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Qihoo 360

Qihoo 360 – Story Of The Biggest Cybersecurity Company In China.

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The Chinese internet security company, Qihoo 360 was born in 2005 in London. The headquarters of the company is based in Beijing, China, and its products and services are used all over the world. Zhou Hongyi is the co-founder and the current CEO and Chairman of the company. He co-founded the company with Qi Xiangdong who is the present director of Qihoo 360. The company is famous for its antivirus software, 360 Safeguard, and its web browser, 360 Secure Browser. This antivirus software is available for both PCs and mobile phones. Qihoo 360 is a privately held company and it has more than 4,000 employees.

About Qihoo 360

Qihoo 360 is the largest provider of cybersecurity and mobile security software in China. The company is known for its widely used products like 360 Total Security, 360 Mobile Security, enterprise security browsers, etc. The company also works closely with the government for national security products. The company has crossed more than 500 million daily active users for its software products. Apart from the software products, the company provides services like security consulting, security maintenance, security training, etc. Qihoo 360 has more than 10,000 patents for its original and core technology.

Qihoo 360
Image source: blogspot.com

Early History Of Qihoo 360

Back in 2005, when the company was founded, it was mainly known for its anti-virus software product. After operating for six years as a private company, it decided to file its IPO in 2011. When the company filed its IPO it raised $175 million and it marked a date in history for being the largest IPO of a Chinese company in the US. So, in March 2011, Qihoo 360 got listed on the New York Stock Exchange as QIHU.

After Qihoo 360 started operating as a public company, it eventually expanded its business and entered the smartphone market in 2012. In a joint venture with Haier, a Chinese electronics company, it released a new product line Battleship (phone). On the first day of releasing the new phone, the company received over 200,000 pre-orders.

Later in 2012, the company released a search engine so.com and it became a competitor of Baidu, China’s one of the most prominent search engines. With this new search engine, China captured around 10% of the total search engine market. In 2013, the company released another search engine called leidian.com to strengthen its presence in the mobile market. As the sales started increasing, Qihoo decided to set up a venture capital fund in Silicon Valley in 2014.

Privatization Of The Company

In 2015, the company announced that it is being acquired by a group of investors and will enter into a privatization agreement valued at $9.3 billion. For privatization of the company in NYSE, the funding came from mortgaging the building of the company and also a $3 billion loan from China Merchant Bank. Qihoo 360 officially became a private company in July 2016. Getting delisted in the US also became an opportunity for the company to grow in its domestic market and also become a key member of the national security of the nation. After the privatization of the Company, China International Capital Corporation (CICC) estimated that the value of the company will increase six-folds than its US value.

Recent Days

After Qihoo 360 became a private company, it decided to go public in China by means of a reverse merger. Qihoo 360 made the deal of reverse merger with a public company called SJEC Corp. The deal was to make Qihoo the dominant entity while SJEC survives as the subsidiary of the company. The reverse merger was completed in February 2018 which led Zhou Hongyi to hold 12.14& shares of Qihoo 360 and 51.56% shares of the two shareholding firms.

Zhou Hongyi – Founder and CEO

Zhou Hongyi is a famous Chinese entrepreneur and billionaire. Famous for co-founding Qihoo 360, he ranked number 45 on the Forbes China Rich List in 2018. Zhou is one of the first internet entrepreneurs in China who was responsible for changing the internet landscape of the nation.

Wise

Wise – A Multimillion-Dollar Fintech Company That Emerged Out Of A Sudden Plan.

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Wise is a young fintech company based in Shoreditch, England. Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus founded the company in 2011. Earlier in 2021, Wise went public through a direct listing on London Stock Exchange and it was valued at $11 billion. The journey of Wise refers to one of those stories when two people meeting at a party started talking about their life problems. From figuring out a viable solution to making millions in revenue, Wise has achieved massive success in ten years. The company also received an impressive amount of funding since 2011 which could be because both the founders were already established in their professional careers.

The Idea Behind Wise

Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus both were living in London when they met in 2007. The two co-founders started a conversation at a party only to realize that they share a common problem. Both Kristi and Taavet send money back to their home countries and every month they need to convert the currency. Taavet used to convert his Estonian salary to pounds whereas Kristo converted his salary to Estonian kroon for paying his mortgage. So, initially, these two fellows devised a solution that was exclusively for both of them. Every month Kristo topped up Taavet’s bank account, setting the amounts according to the mid-market exchange rate while Taavet did the same for Kristo. This arrangement helped them make big savings but none of them decided to open up a company.

After Kristo and Taavet made arrangements for themselves the word traveled fast to other Estonian experts. Due to the huge amount of savings that came with the idea, they turned it into a business without any plan of doing it in 2007. In 2011, they officially established this money-exchange forum and it was called TransferWise. The business started flying only after 15 fifteen minutes of TechCrunch publishing an article. Kristo said that the transactions never stopped.

Wise
Image source: www.gavi.org

Executing The Plan

When Kristo and Taavet came up with this idea of overseas transfer, they were both working at different companies. In 2011 they decided to quit their jobs and for the first year, they self-funded the company. The company eventually started attracting many investors that also include the famous billionaire, Peter Thiel. Today, the company processes transactions for more than ten million active customers who save around $1.5 billion every year that goes as bank fees. The first year when Wise operated, the total amount from the transactions summed up to €10 million. The company gained popularity so fast that after a year it was named “East London’s 20 hottest tech startups.”

In 2012 the company was featured by several big magazines as one of the top startups in the country. Till 2013 the company also allowed its users to purchase bitcoin but due to pressure from banking providers, it was discontinued. The same year, a comparison site called Monito revealed that transactions in Wise are 83 cheaper on average as compared to big banks of the UK. In 2015, the company also made it to the top 10 on CNBC’s 2015 Disruptor 50 list. Later in 2015, Wise was named World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer. In February 2021, the company rebranded itself Wise from TransferWise. This rebranding wanted to reflect on the fact that the company has expanded its services as it goes beyond just international money transfers.

About The Founders

Kristo Käärmann is the famous co-founder of an extremely successful startup called Wise (earlier TransferWise). He studied mathematics and computer science and started his career as a consultant at PwC. Before co-founding Wise with Taavet Hinrikus, he worked at Deloitte for more than four years. He is also the current CEO of Wise, which filed its IPO in 2021.

Taavet Hinrikus is a famous entrepreneur and investor who started his career at Halo Interactive DDB. It worked at several companies before co-founding Wise that also includes being the Director of Strategy at Skype. After he and Kristo came up with the solution of overseas transfer, he spread the word on Skype which helps them gain a potential customer base before officially launching the company.

FactSet

FactSet – Solving All Financial Industry Problems Using The Latest Technology.

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The rise of the IT industry has given great opportunities to other fields to level up their game using technology and remain up to date and relevant in today’s changing trends. Thus from hospital industries to aviation, from hospitality to finance, every field has opted to include technology to achieve the required growth in lesser time.
Talking about the finance industry, there has been a rise in the number of fintech companies as well and companies that provide software solutions to such companies. FactSet Research Systems Inc. falls into the latter category, a financial data, and software company that chose a traditional way of working in the beginning, but today is offering services based on the latest technologies. The company is about more than forty years old, but it has tried to walk with the changing trends, and thus, today is known as one of the leading financial data and software companies.

About The Company

Howard Wille and Charles Snyder founded FactSet in 1978. The company is an American financial services company, with its headquarters based in Norwalk, Connecticut, United States. The company is responsible for data integrations, large-scale transitions, reporting, and research analysis, API integration, index services, portfolio data management, etc. It is a publically traded company and trades with the symbol FDS on New York Stock Exchange. In the past 43 years, FactSet has reached 22 countries and has set up offices in 48 different locations. It has over 10000 people working for it globally and made annual revenues worth US$1.49 billion in the financial year 2020. With high revenues in 2020, FactSet became a unicorn 2020.

FactSet
Image Source: financialit.net

Founding FactSet

Howard Wille and Chuck Snyder founded FactSet in 1978. The two co-founders used to be co-workers at Faulkner, Dawkins & Sullivan, Wall Street. At the beginning of the 70s, computers became quite popular for office work, and with the acquisition of Faulkner, Dawkins & Sullivan by Shearson, the two thought of founding a company of their own that would directly sell user data to their clients. Hence in 1978, they founded FactSet, a company that began with delivering data on paper to the clients under the program, “Company FactSet”.
During the early 80s, FactSet offered its clients the option to download data directly to their spreadsheets, making the process simpler for the clients. In 1989, the company also started a new and advanced service with the name Private Database Service. The service helped users directly include the proprietary data into their research information.
In the next decade, Company released its software for Windows operating system and expanded overseas by establishing offices in countries like London and Tokyo. During the mid-90s, the company was serving the top investment managers in the US. In 1995, FactSet was renamed FactSet Research Systems Inc., and the next year, it went public on NYSE in 1996. In further years, the company released platforms like Portfolio Management Workstation, Economic Analysis, and Company Explorer. Along with those platforms, it also introduced the DIRECTIONS interface and Online Assistant for those platforms. It also started a 24*7 customer care telephone service in 1999.
In the next few years, the Company included more products and applications such as SPAR, Data Central, Marquee, IBCentral, etc. Later, the company merged DIRECTIONS interface, Marquee, and IBCentral into one, to form FactSet, a more versatile product for the FactSet clients. In further years, FactSet made some acquisitions including of Thomson Fundamentals database (2008), Market Metrics (2009), StreetAccount (2012), Revere Data (2013), Code Red Inc (2015), Vermilion (2016), BISAM (2017), Data Managed Solutions (2017), Truvalue Labs (2020), etc., adding to the growth of the company.

The CEO At FactSet

F. Philip Snow is the current CEO of FactSet. He is a B.A. graduate in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley and holds a Master’s degree in International Management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Snow started his career by working at companies like Global Content Sales and Americas Sales. He joined FactSet in 1996 and served the company in different positions. For a long time, he handled the Asia Pacific regions for FactSet, operating from Tokyo and Sydney. In 2015, he became the CEO at FactSet. He is also a board member of the company.

Tech Mahindra

Tech Mahindra – Story Of India’s Leading IT Consulting Company That Started 35 Years Ago.

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Founded in 1986, Tech Mahindra is one of the leading multinational tech companies born in India. It is a subsidiary of the Mahindra Group with its headquarters based in Pune, Maharashtra, India. Anand Mahindra is the founder of the company and he is also the present Chairman of the company. Currently, C.P. Gurnani is both the CEO and MD of Tech Mahindra.

Tech Mahindra is famous for providing IT and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services. It is a publicly-traded company and as of April 2020, its valuation is $5.2 billion. Tech Mahindra is a multinational company with customers across 90 countries. It has more than 125,000 employees and ranks fifth in the list of India’s top IT firms.

Early Days Of The Company

The origin of the Company dates back to the mid-1980s when Mahindra & Mahindra started a joint venture with British Telecom. This partnership was to start a technology outsourcing firm where British Telecom initially has a 30% stake in the Tech Mahindra company. In 2010, British Telecom decided to sell 5.5% of its stake in Tech Mahindra to Mahindra & Mahindra. The deal was closed for Rs 451 crore. After two years, British Telecom again sold 14.1% of its stake to the institutional investors for Rs 1,395 crore approximately. By the end of 2021, British Telecom was out of the joint venture as it sold the rest of its stake of Tech Mahindra to institutional investors.

In 2009, Satyam Computer Services faced a big scandal after which Tech Mahindra decided to bid for the company. It became one of the strong bidders as it beat Larsen & Toubro and emerged out with a 31% stake in the company. After the bidding, the Board of Directors of Satyam Computer was decided by Venturbay Consultants Private Limited. This company was a subsidiary of Tech Mahindra and it became the company with a controlling stake in Satyam Computer.

Tech Mahindra
Image source: brandfinance.com

Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Satyam

In 2012, Tech Mahindra merged with Mahindra Satyam and the merger created an IT company worth $2.5 billion. Both the first received a green signal from the Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange for the merger and after a year Andhra Pradesh High Court also approved. There were several technical approvals to be taken for this merger which were all completed in 2013. After the formation of this new organization, the executive team for the company was formed. Anand Mahindra led the company as its Chairman followed by Vineet Nayyar as Vice Chairman, and C.P. Gurnani as the CEO and Managing Director.

The merger was officially completed in June 2013 and it made Company the fifth largest software services company in India. After the merger took place, the company received approval for a scheme under which the shares of Mahindra Satyam could be swapped for Tech Mahindra. The share swapping was given a time limit of a month as from July, trading of Mahindra Satyam was suspended and the shareholders of this company were allocated shares of Tech Mahindra. This merger witnessed a high increase in profit (up by 27% in the first quarter as compared to that of the previous year).

Recent Days

In 2014, Tech Mahindra made a big acquisition as it bought Lightbridge Communication Corporation, the largest independent multinational telecom service company. Next year it acquired a Swiss IT firm called SOFGEN Holdings. It also purchased a controlling stake in an Italian automotive brand called Pininfarina S.p.A. In 2016, the company revealed its plan to acquire Target Group as it would boost its business in the banking sector.

After the merger of Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Satyam, the company focused on strengthening its international market, thus collaborating with various foreign brands. It also started a partnership with Huawei to sell its products and services across 44 countries. Earlier this year, Company started a joint venture with ThoughtSpot, a US-based analytics company.

About The Founder

Anand Gopal Mahindra is an Indian billionaire who was born into a family of industrialists. He completed his education at Harvard University followed by Harvard Business School. After graduating, he joined Mahindra Ugine Steel Company Ltd and eventually became the Chairman of Mahindra Group in 2016. He is a recipient of the prestigious Padma Bhushan Award.

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo – The Largest Cloud Market Intelligence Platform.

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A business is all about marketing and sales. Better the marketing, the higher are the sales for a business. For the past many years, the marketing techniques had been the same, but for the last couple of years, we have become more dependent on online marketing and customer data for the growth of the businesses. Data, though, has always been an important part of marketing, today, the value of data has increased by 100 times. The user data, whether about their behavior, daily needs, or liking, is the basis of how the marketing strategies should be developed.
Considering the significance of the data in marketing, ZoomInfo took the initiative to make it the very basis of their business, too. The company is one of the biggest information and database companies providing subscription-based software as a service (SaaS) to its clients, helping them accelerate their sales and business growth.

About The Company

ZoomInfo is the provider of B2B data and information to companies which are helpful for the latter in marketing and sales of their products, leading to better business growth. The company provides a cloud-based platform including information about companies, business people, marketing, and recruiting professionals. This information is available to ZoomInfo customers through various subscription plans. Henry Schuck and Kirk Brown founded ZoomInfo in 2007 as DiscoverOrg. The company operated with the same name till 2019. In 2019 ZoomInfo acquired Zoom Information and renamed the DiscoverOrg as ZoomInfo.
With the merger of the two companies, they combined their platforms and developed a new flagship Go-to-Market (GTM) for its customers. ZoomInfo gathers and verifies data of various companies, such that to provide accurate information to its clients. It has curated an in-house research team of over 300 data analysts who use updated technologies, tools, and integrations to verify the information and provide the highest accuracy data to the customers.
ZoomInfo headquarters is based in Vancouver, Washington, United States, and over 2500 people are working for it. One of the founders, Henry Schuck is the current CEO at ZoomInfo. NeverBounce and Datanyze are the ZoomInfo subsidiaries. As of 2020, the company made revenues worth $476 million.

ZoomInfo
Image source: businesswire.com

The Founding Of ZoomInfo

Henry Schuck and Kirk Brown founded ZoomInfo as DiscoverOrg in 2007. The co-founders were law students but eventually, ended up launching DiscoverOrg, a completely different company than their education, at the age of 23. Henry Schuck took up a part-time job as a marketing analyst to pay his tuition fees for college. This very job helped Schuck conceive the idea of DiscoverOrg, and he founded the company with his college mate Kirk Brown.
RainKing was another newly founded company that worked on the same concept as ZoomInfo, except, RainKing had the funding, whereas ZoomInfo was just a concept, and the founders possessed no experience. But in the next ten years, with immense hard work, ZoomInfo was able to acquire RainKing in 2017. As soon as the company started to grow, it received investments from companies like TA Associates, The Carlyle Group, and 22C Capital.
ZoomInfo’s other acquisitions include NeverBounce (2018), Komiko (2019), Clickagy (2020), EverString Technology (2020), and Insent (2021), etc. The company had its first IPO in June 2020, and it went public on Nasdaq Global Select Market trading with ticker symbol ZI. Today the company serves over 16000 customers globally. ZoomInfo has won multiple awards for excellence, like Leader by Forrester in its B2B Marketing Data Wave and was ranked Number One in customer service by G2 Crowd.

The CEO At ZoomInfo

Henry Schuck is a lawyer by education and has got a license for practicing as a lawyer from Washington State Bar Association and Nevada Supreme Court. He received his BS in Accounting and Hospitality Administration from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Juris Doctorate in Law from the Ohio State University. While Schuck was still in college, he worked as a data analyst at Political Data Inc. Later he joined MGM grand as Hotel Operations Administrator. Schuck also worked as the vice president of operations at iProfile. In 2007, he launched DiscoverOrg with Kirk Brown, becoming the CEO of the company.

Slack Technologies

Slack Technologies – A Company That Provides The Best Platform For Real-Time Work Collaboration.

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Slack Technologies is popular for its widely used platform, Slack which provides a platform for business communication and work organization. The software is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. Earlier in 2021, Salesforce announced that it would acquire Slack and the deal was closed for $27 billion approximately. The founders of Slack Technologies are Stewart Butterfield (present CEO), Eric Costello, Cal Henderson, and Serguei Mourachov.

Slack Technologies was founded in 2009 and currently, its headquarters is based in San Francisco, California. There are approximately 1,660 employees in the company and it has several offices across the world including India, Paris, London, Melbourne, Tokyo, etc. Slack is a publicly-traded company and got listed on New York Stock Exchange in 2019.

Origin Of Slack Technologies

Slack Technologies has become very popular especially because it reached a $1 billion valuations within less than a year. When Stewart Butterfield and his team created Slack they didn’t have in mind to create a platform for workspace communication. They initially wanted to create something new for the massively multiplayer online role-playing gaming market. But, instead, they end up building a platform that today is used by some biggest multinational conglomerates across the globe.

Slack Technologies
image source: javatpoint.com

Early Days

The story of Slack Technologies started in 2009 when they received angel funding of $1.5 million followed by Series A funding of $5 million. The main investors were Accel and Andreessen Horowitz. Back then, the company was known as Tiny Speck and it rolled out a computer game called Glitch as its first product. This game was launched in September 2011 but it was soon “unlaunched” for improving the gameplay. But, after withdrawing it from the market, Stewart Butterfield and other members of the team decided to close it down. The game was unable to attract a substantial audience that was required for its survival.

In 2013, the company started developing Slack as a commercial product which they developed earlier to ease the workflow among the employees. Initially, they didn’t understand the massive commercial potential of the platform but by the end of 2013, it rolled out and gained huge popularity. It raised $17 million in funding from the two existing investors and Social Capital. In 2014, the company renamed itself Slack Technologies and Slack was an acronym for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge. So, the tool that was developed for easing the work of team members while developing Glitch, turned into a billion-dollar asset.

Growth And Funding

The company received a huge amount of funding after it was launched in 2013. In 2014, it raised $42.75 million and $120 million in two different funding rounds. By the end of the year, the valuation of Slack Technologies became $1.2 billion. In 2015, Slack acquired a company called Screenhero that specialized in voice, screen, and video recording. Earlier that year, Slack signed an agreement with its investors to raise $160 million in a funding round. So, there were new investors onboard including Index Ventures, DST Global, and a few more. Next year, a few more investors joined in and Slack raised another $200 million.

In 2016, Slack made it into the first position on the Forbes Cloud 100 list. Investors found the growth of Slack very promising and thus the company also attracted the Vision Fund of SoftBank that invested more than $100 million in Slack. By the end of 2017, Slack’s valuation crossed $5 billion. In 2019, Slack became a public company through a direct listing and started in June 2019. With the acquisition of Slack earlier in 2021, Salesforce became its parent company.

Stewart Butterfield – CEO Of Slack Technologies

Stewart Butterfield is a famous Canadian billionaire who apart from co-founding Slack also created Flickr. Stewart belonged to a very poor household as he grew up without electricity for many years. His family moved to Victoria when he was a child and went to the University of Victoria. When Stewart was a teenager he made money by designing websites. He founded a couple of startups before founding the Tiny Speck that later became Slack Technologies.