding in 2014 where it was able to raise $60 million from existing investors and Insight Venture Partners. After this funding round, the company decided to expand its workspace by 30 percent.

In 2015, Alteryx raised another $85 million in a funding round led by ICONIQ Capital. The company announced that this fund will be used to expand internationally, improve their R&D facilities, and increase sales and marketing efforts. In 2016, Company was featured in the Forbes Cloud 100 list and a year after that it filed its IPO and went public. After the company started trading publicly, it made a series of acquisitions starting with a software company called Semanta in 2017. Later in 2017, Company acquired a data science startup, Yhat for $10.8 million. Some of the other companies acquired in the last few years are Alteryx ANZ, ClearStory Data, Feature Labs, etc.

Awards

The company has become one of the noticeable companies in the data science platform. In 2018, Gartner recognized Alteryx as a leader in the 2018 Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms. Gartner Peer Insights also named the company “The Best Business Intelligence and Analytics Software of 2017.” KeyBanc Capital Markets named the company a Top 20 AI All-Stars Technology and the former CEO and co-founder of the company Dean Stoecker received the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2017.

About The Founders

Dean Stoecker is famous as the co-founder and former CEO of Alteryx. He went to the University of Colorado followed by Pepperdine University to complete his MBA. In 2019, the net worth of Stoecker was $1.2 billion.

Duane Adams is one of the co-founders of the company and the Chief Advocacy Officer of Alteryx. One of her main goals in the company is to diversify the workforce and upskill the people of the company to keep up with the constantly evolving business world. Before co-founding Alteryx, she worked at Strategic Mapping, Donnelley, and VNU Business Media.

Ned Harding has recently retired from Alteryx. But, while he was a part of the company he served as the Vice President and CTO of the same. Before co-founding Alteryx, he worked at several companies as a software engineer.

Anaplan

Anaplan – A San Francisco-based Software Company Mainly Famous For Its Enterprise Management Products.

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Based in San Francisco, California, Anaplan is a software company that sells subscription-based products for enterprise management helps in decision making. The software developed by the company are cloud-based products that mainly focus on business planning and it also provides data for business analytics. The founders of the company are Guy Haddleton, Sue Haddleton, and Michael Gould. Anaplan was founded in 2006 and currently, it has established markets in 13 different countries and employs nearly 2,000 people. Anaplan has customers from very diverse industrial sectors like healthcare, telecom, retail, banking, etc. Some of the big customers of the company are DocuSign, Tata Steel, and Zillow.

History Of Anaplan

Anaplan was originally founded in Yorkshire England by the Haddletons and Gould. The company made significant expansion, acquisition, and growth in the last century. In 2010, four years after officially founding the company, it sold its first product. The same year it received its first capital funding and within the next two years, Anaplan was able to host another funding round. In 2012, Anaplam raised $11.2 million in its Series B funding round. The main investors were Granite Ventures and Shasta Ventures. Anaplan also hired Frederic Laluyaux as the new CEO of the company in the same year, but he resigned from the company in 2016.

The company eventually started its acquisition and in 2013 bought Vue Analytics, one of its resellers based in the UK. The monetary terms were not disclosed to the public. In 2013, the company again had another round of funding (Series C) in which it raised $33 million. Apart from Shasta and Granite Ventures, some other significant investors were Meritech and Salesforce.com. A year from its Series C funding, the company announced that it hosted Series D funding from which it raised $100 million and it made the total amount of investment to $150 million.

Anaplan
Image source: ggpht.com

Growth And Success

By 2014, the company was able to raise a handsome amount of money from the investor. So, the same year Anaplan rolled out its marketplace Anaplan Hub whose main goal was to assist customers to find pre-designed planning models. The platform also has an option such that it can allow customers to share their planning models as well. By the end of 2014, the company opened 11 offices in 7 different companies and it was still expanding to other international marketplaces.

In 2016, Anaplam conducted another round of funding and it received $90 million from it. After this funding round, the valuation of the company reached the $1 billion mark and it obtained unicorn status. The then CEO of the company, Frederic Laluyaux announced that it was the last private funding round of the company and an IPO was around the corner. Before going public, Anaplan hired James Budge as the new Chief Financial Officer of the company and after a year appointed Frank A. Calderoni as the new CEO.

With Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as the lead underwriters, Anaplam went public in 2018 and got listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The position of Simon Tucker changed from Chief Customer Officer to Chief Planning Officer and he was given the responsibility to reshape the company’s core business. Recently, Anaplan has acquired an Israeli company called Mintigo which specializes in sales analytics. Anaplan also appeared on the list of Deloitte Technology First 500.

Frank Calderoni – CEO Of Anaplan

Frank Calderoni is not only the CEO of the company but also the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Anaplan. Frank has experience in industry leadership for more than 30 years and he served in many other companies before joining Anaplan. Prior to joining Anaplan, Frank was the Executive Vice President, Operations, and CFO of Red Hat Inc, for two years. He also worked at Cisco Systems for 7 years and other companies like Adobe and SanDisk. In an interview, Frank said that Anaplan is full of opportunities and that is one of the main reasons he decided to join the company.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace – The Software Intelligence Company Assuring Error-free Execution of Business Applications.

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It won’t be inappropriate if we call the current era the era of Information Technology. There is no business that is not using the very technology to accomplish their daily work. Though there have been discovered various software to ease out the tasks for companies, still to deal with some conflicts in that software we require some application monitoring software too. This software ensures the seamless working of the software without having to face any errors or other conflicts. Dynatrace is one of the companies which is responsible for building such software and helping companies work without any difficulty. Dynatrace is a U.S.A.-based software intelligence company that offers monitoring and optimization services to ensure a better user experience for its clients.

About The Company

Dynatrace is a sixteen years old company founded in 2005 in Linz, Austria. The company has its headquarters based in Waltham, Massachusetts, U.S., but it offers services to its customers globally. Dynatrace is best known for its Software Intelligence Platform, which uses AI to provide monitoring and application optimizing services to its customers. Other services by the company include Application Security, Cloud Automation, Digital Business Analytics, Infrastructure Monitoring, and IT Operations Analytics, etc.
It is a publicly-traded company, as it trades on the New York Stock Exchange as DT. As of the year 2021, about 3000 people are working at Dynatrace, and for the fiscal year 2021, it made revenues worth US$703.509 Million. Apart from its headquarters in the U.S., the company has opened about 50 offices in countries like Canada, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Egypt, Italy, Poland, Ireland, the U.K., Estonia, Finland, France, and Greece, etc. From Mastercard and Bank of America to At&T and Vodafone, almost every big-name company is using services by Dynatrace.

Dynatrace
Image source: wikimedia.org

Founding Dynatrace

Bernd Greifeneder is the founder of Dynatrace. He founded the company Dynatrace Software GmbH on 2 February 2005 in Linz, Austria. During the dot-com boom, Greifeneder was studying Computer Science at the JKU Linz. Despite the popularity of the internet around, he always felt confused about online shopping stores getting crashed due to more than ten users using the website. This problem led to a solution by Greifeneder, as he invented software for websites to handle rush with ease and without getting them collapsed. This led to the birth of Dynamic Tracing with the help of AI and then to the founding of Dynatrace in 2005. In the beginning, the company used a few servers for the business, but later with the growth, it started using thousands of servers for its work.
Within one year of founding Dynatrace, the founder of the company was able to bag investments from the leading venture capitalist Bain Capital Ventures. In the next three years, the company received 13 million US dollars from Bay Partners of California.
In 2011, Compuware acquired Dynatrace for a sum 256 of million US dollars, and with the acquisition, Compuware (previously a public company) became private. After the acquisition, Greifeneder held the position of CTO at the company, and the company growth skyrocketed like never before. The two companies were different in their field of work, and Dynatrace remained a separate division of Compuware handled by Greifeneder. Later in 2014, the Compuware APM group was renamed Dynatrace. In the same year, the company also established the Digital Performance Management category. Dynatrace had its first IPO in 2019 and started to trade on NYSE. For the past many years, Dynatrace has won several awards of excellence, including Best Large Company to Work For by Built In Boston.

The Founder

Bernd Greifeneder is the founder and the current CTO at Dynatrace. He is a software engineer with a graduate and postgraduate degree in computer science from Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria. He has held many prominent positions in various companies. Greifeneder has spent more than seven years at Segue Software Inc., where he started as the Project lead and was promoted to be the CTO of Globel Technologies and Chief software architect. Greifeneder also served Ruxit as the Senior Vice President and CTO of the company. He founded Dynatrace in 2005, and since then, he has served the company as the CEO, CTO, Vice President Engineering, etc. Currently, he is leading the company as the Senior Vice President and CTO.

PTC Inc

PTC Inc – An American Technology Company Specializing In IoT And Augmented Reality.

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PTC Inc is a famous American software company that was founded in 1985. The main products and services of the company include the Internet of Things (IoT), Augmented Reality (AR), and collaboration software. The headquarters of the company is based in Boston, Massachusetts, US. A Russian immigrant and mathematician, Samuel P. Giesberg is the mastermind behind the foundation of PTC Inc. He worked as a software engineer at other companies before founding PTC. Today, this public multinational company has more than 6,000 employees spread across 30 countries.

The Initial Story Of PTC Inc

In May 1985, Samuel Giesberg officially launched PTC Inc and worked for developing a new CAD-CAM program. In the first few years, Samuel was looking for venture capitalists to market his new software. Initially, he was turned down by many venture capitalists but at last, he received a total fund of $4 million from Charles River Ventures and other firms. In 1988, the company launched its first product and by then half the funding money was invested. The first product of the company was the CAD-CAM program but PTC entered late in the market and was already surrounded by powerful rivals.

The CAD-CAM software technology entered the market in the 1960s and it was in the late 1980s that Samuel launched the new software. But, what he brought into the market has an added innovation in the already developed technology which left its rival surprised. For example, the CAD-CAM software in the market was able to make different changes in a 3D model but PTC’s software was able to predict the consequences of that change in the overall model. Thus, this new software became a breakthrough as it made the work of an engineer much easier. Within one year, PTC made a total sales of $11 million and a net income of more than $1.5 million.

PTC Inc
Image source: wikimedia.org

Business Growth

After the sales started escalating in the late 1980s, the company filed its first IPO and went public. Samuel also launched different versions of the mechanical software for various operating systems. Only after two years of launching the CAD-CAM software, PTC was controlling 10 percent of this software market. By the end of 1991, the total sales of the company reached $45 million. The CAD-CAM Pro/Engineer system was such a big hit that it attracted clients of big companies who were established in the industry. In 1992, this technology was named “Technology of the Year” by IndustryWeek. PTC also made into the list of Fortune 500 in 1995 and crossed $800 million in revenue.

In 1993 PTC’s market share increased to 20 percent and it landed big clients like Ford Motor and Caterpillar Inc. By this time the company also started increasing the number of employees and the annual revenue doubled within a year. In 1998, PTC acquired Comoutervision, where Samuel was a former employee, and Windchill Technology. In the early 2000s, PTC broadened the range of products as it developed lifecycle management software for products and services. PTC made both CAD-related and other acquisitions that include Polyplan Technologies, NetRegulus, Synapsis Technology, Mathsoft, CoCreate, NC Graphics, etc. Three years ago, the company landed a major investor, Rockwell Automation. It invested $1 billion in the company and acquired an 8.4 percent ownership stake.

About The Founder

Samuel Giesberg was a maths professor who fled to the US in 1974 with his 11-year old son. After he moved to a new country, he started working as a software engineer and soon he became a prodigy at Computervision (the company he worked for). Samuel’s brother Vladimir gave him the push to start his own company and also suggested landing some investors for financing the same. Samuel had ten years of experience in designing CAD-CAM software and thus decided to leap.

CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike – The Leading EndPoint protection Software Provider.

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With the first virus on the computer, the IT industry has seen multiple threats in the form of viruses, malicious activities, and cyber-attacks. Today, data is everything, and safeguarding the data has become the supreme task for the industry. There are several companies that are working towards providing a secure working environment and keeping the data safe from any sort of external threat. CrowdStrike is one of those companies bringing the most innovative products promoting cyber security and fighting such attacks. This 10-year-old company is best known for its endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services.

About The Company

CrowdStrike is a publically traded company founded in 2011. The company trades on Nasdaq with the ticker name CRWD. Its founders include George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston. The company headquarters is based in Sunnyvale, California, U.S., and it operates globally. CrowdStrike is home to about 4000 employees, and as of 2021, it made revenues worth US$874.438 million. A few of the major products by the company include Endpoint security, Security and IT operations, and Security cloud. CrowdStrike has helped companies tackle major high-profile cyberattacks like the Sony Pictures hack in 2014 and the Democratic National Committee cyber attacks in 2015-16, etc.

CrowdStrike
image source: www.crowdstrike.com

Founding CrowdStrike

George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston co-founded CrowdStrike in 2011. The next year, the founders started a subsidiary with the name CrowdStrike Services, Inc. The subsidiary provided proactive and incident response services. The company’s first product was the CrowdStrike Falcon, a threat intelligence software published in the year 2013. In the following years, CrowdStrike assisted major organizations like the United States Department of Justice, Sony Pictures, and the Democratic National Committee in tackling the biggest cyber-attacks. The company was also successful in uncovering malicious activities by many hacking groups, such as the activities of the Energetic Bear that worked for the Russian Federation.
In 2015, CrowdStrike received investments from Google through a Series C funding round. CrowdStrike launched a version of its antivirus software Falcon for mobile devices in 2017. During the same year, it became a unicorn and had annual revenues worth $100 million. By 2018, the company value reached more than $3 billion. The company went public on Nasdaq and had its first IPO in 2019. In the years 2020 and 2021, CrowdStrike acquired companies, including Preempt Security and Humio.
The company has won awards like AWS Global Public Sector Partner Award for best cybersecurity solution and Canada AWS Partner Award as the ISV Partner of the Year in 2021. It also got ranked at number one for Modern Endpoint Security 2020 Market Shares in IDC’s Worldwide Corporate Endpoint Security Market Shares, 2020 Report in the same year. Telstra, Google, Rackspace, March Capital Partners, Accel Partners, and Warburg Pincus are some of the major investors in CrowdStrike.

The CEO of CrowdStrike

George Kurtz is the President, CEO, and one of the co-founders of CrowdStrike. He was born in 1970 and grew up in Parsippany-Troy Hills, New Jersey. Kurtz went to the Parsippany High School, and according to sources, he started to program video games at an early age. When he was in high school, he built a bulletin board system too. He has got an accounting degree from Seton Hall University.
As soon Kurtz graduated from college, he started to work at Price Waterhouse. He then was shifted to the security group of the company in 1993. In 1999, he co-published a book on cybersecurity named Hacking Exposed, which later came in 30 different languages. In the same year, Kurtz founded his first company named Foundstone, which he sold to McAfee in 2004, becoming the senior vice president and general manager of risk management at McAfee.
In 2011, Kurtz, along with the former chief financial officer at Foundstone, Gregg Marston, and Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founded CrowdStrike in Irvine, California. Since then, he has been working as the President and the CEO of CrowdStrike.