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Mimecast

Mimecast, the cloud-based email management to protect our sensitive information.

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Mimecast is a publicly-traded company in the IT sector specializing in cybersecurity, information security, and email and file archiving. Peter Bauer and Neil Murray founded the company in 2003 and currently, Peteris is serving as the CEO of the company while Neil is in the position of CTO. The headquarters of the company is based in London, England. Though Mimecast offers a wide range of products to its customers, it mainly specializes in cloud-based email management for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Email 365. Mimecast became a public company in November 2015.

About Mimecast

The main goal of Mimecast is to eradicate the risks that we face daily on your email system. It also helps in reducing the cost that is required to protect our sensitive information by moving the workload to the cloud. In a single subscription-based model, Mimecast provides comprehensive email security along with archiving and service continuity.

Currently, Mimecast has 12 offices in several continents. It has more than 40,600 customers on a worldwide basis and approximately 1,700 employees to make better products and offer consistent service. The major investors of the company are Index Ventures, Dawn Capital, and Insight Venture Partners. Recently, the company has hired a new Public Sector and Channel Director to strengthen its operation in South Africa.

Mimecast
Image source: businesstech.co.za

History of the Company

Both Peter Bauer and Neil Murray came from an experienced and entrepreneurial background. They previously founded FAB Technology and Pro-Solutions respectively. Before founding Mimecast, Peter was trained as a Microsoft systems engineer and gained experience working with corporate messaging systems. The company designed the MIME protocol for formatting multimedia e-mail. Nathaniel Borenstein was the chief scientist behind the design of this protocol. After the company was founded in 2003, it expanded overseas establishing offices in London, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Munich, Israel, and many more.

The idea behind founding Mimecast was quite simple as the product was developed to make it easy for users to embrace email. In October 2015, the company filed for its IPO and the next month it started trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. In the past few years, Mimecast has acquired several companies starting with Ataata, a startup specializing in cybersecurity. In 2018, the company acquired another cybersecurity firm called Solebit. It acquired a company called DMARC Analyzer in 2019 and last year it acquired Segasec.

Business Strategies

In an interview, Peter Bauer said that the M&A strategies of the company are mainly focused on advanced technologies and new talents. They mainly target buying start-ups that can provide the company with new opportunities and capabilities. It is more like harnessing the power of any new technology and giving it a proper shape using the funds of Mimecast. The company didn’t acquire any businesses for the first fourteen years, instead, they chose to build an organic platform with strong architecture. Mimecast plans for months before acquiring so that they understand the workflow of the organization well and if their technology can bring new capabilities for its customers.

Peter Bauer – Co-Founder and CEO

The CEO and co-founder of Mimecast, Peter Bauer is also a Board Member of the company. He has significant contributions to Mimecast’s SaaS strategy. He along with Neil Murray has developed the pure cloud delivery mechanism for an easy and secured user experience. Peter originally belongs from South Africa and during the 1990s he was trained as a Microsoft system engineer. He moved to the UK from South Africa where he founded Mimecast.

In 2011, he moved to Boston to help in expanding the operations of Mimecast to South Africa. In an interview, he mentioned that though their potential plans got delayed due to the crisis of COVID-19, the employees improved their communications significantly during work from home. And, it helped in uplifting the working environment of the company.

MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy – A Powerful Business Intelligence And Data Analytics Company.

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MicroStrategy is one of the leading providers of enterprise software globally. The company was founded in 1989 in Wilmington, Delaware. The founders of the company are Michael J. Saylor, Thomas Spahr, and Sanju Bansal. It is a publicly-traded company listed on New York Stock Exchange. MicroStrategy’s main focus is on developing software and that analyzes both internal and external data and helps businesses make better decisions. The company’s headquarters is based in Virginia and it has nearly 3,200 employees.

About MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy has become a very dominating company in the business analytics sector as it has successfully built a simple UI design combined with high system performance and a universal approach. MicroStrategy has 4,000 customers spread across 26 countries for whom it provides a consistent and high-quality analytics platform. The major competitors of MicroStrategy in the market are IBM Cognos, Oracle’s BI Platform, and SAP AG Business Objects. The main goal of the company is to make sure that an enterprise has access to all its data and the platform functions optimally for the user end.

History Of The Company

Michael Saylor with a consulting contract from DuPont started MicroStrategy in 1989. He received $250,000 as start-up capital and office space in Delaware to start his work. Saylor went to MIT and while he was in college he met Sanju Bansal who joined the company shortly as a co-founder. While they were in college, both of them took a class in systems dynamics theory. Based on the idea of that subject MicroStrategy developed data mining and business intelligence software using nonlinear mathematics. After three years, the company landed its first major client, McDonald’s, and signed a contract of $10 million.

Between 1990 and 1996 the company was able to increase revenue by 100% each year. With the rapid growth, the company decided to move from Delaware to Virginia with its 50 employees. In June 1998 it applied for an IPO and became a public company. MicroStrategy eventually started focusing on its research and development division hence founded Alarm.com as part of its R&D unit.

MicroStrategy
Image source: solutionsreview.com

Economic Downfall And Lawsuit

In 2000, the company decided to restate its financial years for the preceding two years after doing a review of its accounting. When the company became a public entity its stock price rose from $7 per share to $333 per share within a year. But it started falling ($120 per share) and it was due to the burst of the dot-com bubble. The same year, MicroStrategy went through another turmoil as the US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against the company and its executives. The charges were mostly of fraud and the matter was settled later in December where each of those officials paid $350,000 in fines.

Recent Days Of MicroStrategy

In 2009, the company decided to sell Alarm.com for $27.7 million. The deal was finalized with a venture capital firm ABS Capital Partners. The same year the company introduced OLAP services and eventually started developing business intelligence software applications for iPhone and iPad. In the last decade, the company also expanded the range of its services as it launched a cloud-based service, MicroStrategy Cloud in 2011. In 2014, the company collaborated with Facebook and introduced a new feature on its platform called PRIME (Parallel Relational In-Memory Engine).

The company was going through a rough financial state in 2014 and decided to lay off 770 employees. Saylor also requested the company to reduce his salary to $1 from $875,000. In 2015, the company launched MicroStrategy 10 and after three years released the next version. Last year, the company released MicroStrategy 2020 which included a new design for its Hyperintelligence analytics tool.

Michael J. Saylor – Co-Founder And CEO

Michael J. Saylor is a famous American entrepreneur who is famous for co-founding MicroStrategy. He is also an author and the sole trustee of Saylor Academy. He went to MIT with a scholarship. He also joined the Theta Delta Chi fraternity where he met Sanju Bansal. In 1999 he was featured in MIT Technology Review as an “Innovator Under 35.”

Varonis Systems

Varonis Systems – A Software Company That Started To Mainly Protect Unstructured Data.

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In 2005, Yaki Faitelson and Ohad Korkus founded Varonis Systems to help organizations track, visualize, and protect their unstructured data. Varonis Systems is based in New York City, US and it has R&D offices in Herzliya, Israel. Varonis offers services globally and it has approximately 1,700 employees and more than 7,000 customers.

Though Varonis is a computer software company working to protect the unstructured data of its clients, it works a bit differently than other conventional cybersecurity firms. With the help of various platforms and data-tracking technology of Varonis, organizations can keep a real-time awareness of how every employee is accessing and using data to stop any malicious attacks.

About Varonis Systems

Since data is at the center of every organization, Varonis builds advanced platforms to help clients protect their unstructured data. In every organization, multiple malicious attacks that compromise sensitive data take place both from an external and internal source. To protect data, Varonis performs User Behavior Analytics (UBA) to identify any abnormal behavior before a cyberattack. The principle working pattern of Veronis is to extract the metadata from an organization’s IT infrastructure and then use the necessary information to map relationships among employees, data, etc.

Varonis has multiple types of products as per the need of a customer. Some of them are DatAlert (UBA and Data Security), DatAdvanatge (Data Governance and Data Protection), DatAnywhere (Enterprise File Sync and Sharing), etc. In 2008, the company made it to the list of Fast 50 Reader Favourites. Earlier this year, the company was awarded a Cyber Catalyst designation for its data security platform.

Varonis Systems
Image source: tadviser.com

The Idea Behind Founding Varonis

A big idea doesn’t emerge out of thin air. Whenever we are trying to find a solution to fix our problem, we hardly have any idea that how many people can benefit from an effective solution. The idea to establish Varonis Systems always emerged as a solution when the two founders were trying to find a solution to protect data. In 2003, an oil and gas company almost faced a disaster when they took high-resolution images of the ocean floor. But, one day the photographs suddenly disappeared from their server and no experts were able to discover what took place.

Unable to understand if the data was deleted by an accident or deliberately, the security experts saw an opportunity in the software industry. With every passing data, data is becoming more valuable to an individual, an enterprise, a nation, and to the whole world. So, security and systems experts (who previously worked at NetVision and NetApp), Yaki Faitelson, and Ohad Korkus founded Varonis Systems in 2005. They wanted to give organizations more visibility to their data and protect sensitive information.

History Of The Company

Varonis offers multiple ways for an organization to protect its data from both the employees of the company and external sources. The company mainly addresses issues like file activity tracking, access control, and information rights management. Varonis enables a company to track the behavior of an employee in the data server and if there is any abnormal behavior the system will be alerted. The co-founders created a system such that it would be able to extract metadata in the file systems.

While they were developing the product, they brought Dr. Jacob Goldberger, statistical modeling and machine learning expert onboard. He mainly helped the team to develop the algorithms that would provide the user data link. In 2005, these three people filed a patent and it was approved in 2006. The same year, Veronis released its first product, DatAdvanatge so that enterprises can monitor their file activity, data access rights, user behavior, etc. After a few years, the company added the IDU Classification Framework so that the system was able to search for various keywords and phrases. The main investors of the company are Accel Partners, Evergreen Venture Partners, Gitano Venture Capital, and EMC.

Yaki Faitelson – CEO Of Veronis Systems

Yaki Faitelson is the co-founder and current CEO of Veronis Systems. He is also the Chairman of the Board. Before co-founding Veronis Systems, Yaki served at many leadership positions in the global professional services and systems integration divisions of NetVision and Network Appliance.

Mindtree

Mindtree – An 22-year Old Indian IT Company That Operates Under Larsen & Toubro.

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Mindtree is a publicly-traded company that is established in the IT industry. It was founded in 1999 by a group of 10 people. Most of them were Indian IT professionals while three of them invested through an entity incorporated in Mauritius. Mindtree provides various IT services including outsourcing and consulting. The company’s headquarters is based in Bangalore, India and it is currently a part of L&T Group. Debashis Chatterjee is the present MD and CEO of the company.

About Mindtree

Mindtree is an Indian IT company offering services on a global scale. It has hired more than 23,000 people over the past two decades who serve more than 300 active clients. Mindtree has business across 18 countries and the major areas that the company deals with are e-commerce, cloud computing, data analytics, digital transformation, resource planning, etc. The company offers services in various sectors like banking, insurance, consumer packed goods, manufacturing, entertainment, hospitality, etc. Mindtree has five overseas subsidiaries located in China, the UK, the US, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Mindtree
Image source: financialexpress.com

Founding History Of The Company

Mindtree was officially incorporated on 5th August 1999. The group of 10 IT professionals started the company with an initial investment of Rs 169 million. The company raised this amount by subscription of equity shares during the first round of funding. Mindtree received the initial funding from LSO Investment (P) Limited, Walden Software Investments Limited, Amalgamated Holdings Limited, and Vaitarna Holdings Private Limited. In 2001, Mindtree conducted the second round of funding where it raised another Rs 590 million from existing and new (Capital Group and Franklin Templeton) investors.

In 2006, the company filed for its IPO and became a public company. It was listed on both the Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange. After the company became public, it rebranded itself with a new logo and brand identity. The company eventually started planning its expansion in various Indian states like Chennai and Bhubaneshwar. It also acquired two companies in the early 2000s, namely, ASAP and ARPSL (software division) and Linc Software Services Private Limited. It also established a partnership with Volvo Information Technology for IT outsourcing.

Expansion And Growth

In 2008, the company changed its name from Mindtree Consulting Limited to Mindtree Limited. In 2009, the company signed an agreement with the world’s largest private equity firm, Carlyle Group. The agreement was such that Mindtree would provide its IT infrastructure management and services that would help in monitoring Carlyle’s IT production servers. Later in 2010, the company also launched security services so that businesses can solidify their security and compliance strategies. In 2011, Mindtree was recognized as a top outsourcing company in India. It also won the Marathon Awards South Asia 2010 for its Assist Technologies Program. Mindtree also won the prestigious Corporate Governance Award in 2012. It also became one of the top five companies at an international level for R&D services providers.

In 2012, Mindtree established its first delivery center in the US (Gainesville, Florida). And once it started expanding overseas after five years it has established offices in 17 countries. In 2015 and 2016, Mindtree acquired a few companies outside India that helped it strengthen its American and European markets. In 2015, it acquired three companies, namely, Discoverture Solutions LLC, Bluefin Solutions Limited, and Relational Solutions Inc. IN 2016, it acquired a USA-based company called Magnet 360. In 2019, Larsen & Toubro, one of the biggest Indian conglomerates took control over Mindtree, and currently, it owns a 61.08% stake in the company.

Debashis Chatterjee – CEO

Debasish Chatterjee hails from a very rich industrial background as he has 30 years of working experience in various fields including IT, relationship management, strategic alliance, etc. Before joining Mindtree, he worked at Cognizant as the President of Global Delivery and Digital Systems and Technology. He also has working experience at TCS, Mahindra & Mahindra, and IBM. He completed his education at Jadavpur University.

SenseTime

SenseTime – A Chinese AI Unicorn That Came Up With Some Of The World’s Most Advanced Technologies.

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Based in Hong Kong, SenseTime is known as the world’s most valuable AI (artificial intelligence) company. It was founded in 2014 and within 7 years it has gained unicorn status and developed some of the advanced AI algorithms. A computer science professor, Tang Xiao’ou, and a computer scientist, Xu Li co-founded the company with others. It started as an academic project and by 2019 its valuation became $4.5 billion. It has landed some of the biggest conglomerates as its clients including Alibaba, Honda, Qualcomm, and Weibo.

About The SenseTime

It is almost hard to believe that a young seven-year-old company develops such advanced Ai-based technologies that it is one of the finest in the world. The company develops AI technology including image and facial recognition, object detection, medical image analysis, video analysis, remote sensing, etc. Its products are used in several different industries from entertainment to healthcare.

When the company was founded in 2014, it developed DeepID, a facial recognition algorithm that was the first of its kind to detect accuracy better than human eyes. SenseTime is working with the Chinese government on a project to make the country economically autonomous by 2025. Currently, SenseTime is a privately-held company.

SenseTime
Image source: wire19.com

Early History

In October 2014, Tang Xiao’ou and Xu Li co-founded SenseTime and in the founded year it unveiled the best algorithm for better detection accuracy than human eyes. This algorithm is called DeepID and it is even ahead of Facebook. The company also presented and published several papers on computer vision and they were accepted into the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

Within one year of its establishment, a total of 9 papers were accepted. In 2016, the company enrolled itself in the ImagineNet competition and it bagged the first price in several fields including object detection, video object detection, and scene analysis. The number of papers accepted in the CVPR Conference also rose to 16 by the end of the year.

Success Of SenseTime

In 2017, SenseTime broke all of the records of past company’s in the AI industry in terms of the highest rounds of financing. The number of publications kept on increasing and by the year-end, it surpassed both Google and Facebook with 43 publications. It was in the same year that SenseTime raised $410 million in the Series B funding. SenseTime started collaborating with several companies and government bodies of China. For example, in October 2017 it started a joint venture with Qualcomm followed by collaborating with Shanghai Municipal Government, and Honda by the end of the year.

In 2018, the company declared a collaboration with MIT for advanced research in the field of AI but after a couple of years, the program was canceled by MIT. In April 2018, a non-profit AI lab called HKAI Lab was founded to make Hong Kong a global AI hub. SenseTime founded this lab jointly with Alibaba and the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation. SenseTime was also named as China’s National Open Innovation Platform for Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence on Intelligent Vision in September 2018.

Recent Days

Since 2014, SenseTime has tried to develop more advanced AI technologies that are equally focused on the research and development side of the company apart from the business part. In 2019, it became the first company in the world to join MIT’s Quest for Intelligence Campaign. The company is planning to go public as it filed IPO this year on the Hong Kong exchange. Though the company has given the world’s largest computer vision model, the profit curve is not very impressive. SenseTime heavily invests in R&D (60% of funding) and plans to expand to more and more industries both in domestic and overseas countries.

About The Founders

Tang Xiao’ou, apart from being the co-founder of SenseTime is also an information engineering professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is an alumnus of MIT and worked at Microsoft Research Area for four years. In 2009, he received the best paper award at CVPR Conference.

Xu Li is the co-founder and current CEO of SenseTime. He studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong followed by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He has published more than 50 academic works in the field of computer vision and won many awards.

Asana

Asana – The Makers Of Simplified Management Tools To Help Companies Focus On Their Goals.

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Small or big, goals are necessary for every type of growth, be it personal growth or growth as a big company. To achieve these goals, one needs to have a system or discipline that would help manage the tasks required to be fulfilled for those goals. The idea behind founding Asana has been the same. The company was founded to provide companies with software and web applications that would help them reduce the complexity of managing their teams, daily tasks, etc. so that they can achieve their targets (small or big) with lesser efforts and in time. The applications by Asana do not only help companies manage their teams and tasks, but also help the employees increase their productivity.

About Asana

Asana is a task management and productivity software development company founded in 2008. Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein founded the company to reduce the complexity of daily office work for the companies so that they can focus on the major part of the work. Asana is a Sanskrit word that means Yoga pose. The company headquarters is based in San Francisco, California, US and offers services to its clients globally. The software and applications by Asana include tasks like organizing and managing daily office work, managing the teams, and tracking the progress. Apart from web applications and software, Asana also provides API integration to third-party applications. Gmail, Outlook, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Slack are some of those applications with Asana API integrations.
As of 2019, around 1000 people are working at Asana, and it made annual revenues worth $142.2 million in the same year. The company is publically traded, trading on New York Stock Exchange as ASAN.

Asana
Image source: thisweekinstartups.com

The Company History

Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein were working together at Facebook in its beginning years. The two worked on improving the productivity of the Facebook employees, as CTO and the engineer manager, respectively. In 2008, the two left their jobs at Facebook to establish Asana. The company launched the beta version of their software in 2011 and offered it for free to companies. Later in 2012, Asana released the software for commercial use. The software from Asana is to manage the collaboration of the employees and daily tasks. It is a software-as-a-service that provides multiple features helpful for companies to handle their projects and their teams.
In 2013, Asana launched another software named Organizations providing administration tools for companies. The next year, the company released Calendar View for iOS and the Android app for the same came in 2015, including team conversations feature. By the next year, Company had added more features to its software like team management, member management, status updates, task dependencies, custom fields, Boards, pre-made project templates, and security features, etc.
Asana partnered with Microsoft in 2017 and integrated its features into Microsoft Teams. The same year, Gmail also integrated some Asana features into it, resulting in the release of comment-only projects. Asana also released its versions in French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese in 2017 and 2018. CSV importer and Timeline came in 2018. In 2021, Asana launched a special app for Zoom as well as a new Enterprise Work Graph suite.
Though Asana is not a very old company, it has been successful in bagging contracts and partnerships from big names like Google, Slack, Wufoo, Okta, Uber, Zoom, IBM, eBay, and Microsoft, and over 100,000 other paying customers. The company has won a few recognitions, like “one of the best collaboration and productivity apps for teams” by PC Magazine in 2017 and “one of the Best Workplaces for Parents” by Great Place to Work in 2020.

The Founder/CEO

Dustin Aaron Moskovitz is one of the co-founders and the present CEO of Asana. He was born on 22 May 1984 in Gainesville, Florida, U.S. Moskovitz went to the Vanguard High School and joined Harvard University to pursue a graduate degree with an economics major. He was one of the four roommates with Mark Zuckerberg at the university. So when Zuckerberg decided to drop from college to work on a Facebook full time, Moskovitz too joined in and moved to Palo Alto with him. Moskovitz was the first CTO at Facebook and spent four years at the company. In 2008, he, along with Justin Rosenstein, left Facebook and started Asana. Moskovitz became the first CEO of Asana and is still serving the company as the CEO.