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Naver Corporation

Naver Corporation – A South Korean Multinational Conglomerate Offering The Topmost Search Portal In The Country.

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Born in 1999, Naver Corporation is a South Korean company that started offering search services at the beginning of the 21st century. Naver’s headquarters is based in Seongnam, South Korea. The company is known for pioneering in user-generated content in its early days and it has several other services (encyclopedia, cafe, blog, etc). It also has several subsidiaries that include Line, Snow, Camp Mobile, Naver Labs, etc. The company is also trying to evolve its technology platform and hence closely cooperating with tech startups. Naver was also recognized by Forbes as one of the most innovative companies in the world and was also featured in Fortune magazine.

About Naver Corporation

NAVER is the top search portal in South Korea and the company’s other subsidiaries and affiliates offer services like digital comic platforms, messenger, social media platforms, metaverse platforms, etc. Naver has also expanded to the international markets in the last two decades. It has offices in Japan, the USA, France, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, China, and Taiwan. There are nearly 3,000 employees in the company and its current CEO is Choi Soo Yeon. Naver was originally founded by Lee Hae Jin under the name of Naver Comm. It has made several acquisitions in the past decade and merged with many companies to expand its territory.

Naver Corporation
Image source: www.korea.net

History

In June 1999, Lee Hae Jin established Naver Comm. and its main product was the search engine, Naver. Since Naver was a search portal the company decided to roll out a similar search engine for the children and hence named it Junior Naver. After a year, the company merged with Hangame Communications Inc, Search Solutions, Oneque, and several other companies. In August 2000, Naver decided to roll out its comprehensive search product that allowed users to get a variety of search results from a single query on a single page. And the search results were organized by types like blogs, products, images, etc. In the same year, the company also established Hangame Japan.

Entering a new decade, the company changed its name to NHN (Next Human Network) Corporation. But the two divisions of the company, Naver and Hangame continued operating under their original brand names. In 2002, Naver became a public company and also launched a new service, Naver Knowledge iN. It also began a donation service called Happy Bean. It was in 2003 that the company merged all of its Japanese subsidiaries into NHN Japan and after a few years launched Naver Japan to start its search engine in the country. Eventually, the company also expanded to the USA and opened the American game service, ijji but sold it away shortly.

In 2008, it was for the first time that the company’s name was featured in Forbes magazine and after a year the CEO of NHN was also featured in Forbes’ Asia’s Fab 50 list. In the next few years, Naver focuses on strengthening the social media business as it acquired a Japanese blog platform, Livedoor, and also launched Line, a messaging application. In 2013, NHN was split into two divisions, Naver Corporation and NHN Entertainment and in the same year, Naver became the first company to operate its own data center. By the end of 2015, the company’s global revenue started exceeding rapidly especially because of the global affiliate services.

Global Expansion

As the company’s annual revenue started exceeding 4 trillion won, many of its affiliates also started filing IPO and going public. The number of subsidiaries of the company also started increasing and some of the new ones include Snow, Naver Labs, and Naver Webtoon. In 2021, Naver acquired Wattpad for $600 million. Line Corporation, the biggest subsidiary of Naver merged with Yahoo Japan in 2021. Naver’s current focus is to start competing with the biggest tech giants of the world like Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.

About the Founder

Famous as the founder of Naver Corporation, Lee Hae-jin is a 54-year old billionaire. He is one of the top twenty richest people in South Korea and his business venture started while he was already working for Samsung in the late 1990s. Lee went to Seoul National University followed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

Coupang

Coupang – An e-Commerce Company That Is Recognized As The Amazon Of South Korea.

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Founded in July 2010, Coupang is the second largest e-commerce marketplace in South Korea. The founder of the company is Bom Kim, a Korean-American businessman who is serving as the CEO of the company presently. Coupang is often compared to Amazon in South Korea because the company has expanded very rapidly and it is known for the fastest deliveries. The company is incorporated in Delaware, United States and apart from South Korea, recently it has entered the American stock market. In 2021, the company announced that it is expanding its business in Japan and Taiwan. Some of the other offices of Coupang are located in Seattle. Los Angeles, Shanghai, Mountain View, etc.

About Coupang

Coupang is not only a famous e-commerce company in South Korea but also recognized across the world as one of the biggest companies. The company’s growth has been exponential in the past few years and in the first quarter of 2021, sales of $4.26 billion were recorded. SoftBank majorly invested in the company when it was rising during 2015 and then in 2018 and currently, the company owns one-third of Coupang. The company is trying to create a better experience for the users every day by implementing innovative technologies. Both Forbes Magazine and MIT Technology Review recognized Coupang as one of the 50 smartest companies in the world. So, starting out only a decade ago, the company is making the same lists as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Tesla.

Coupang’s fastest delivery is what makes it the most widely used e-commerce site in South Korea. In 2019, the company introduced a new feature called Dawn Delivery which means that if a customer orders something before midnight it will get delivered by 7 am in the next day. This feature helped the company grow very fast especially during the time of pandemic as people could get emergency supplies in less than half a day’s duration. Coupang’s IPO when entering the American market became the biggest IPO of an Asian company after the Alibaba Group.

Coupang
Image source: tellimer.com

History of the Company

Back in 2010 when Coupang was established it started out as an endeavor similar to Groupon. But within the first three years, Company crossed everyone’s expectations and left most of its competitors behind in the market. It was able to attract many large investors and in 2014 raised $300 million successfully from US investors and then in 2015 and 2018 raised $3 billion from SoftBank. SoftBank, today, owns a major portion of the company while the stakeholders are Greenoaks Capital, Maverick Holdings, Rose Park Advisors, BlackRock, and Bom Kim.

After eleven years of successfully establishing one of the largest Asian e-commerce companies, Coupang has a workforce of more than 50,000. It is because of the fastest deliveries that people in South Korea uses Coupang extensively. The company claims that 99.6% of the order received are delivered within 24 hours. The company uses Rocket Delivery Network and 70% of the South Korean citizens have a Coupang logistic center within a 10-minutes distance from their home.

Is Coupang better than Amazon?

Though in South Korea, Coupang is used extensively when compared to Amazon, the former has a very small customer base. Coupang has approximately 15 million customers whereas Amazon has over 100 million prime customers across the world. But, the customer base of Coupang will steadily increase because it is launching in overseas markets. Similar to Amazon Prime membership, Coupang has also launched a membership program (Coupang Wow Rocket Membership) and nearly 32% of the total customers are paying for it. The delivery speed of Coupang is unmatchable even for Amazon especially when it comes down to groceries.

About the Founder

Born in Seoul, Bom Kim left Korea at the age of seven and went to boarding school in Massachusetts. Later, he attended Harvard University followed by Harvard Business School but dropped out after six months. Before starting Coupang, he worked at Boston Consulting Group and currently his net worth is approximately $6.8 billion.

Align Technology

Zia Chishti Conceived The Idea Of Align Technology After An Uncomfortable Appointment With His Dentist.

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Technology has helped almost every field of work improve its operations. Whether it is the hospitality business or the healthcare industry, each one is enjoying merging technology to their services. Talking about healthcare, several machines are technology-based, whether an MRI machine or a heartbeat oscillator. There are also 3D scanners made by companies like Align Technology that are used in the orthodontics department of healthcare, to ease out dental operations. The company is known for its 3D digital scanners and clear aligners made for the dentistry industry. Not only the company manufactures these products but also provides resources for the doctors to learn and train better.

About Align Technology

A twenty-five years old Align Technology has its headquarters based in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. (corporate), and San Jose, California, U.S. (regional). This American company is a leading manufacturer of orthodontics devices. The company was founded in 1997 by Zia Chishti and Kelsey Wirth. The company is based in America but serves worldwide. It specializes in manufacturing clear aligners and scanners. Align Technology is a publically traded company and trades on Nasdaq as ALGN. As per the 2020 records, the company made annual revenues worth US$2.471 Billion and is a home for over 18,070 employees working for it globally. The company has over 1,260 patents registered under its name.

Align Technology
Image source: www.mercurynews.com

The Back Story

Zia Chishti conceived the idea of Align Technology after an uncomfortable appointment with his dentist. He partnered with Kelsey Wirth to develop clear aligners under the brand name Invisalign. The company received the approval for Invisalign from Food and Drug Administration in 1998, and they started shipping the products very next year. In the initial years of Align Technology, it received investments worth $140 million from some major venture capitalists. In 2001, the company had its first IPO, and it went public on NASDAQ. It raised a sum of $130 million in the IPO.
The innovative idea behind the Align Technology products made the company reach over 175,000 by 2004. In 2005, the company started to expand overseas and reached Japan for the first time. The same year, the Invisalign certification also became a compulsory thing for the Harvard School Dental Medicine graduates. Align Technology has also launched a certification program to train doctors and has established the AlignTech Institute for doctors to learn better.
Align Technology also introduced another innovative product in 2005, the Invisalign Express 10. The next launches from the company included Invisalign 1.5 (2009), Invisalign G3 (2010), Invisalign G4 (2011), Express 5 version (2012), Invisalign G5 (2014), etc.
In 2011, Company acquired Israel-based Cadent System, Inc., which helped the company to expand its 3D imaging and scanner manufacturing wing. By 2014, over 2.4 million people all over the world were being treated using Invisalign. Also, Align Technology became a unicorn in 2016. Apart from California, the company has its manufacturing units based in Costa Rica, Juarez, and Mexico. It also has its scanner manufacturing units in Israel and China. It has also launched separate subsidiaries to operate in Australia and Hong Kong.

The CEO at Align Technology

Joseph M. Hogan or Joe Hogan is the Director, President, and the CEO at Align Technology, serving since 2015 at the position. Hogan has got a B.S. degree in Business and Economics from Geneva College, Pennsylvania, and has completed his MBA from Robert Morris University.
With more than 25 years of experience, Hogan has worked at executive positions in companies belonging to fields, including healthcare, technology, automation, etc. Before becoming the CEO of Align Technology, Hogan has served companies like ABB and GE Healthcare as the CEO.

Zscaler

Zscaler – A Cloud Security Company Founded By An Indian-American Billionaire.

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Zscaler is an American company established in the network security sector. The company was named one of the best places to work in America for two consecutive years. Zscaler is a publicly-traded company that was founded in 2007. Its headquarters is based in San Jose, California. CRN has also named Zscaler as one of the twenty coolest could security companies of the year. The main goal of the company is to anticipate and secure the whole experience of connectivity and sharing information. It started acquiring other companies more than after a decade the company was established. In 2021, the company started powering its global data centers and offices with renewable energy.

About Zscaler

Jay Chaudhry is the founder of the Zscaler who established it in 2007 along with K. Kailash. Chaudhry’s passion for making innovations in cybersecurity led to the foundation of the company which is one of the five startups he established in his journey. Zscaler is a leading cloud security company and it is also a leader in the zero-trust security model. The products offered by Zscaler ensure that a company can safely transfer data among its employers especially when working from a remote environment. The two main compromises that network security company deals with today are data loss and cyberattacks. Zscaler’s platform ensures its customer protection from these threats.

The company has a very lucrative list of clients and investors and its products are used in more than 185 countries today. Apart from the multinational companies, the government agencies also use the Company platform to prevent cyberattacks and data loss. The company has security as a service revenue model and some of its biggest clients are General Electric, VMware, Nestle, Barclays, the State of North Carolina, etc. The National Health Services of the UK is one of the largest government bodies to use Zscaler. The main products of the company include Zero Trust Exchange, Zscaler Internet Access, Zscaler Cloud Protection, Zscaler Private Access, and Zscaler Digital Experience.

Zscaler
Image source: www.zscaler.com

History of the Company

Zscaler started its venture in 2007 and from 2008 the products (cloud security services) of the company were made available. Within two years, the company became very famous and was featured in the list of top 10 startups to watch in 2009 by Network World. Gartner Magic Quadrant named the company as a “Visionary” for Secure Web Gateways in 2010. For many subsequent years, Company was also positioned as a “Leader” in the Leaders Quadrant for Secure Web Gateways.

Zscaler also started acquiring new investors in the early 2010s. In 2012, Zscaler was able to raise $38 million from multiple investors including Lightspeed Ventures. In 2015, another round of funding took place which was led by TPG and the company secured $100 million. The company went public in March 2018 in which it raised $192 million in the initial public offering. It was by the end of 2021 that the Zscaler stock was added to the Nasdaq 100. The company also started making several acquisitions in 2018. The first company acquired was TrustPath, an AI-based company for cybersecurity. In 2019, acquired Appsulate, a cloud browser isolation company followed by Cloudneeti, a company that offered cloud security posture management (CSPM) technology. In 2021, it acquired two companies namely, Trustdome and Smokescreen.

Awards and Accolades

Zscaler has been recognized for its innovative technology and work culture over the years. In 2017, the company was awarded the Morgan Stanley CTO Award for Innovation, Most Innovative Tech Company of the Year in 2019, Cybersecurity Impact Awards Honoree in 2020, Infosec Publisher’s Choice Award in 2020, and many more. For the last two years, it has consecutive won the award of Glassdoor Best Place to Work.

Jay Chaudhry – Founder and CEO

Jay Chaudhry is an Indian-American entrepreneur who has started several ventures apart from Zscaler. His other successful endeavors are AirDefense, CipherTrust, CoreHarbor, and SecureIT. Jay has more than 25 years of experience in network security, sales, marketing, and management. Before becoming an entrepreneur, he worked at companies like IBM and Unisys. He is an alumnus of IIT BHU and later went to Harvard Business School.

Hathway

Hathway – India’s largest Multi System Operator Owned By Reliance Industries.

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In the early days of television, we used to have those antennas and big dishes that would catch the signal for us. But slowly, time went by, and the broadcasting went digital. In India, some major names handled those cable connections, one of them is Hathway. Hathway started from digital TV broadcasting, and today, it is also offering broadband services to its customers. This can be termed as a fairly growth story of a company and must be considered as an inspiring one, as one can only learn from the journey of the company is to grow whatever is the scale of competition is out there. This Indian company is the first cable ISP in India and the first to provide internet using a CATV network in India.

About the Company

Hathway is an over eighty years old company founded in India. Pheroza Billimoria and Roopesh Rao founded the company, establishing its headquarters in Mumbai India. The company offers its services in Cable television, Broadband Internet, Digital voice as well as Home networking. Hathway is a publically traded company and is completely owned by Reliance Industries. It is one of the first companies to provide HDTV services in India, and Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Indore, Kolkata; Gujarat were the first ones to receive this service.
Today, over 11 million people are using the Hathway services in terms of digital TV and broadband/wireless services. In 2018, the company came under the ownership of Reliance Industries as it acquired 51% of the stakes in the company for ₹2,940 crores (US$390 million). In the following years, Reliance acquired the other 49% stakes as well.

Hathway
Image source: www.gizbot.com

The Founding of Hathway

Pheroza Billimoria and Roopesh Rao founded Hathway as Chics Display Services Private Limited in 1959 in Mumbai. The company then had a name change to Hathway Cable & Datacom Private Limited as the shift in the ownership to Business India Television (BITV) Cable Networks Pvt Ltd. The real journey of the company started in 1998 when it was revamped and got launched again as a cable service provider after receiving massive funding from its investors.
In 2000 Hathway also started the broadband internet services on DOCSIS technology, whereas the News Corp acquired a 26% equity in the company paying ₹ 3.4 Bn. The year 2003 was a special year for Hathway as it had reached 2 lakh cable TV subscribers in that year. The next year, the company introduced digital TV services and had acquired over 100,000 internet service subscribers.
The company starting from Mumbai, began to expand to other major cities of the country as well by acquiring the local MSOs, like the Rajesh Multichannel Private Limid (Maharashtra), Gujarat Telelink Private Limited (Gujrat), Bhaskar Multinet Private Limited (Madhya Pradesh), etc.
In the year 2008, Hathway launched the HD PVR boxes and acquired 50% stakes in GTPL. The next year, the company hit the one million subscribers milestone for its digital cable subscriber. The company went public in 2010 and raised ₹4.8 Bn in the IPO. In 2011, the company launched the HDTV service in the major cities of India. Hathway partnered with D-Link Direct Service in 2013 to provide high-speed Wi-fi routers to its customers.
The company also launched its music channel in Bangalore as well as partnered with EROS to launch a movie service in 2014. In 2017, the company spun off its cable TV business to make it a subsidiary company.

The CEO at Hathway

Rajan Gupta is the current CEO and MD of Hathway. Before becoming the CEO of the company, Gupta served Hathway as the President of the Hathway Broadband business and has done quite well for the company. Gupta has more than twenty years of experience handling various leadership roles as he has been a part of companies like Tata Teleservices, Coca-Cola, and Asian Paints.

Avant

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

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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.

Avant
Image source: www.avantcorp.com

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.