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Special Edition Volume 3 C O N T E N T S

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this issue 6

Letter from the Editor

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Top 100 Companies: Europe

The best and brightest

10 List of European Winners 80 top 100 companies: North America

Celebrating innovation and excellence

82 List of North American Winners

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Red Herring Magazine

top 100 awards In this issue the Red Herring Top 100 awards highlights the most exciting startups from Europe and North America. Hundreds of companies from both regions were reviewed in a rigorous 3-step process.

Congratulations to all the winners.

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174

features 72 Infinite Convergence

167 DocuSign’s Signature Growth

74 Centric Software

170 Kyriba Moves Fast

75 Albania Tech

172 Gender Gap

77 Sexual Minority Rights

174 Keep the Vision

One-on-One with CEO Anurag Lal Cutting-Edge PLM for Clothing De-Balkanzie the Balkans In the tech sector

Contracting in business is getting easier Treasury management races to the cloud

Norrowing technology sector

Course Hero and Andrew Grauer

79 Numerix

Risk analytics software

163 Increasing Governments and corporations’ cyber-resilience RedSeal

165 France heading for dramatic turnaround Bpifrance

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SPECIAL EDITION Volume 3

Advertise With Us! PUBLISHER / EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Alex Vieux SENIOR EDITOR AND U.S. CORRESPONDENT Peter Ward DIRECTOR OF SALES – NORTH AMERICA Anam Alpenia FINANCE Augustin Meloty-Kapella REPORTERS Alex Plough Catherine Trautwein Jamie Knights Rob Galliani Samrat Chakrabarti Sahil Arora Sean Williams PROGRAM MANAGER Charles Limido DESIGN Kelly Harkins FOR EDITORIAL QUERIES info@redherring.com

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Red Herring is published by Red Herring, Inc. 7660 Fay Avenue, Suite H La Jolla, CA 92037 Telephone: (650) 461-9156 To participate or advertise in Red Herring events, contact aalpenia@redherring.com or Call (650) 461-9156 POSTMASTER: Please send change of addresses to: Red Herring 7660 Fay Avenue, Suite H La Jolla, CA 92037 ISSN: 1080-076X Printed in the USA www.redherring.com | 6

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Feature Note Editor’s Story

Twenty-four years after its start, Red Herring and its team still enjoy the rare privilege of reaching out to the most audacious entrepreneurs in the world.

I

n June 2017, the world is a different place, with technology transforming economic rules and social behaviors.

But it looks as if the new White House resident might play a significant role in altering the course of the digital revolution.

Although there is always a gap between rhetoric and public policies, Silicon Valley and the world should pay close attention to the first hundred days of the new presidency.

It must be emphasized that during their last two stints, Democrats have warmly embraced modernity and the first waves of the internet. Bill Clinton provided a continued string of positive growth which ended in 2000 with 50 million Americans online. Barack Obama, beyond engineering an economic recovery from the abyss, managed to amend the ominous Sarbanes Oaxley legislation which hurt tech IPO particularly hard. During his tenure LPs, who had backed out from venture capital after the bubble, regained trust in the tech sector, investing over $69 billion in 2016 versus $30 billion in 2008.

Millions of jobs were created in the economy–cruising at a stellar 4.6% unemployment rate–and saw the growth of internet giants such as Facebook, Uber and Airbnb, while incumbents, Microsoft, Apple and Intel continued to execute rangy strategies. Almost 200 unicorns are now waiting for their fifty seconds of fame on Nasdaq.

It must be stressed that globalization of the supply chain and information systems accelerated, shedding millions of lowskilled jobs, but pushing for more valueadded manufacturing practices and services in America. United Nations statistics show 234 million people in developing countries working in manufacturing. By 2014, 8

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the number had swelled to 304 million versus 63 million in OECD countries. An inevitable trend for the US and the Western world, unless these countries expect to lose their economic leadership vis a vis China and other Asian contenders.

Elections often bring the worst scenes and behaviors in a divided country, but 2016 proved the lowest ebbs had not yet been reached. Four major themes became commonplace in the new President’s stumps: job recovery, immigration, carried interest and the media. Since January 2017, executive orders, and the rhetoric have added to the confrontational stance of a clearly divided nation. Street demonstrations, anti-immigrants attacks have mushroomed but the real problems are not being solved.

Manufacturing has slowly shifted away from major western nations. They represented 33% of non-farm jobs in America in the fifties, and less than 9% today according to the OECD. America has excelled at designing products, innovating and marketing them, and has abandoned the idea of spending billions in assembly lines, with repetitive tasks and high wages forced by unionized workers.

Researchers also point out at the fact that manufacturing itself has changed and integrates more know how diversified skill sets not included in labor statistics.

Outsourcing in developing countries did not just replace old jobs; it took place alongside a paradigm shift in processes and digital implementation. Plant workers in Taiwan in the seventies, in China in the nineties and in Vietnam today do not just mimic the westerners’ past tasks; they live in a universe where design, automation and production are interwoven. CAD systems occupy the floors and engineers stand

elbow to elbow with well-trained workers.

It is highly improbable these jobs will ever go back and protectionist measures will not turn back time. Protectionism will open a can of worms and drive retaliatory measures against America’s tech sector. It is already facing piracy, patent infringements and other global competitors.

Immigration is part of America’s DNA. The new President’s grandfather immigrated from Germany; Obama’s father from Kenya.

All studies prove that the US economy has profited from the inflow of millions of hispanics during the past thirty years, 99% of them being law-abiding citizens. In tech it is suffice to walk around Sunnyvale or Mountain View on a weekend, not to mention R&D departments, to realize how H-1B visas granted to Romanian, Turkish or Indian-born engineers have enabled Nvidia, Salesforce or Snapchat to forge ahead with transformative concepts.

The past administration turned off the spigots of immigration and was stingy in welcoming Syrian refugees in the name of security concerns. Well done.

But a blanket anti-immigration system will just drive outstanding talents to go elsewhere. America needs additional intellectual capital, not less. The US economy has witnessed its first purchasing power increases in years, salaries are on the rise, employment at its peak. Any inauspicious executive order or legislation will tighten the job market even further without providing jobs in the Rust Belt.

Inflation will follow with its unpredictable consequences.

A consensus was reached a long time ago about the value added of venture capital and its serendipitous cycles. Silicon Valley has gone from orchards in the sixties to the home of three of ten of the top market

Editor’s Note

cap companies in the world. It is a magnet for most countries trying to build their own ecosystem. Walking at the last Cebit in Hannover-Germany- in March, Red Herring reporters realized how many states, regions or cities are still trying to emulate the magical combination between VC funding, incubators, entrepreneurship and academic fusion, the founding ingredients of the Valley’s success.

Bill Draper, Pitch Johnson, and the late Tom Perkins unleashed an unstoppable flow of creativity in the computer industry and biotech before passing the baton to a next generation. The NVCA accounts for 1,000 firms, with regions such as Los Angeles and New York emerging onto the scene.

Venture capital’s business model, meanwhile, is rooted: management fees, generally 2% pay for operational expenses, while carried interest (often 20% above a hurdle rate) represent the real pay day. It did well for VCs with tens of millions, who have become billionaires. But any research would prove that VC’s remuneration is low compared to the number of jobs created or the financial value to the economy. It pales in comparison with the payday of the top 100 corporate chiefs released in March by Business Week.

The idea of repealing the fiscal treatment of the carried interest–although appealing to the masses–throws in the same basket hedge funds and venture capital. VCs’ contributions to the economy are among the most stable assets of the US post-war economy. Without it innovation would not have flourished.

As the famous saying goes, “Since it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.”

Just a handful of past Red Herring Magazine issues from the past 24 years.

Last, the media. Most will take for granted a heightened wealth of information, financial disclosures, compliance and accountability, as well as First Amendment rights. It creates an increasingly transparent world where corruption is denounced, the rule of the law prevails and legal stability is enforced.

This is a crucial factor of differentiation between the United states and its two socioeconomic nemeses, China and Russia, where autocratic regimes and rulers literally kill their opponents. The media, for all its faults–and there are many–remains the guardian of the temple.

CNN, CBS, Fox, and the Washington Post should be viewed as national treasures: the disheartening view of the leader of the free world lambasting CNN’s reporting does not bode well for what will take place at the Oval Office for the next 46 months.

Intimidating companies to stop exporting jobs is bad enough. Intimidating the press for its coverage means that nothing is offlimits. Silicon Valley stands for freedom of entrepreneurship and any encroachment, and political intervention within that climate, will contrive risk-takers and mortgage the future of innovation.

Red Herring has faced its own highs and lows since 1993. But it has always championed two causes: the right to fail and the right to succeed. An open society, a tolerant and equal, gender-blind workplace takes a lot of work, day after day, because bad habits live long and take significant efforts to be rooted out.

A backlash on these fronts could suppress years of progress and, more fundamentally, give an edge to other countries who have conspired for a long time to destroy the democratic model that America has successfully promoted across the world.

It remains to be seen if rationality will supplant electoral promises and the first 90 days’ actions.

Stay tuned.

Alex Vieux, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher www.REDHERRING.com

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TOP 100 WINNERS:

EUROPE

The Best and Brightest

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Top 100 Companies: Europe

E

urope’s startup scene faces increasingly high levels of uncertainty. The main driver of this is the UK’s breathtaking decision to leave the European Union in 2016, a previously unbelievable occurrence which has now begun to take place in earnest.

British companies will no doubt still be worrying over their lost access to the EU single market, and their European counterparts will rue the increasingly complex relationships they will hold with British companies.

Brexit hasn’t been the only reason for uncertainty in Europe. Upcoming elections in France and Germany will go a long way to determine if mainland Europe is destined to succumb to the same crippling insularism as the U.K. But despite this, there has been cause for optimism, and none so clear as the latest batch of startups coming out of the continent. The following companies all give hope that the best European startups can overcome uncertainty and bring prosperity to a continent in flux.

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Top 100 Companies: Europe

TOP Technology Companies

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Europe: 360Visualizer 4tiitoo GmbH Aava Software Accedo AirTies Wireless Networks Appland AB Aqurance AW-Energy BioCatch Bluetector Bonus Therapeutics Boxever BrainSINS CashOrCard POS Cogeon Combain Mobile COMFORCE Content Square Contentful Cozify Oy DECOVRY Ebiid Ecoppia ERPScan BV fanatix Finnay Ltd Flexenclosure FloCash Limited ForceManager GiPStech Global Warning System Gobike A/S Good Sign H&D Wireless Habitissimo HIL Applied Medical i-movo i4drive Inango Systems INmatix Technology Group Intellipocket Interworks INVEA-TECH IXcellerate Iyzico Jahia Solutions Group jClarity Kompyte Lantia Lendstar LeukoDx Limes Audio Mapz Medigoo MentAd Midaxo Mistral Mobile MOBGEN

A-Z

Moovly MUV Interactive Netstream AG numberly Onegini OneVisage Peak Ace AG PRODAFT PulseOn Oy purechannelapps Qvanteq AG Real Impact Analytics RealityMine ReklamStore responda 113 RingCredible Rivo Software Seabery SecurIT bvba SendinBlue Sentrix Siltectra SimilarWeb SimpleSite.com SIOPTICA Slashe Smartpipe Solutions SoAmpli Soil Scout SPnano STANDS4 SysMech TA telecom TagCommander Talent Swarm TBlox Telavox Terria Mobile Texxi Global Tipa-Corp Todacell TokenID TradAir Trialbee AB Ubimo VideoDubber VirtaMed vocalzoom Wadaro WebProof Windward Winnow Solutions Wirepas Wordbee WordDive WORKSTREAMPEOPLE wywy GmbH

Top 100 Companies: Europe

4tiitoo www.4tiitoo.com Tore Meyer

With the tablet market consolidating rapidly, the team shifted its focus to the upcoming revolution in computer interaction based on next generation sensor. Tore has been active in the area of natural user interaction ever since.

Software Munich, Germany » 4tiitoo was founded in 2013 and is leading in the development and consulting in the context of natural and intuitive user interaction. Its patent-pending NUIA technology allows interaction with computers based on next generation sensors like eye trackers, 3D and gesture cameras and speech input.

NUIA is the basis for 4tiitoo’s vertical projects optimizing workflows and adding customer specific functionalities for more productive and/or convenient computer interaction. Starting from 2015, NUIA will be shipped to consumers to add natural user interaction to consumer devices. B2B customers are leading computer OEMs, sensor manufacturers as well as companies from automotive, medical technology, aviation and digital signage.

Leadership: Tore Meyer is one of the founders of 4tiitoo GmbH. Born in 1976, Meyer earned his degree in business administration at the WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, with a high affinity for technology all his life. When starting his first company in 2003 and successfully leading it till 2006 he started working in the context of interaction and visualization.

In 2007 he founded his next company to bring a more intuitive and natural user experience to the daily computer interaction based on tablet devices. After promoting tablet computing to major players in publishing and eCommerce, the platform was launched in 2010 in cooperation with major players in consumer electronics.

360Visualizer www.360visualizer.com Kimmo Kaitala Internet/Online Helsinki, Finland » It was a natural, if tough, progression.

360Visualizer’s Joel Hakuli had been a hotel photographer for ten years, working with leading chains on still and panoramic images to sell more rooms. But the hotels wanted more. They wanted “a simple way to produce compelling presentations from the photos, since the CMS tools available are not suited for this,” Kimmo Kaitala, CEO of 360Visualizer tells Red Herring.

With this in mind, 360Visualizer was born. The company, based in the Finnish capital of Helsinki, knew that 90% of all information coming to the human brain is visual. 67% of customers consider clear, detailed images to “carry even more weight than product information, descriptions, and customer ratings.” And in few industries is this more pertinent than hospitality, an industry that continues to grow phenomenally, and whose market becomes more furiously competitive each year.

The global hotel industry achieves revenues of $550 billion per year, according to Statista, a researcher. No wonder, then, that 360Visualizer has grown quickly from a provider of simple panoramic and still images, to a web-based, cloud solution that is quickly expanding from its Nordic base into western Europe.

The company, which has thus far raised over €700,000 ($792,000) - €400,000 ($452,000) of which has come from investors - has recently announced expansions from Finland into the Benelux region, and Germany. Even the Corinthia St. Petersburg, one of the Russian city’s most famed stays, has got on board with 360Visualizer’s Visualizer Engage and Sell PRO products, which allow hotels greater control over their image and marketing.

Another happy customer is Barceló Hotels and Resorts, one of Spain’s leading chains: “Visualizer Engage & Sell PRO has clearly met, and actually exceeded our expectations,” says deputy marketing director of EMEA Antonio Bauza. “The product is innovative and one of a kind.

We are starting the next phase in the roll-out of the product to other hotels in Europe and Central America.”

That’s important in an industry notorious for its dog-eat-dog competition. In Europe alone the hospitality market grew by 5% last year, according to consultant HVS. 360Visualizer, on the other hand, has managed to “carve out a niche, where we provide an integrated set of tools for hotels, where the competition is slightly less intense.” The company’s major challenges, Kaitala says, are finding early-adopter hotels and discovering the right marketing messages, that can grab the attentions of hotel decision-makers.

That will help it dig out a portion of an estimated €2.5 billion ($2.83 billion) market opportunity. Competitors include Leonardo, ICE Portal, Photoweb USA and Slideshark. But with an executive team that includes Kaitala, a 20-year veteran of firms such as Nokia Networks, and hospitality pro Markus Kauppinen, 360Visualizer appears on the right path to that goal.

For now the target is simple: scale: “First Europe, then the rest of the world,” concludes Kaitala.

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Top 100 Companies: Europe

Aava Software www.aavasoftware.com Jari Heiskanen Software Espoo, Finland » Aava is a provider of a completely new, next generation cloud-based business application platform. Aava enables 10 times faster and significantly more cost-effective, application-specific enterprise software application / solution implementation than with other technologies. Currently, Aava Ohjelmistot has 17 employees, locations in Espoo and Tampere, Finland and 20+ delivered customer installations in production in Finland, with the first international deployments completed in Sweden and in Lithuania. The software platform has matured to a productized level and the current business model can now be scaled abroad.

The company is owned by the founder Jari Heiskanen, key employees, and early stage investors; Heimo Välinen Oy, V-M Kimanen, and Avantech Innovations Oy. Aava Advisory board consist of wellknown IT figures including Ossi Pohjola (former head of Oracle ERP EMEA), Petri Niemi (experienced venture capitalist at leading Finnish VC company) and Tarja Pääkkönen (one of the leading branding strategists in Finland).

Leadership: Jari Heiskanen is an innovative technology enthusiast with almost 20 years of experience in ICT and Telecom. Joined Nokia at 1995 as a trainee but quickly advanced to work as a system and software engineer and later as a project manager.

He was the first one to implement a fully

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functional Multimedia Messaging Service Center for demonstration purposes before the standardization was completed.

Founded UniqMinds Oy in 2000 where he acted as a CTO until company was sold to Valimo Wireless in 2006. At UniqMinds Jari created a concept of Multimedia Messaging Application-to-person (MMS A2P) and created a first MMS A2P platform that is still in use at Amena Spain.

offering allows its customers to create, deploy, manage and maintain their UXs on any connected platform, including mobile, game consoles, set-top boxes, Smart TVs and more. With an increasingly fragmented world of services and devices, where competitors are a click away, the complexity to manage potentially hundreds of instances of a service is huge. Accedo solves this problem.

He also patented the method of MMS notification routing in mobile networks.

Joined Exomi Oy (soon acquired by Real Networks) in 2006 where he worked as a Product Manager. In the background he was also developing a completely new kind of an innovation for generic information management and by 2008 it was ready to for commercialisation and then Aava Software was founded. Currently Heiskanen is a CEO of Aava Software and also the innovator behind the Aava’s main product, Aava.

Accedo was founded in 2004 and has grown quickly to a profitable company with more than 250 employees in 12 offices around the world. The founders Michael Lantz and Fredrik Andersson are still the senior management of the company.

Accedo www.accedo.tv Michael Lantz Software Stockholm, Sweden » Accedo is the global market leader for providing multiscreen video applications.

Accedo’s products and solutions are the engine behind more than 250 of the world’s most successful TV application solutions from TV operators, TV channels and VOD companies, such as Sky, HBO, ITV, Fox, Deutsche Telecom, Telstra, Orange, DirecTV and more. Accedo’s suite of

Leadership: Michael Lantz is the CEO and co-founder of Accedo. Since its founding in 2004, Lantz has been instrumental in growing Accedo to a profitable global company with 12 offices around the world, 250 employees and customers like Sky, HBO, ITV, Fox, Deutsche Telecom, Telstra, Orange, DirecTV and more. Lantz has more than 15 years’ experience from the dynamic media industry, emerging broadband services, fragmented TV technologies, and the overall convergence between the telecom and media industries.

Prior to founding Accedo in 2004, Lantz was a senior management consultant responsible for broadband and TV operators at Nordic telecom and media consultancy Digiscope. Before Digiscope, Lantz was product manager for software and Internet services at a start up in the med tech industry. Lantz holds degrees in Engineering Physics and Business Administration from Lund University.

Top 100 Companies: Europe

AirTies Wireless Networks www.airties.com Philippe Alcaras Hardware Istanbul, Turkey » Istanbul’s AirTies Wireless Networks was founded twelve years ago with the vision that, in the words of CEO Philippe Alcaras, “everything electronic in the home would be connected to the Internet, and this had to be done wirelessly.

“We knew streaming video flawlessly would be a huge challenge, mostly because of home construction materials: wood and sheetrock act like an open door, while bathroom tiles, brick and concrete act like a steel door,” Alcaras told Red Herring.

Unlike traditional WiFi, which relies on a single access point from a router or gateway, AirTies developed a system of multiple access points placed around the home, which creates an “intelligent network that ensures consistent, high quality whole home Internet and streaming coverage.

“This is a vision of ‘Premium WiFi,” adds Alcaras. “In the world we live in, information at home should flow like water.”

AirTies is part of the wave of nextgeneration home WiFi providers that includes the likes of Eero and Luma.

The company addresses one of the most frustrating problems for home Internet

users - namely that WiFi strength varies wildly throughout the home. Anyone who has had browsing interrupted while in another room (i.e. pretty much all of us) knows the pain point well.

on direct to consumer approach whereas we partner with broadband operators,” says Alcaras. “On our core market, we compete with more established players like Arris, Netgear and Technicolor.”

“If you think your home Wi-Fi is annoying now - flaky, slow, riddled with dead zones - just wait until your streaming 4K TVs are battling phones, laptops, game systems and connected gadgets for the available bandwidth,” wrote The Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims as recently as March. “The future depends on your home network, but even today’s best home networks aren’t ready.”

Alcaras’ next role is to develop that customer base, and evangelize the market even further to expand AirTies’ profitability. “In most markets around the world, ISP services generate tens of dollars in ARPU, out of well over 250 million broadband subscribers,” he says.

Alcaras and co are on it. “For many years, we have perfected and deployed our technology based on small coordinated access points to aim at the best wireless home network experience for consumers, and have patented our inventions along the way,” he says. “As internet speed and number of connected devices are increasing exponentially, we believe even bigger challenges are ahead of the industry to deliver true home network excellency.”

AirTies, which is headquartered in Turkey’s capital city but with other offices in London and Sunnyvale, California, won a significant Series B funding round in 2012, and since then has grown to employ dozens of staff, who have been busy promoting its six-strong product range to customers based largely in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

“The home networking device market in which we are playing was about $12.6 billion in 2014 with a growth of 8% (IHS),” Alcaras adds. “We expect similar progression in 2016. However, we see also new potential of much larger market potential and recurring revenues with decisions like Singtel proposing our Premium WiFi technology to Consumers for $7 per month.”

So with such a promising market opportunity at hand, and an impressive roster of customers, what will the second half of 2016 have in store for AirTies?

North America, says Alcaras, who believes the continent is his company’s “biggest opportunity for sustainable growth.” The next WiFi generation is here, and AirTies is leading the way.

They include consumers, small businesses and service providers such as Digiturk; Orange; Singtel; Sky; Swisscom and Vodafone - among the biggest such firms around. “On the startup side Eero and Luma (are competitors), although focusing

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Top 100 Companies: Europe

Appland www.applandinc.com Jonatan Redvik Mobile Gothenburg, Sweden » Total time spent in apps worldwide grew by 63% on Android phones globally, from 2014 to 2015. That’s a pretty weighty stat, and one few will be more pleased by than Appland, a Swedish white label app store solution provider.

The Gothenburg-based firm, which was founded five years ago by Jonatan Redvik and Henrik Lewander, has quickly grown to become a world leader in its field, securing $2 million in funding, the most recent being a $1.1 million seed round in May 2014. Clearly investors are seeing the potential in Appland (and Red Herring, which awarded the company a Top 100 gong last year). What’s its secret?

device management (MDM) and mobile application management (MAM) companies. All of this allows Appland to offer extensive feature sets and quicklyscalable time-to-market in regions that have traditionally been overlooked by the industry.

Aqurance

One such project that Appland has executed was in Myanmar, where in late 2014 it helped Ericsson and the UK government offer STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) applications to thousands of schoolchildren. “At Appland we believe in the importance of education and that it should be available for everyone,” said Appland CCO Daniel Nilsson, upon the implementation this year of another, similar project with British firm EduGamesApps.

Athens, Greece

With around 100,000 apps live already, Appland is proving its solutions work to disseminate some of the best white label apps on the market. It has already made significant connections in the mobile world, including telecommunications operators like TeliaSonera of Sweden and Finland, and Saudi Arabia’s STC.

There are three, the company tells Red Herring: firstly, a free trial is offered to web users for both Android and iOS. The company also offers a “sophisticated subscription club for Android,” and Appland’s solution works on any connected device, including phones, tablets, set-top boxes and automotive technology.

Its two cofounders are perfectly positioned to grow the company further still.

Lewander has spent over 15 years in the industry, while Redvik, who has also founded Redvik Holding and Stage Voice in Sweden, has spent a similar amount of time creating turnkey SaaS solutions.

“The world is getting connected,” says Redvik. “Connected devices’ values are often not based on the hardware they consist of, but instead the content they can deliver to the consumer.

“The app ecosystem is changing at the speed of light,” Redvik says. “New innovation continually changes the methods for how to monetize apps in the most efficient way.” Appland is at the forefront of that movement, and it’s going places fast.

“Appland’s expertise areas are app discovery, app distribution and app monetization,” he adds. “It is the world leader in third party, white labeled B2B2C app store solutions.”

That final aspect is key, as the B2B2C market is less competitive than B2B2E (employee) sectors, among mobile

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www.aqurance.com Dionissis Nikolopoulos Pharma

» Aqurance has found a perfect sweet spot in a niche market, with a unique product. Unsurprisingly the Greecefounded company has enjoyed a busy year. This January it was numbered among Deloitte’s fastest-growing companies in Greece, which despite its economic woes has produced hundreds of emerging tech players, and a highly promising community.

“During difficult times of the Greek economy, Aqurance is one of the companies that export services and work on top technology projects,” the company told Red Herring. “In less than four years, Aqurance has succeeded in creating a robust and dynamic global partners’ and clients’ network.”

Aqurance is a Life Sciences consultancy which offers solutions currently to over 40 companies, including global heavyweights such as AstraZeneca; Bayer; Danone; GlaxoSmithKline; Pfizer and Zoetis. In total Aqurance has implemented global projects in over 50 countries.

Healthcare spending was greatly affected by the recent global financial turndown.

But, according to Deloitte, it is still increasing in 60 developed nations it recently surveyed. And despite slowed growth, the global pharma segment sales industry is still projected to top $1.2 trillion by 2019.

Aqurance was founded in 2011 and now has offices in Athens, London and Istanbul.

“A differentiator factor for Aqurance is that it is an organization that follows a B2B strategy to a niche market; Life

Top 100 Companies: Europe

Sciences,” the company says. “Unlike many business and IT services providers that form company’s competition, Aqurance is focused on providing solutions primarily in a specific industry: pharmaceutical organizations.”

AW Energy www.waveroller.eu John Liljelund Clean Tech

“The objective is to deliver top quality, innovative, tech business services to Life Sciences, assisting them to reach a point where they can be innovative and successful,” the company adds. “Following a dynamic B2B strategy, Aqurance has demonstrated successful Customer Service achievement since the beginning of operations.”

» Shipwreck divers usually might hope to find something of historical value - maybe even the odd gold coin. Rauno Koivusaari might be the first to have found the idea for a global green energy leader.

The company’s cloud technology allows pharmaceutical companies to boost sales and salesforce, and to take the reins of a new generation in digital sales strategies.

Its analytics-enabled solutions also help firms transform data into action.

The Finnish professional diver was exploring over a decade ago when he noticed something strange: a heavy part of the ship was moving back and forth, driven by the energetic under-surface surge of water - ocean waves.

In January 2015 Aqurance was among 36 companies to have earned the title of ‘national champions’ from 700 European companies selected from 32,000 as part of the prestigious European Business Awards.

In the past year alone the company, which was bootstrapped with no external funding, has grown by 352%.

In 2002 AW Energy was founded on Koivusaari’s revolutionary WaveRoller design, which has gone through multiple cycles of prototype-building, laboratory testing and simulations. 14 years later it is one of Europe’s most promising clean tech firms, with a presence all over the world.

And that kind of growth should continue, having created four products to date and pouncing on an industry which is increasingly becoming aware of Big Data, automation and multichannel technology.

“The market opportunity is big and always evolving according to latest advancements,” the company says.

It plans to build its presence in the U.K., and develop relationships with pharma executives in northern Europe. It also hopes to expand its sales and customer service staff, in what promises to be yet another busy year for Aqurance.

Vantaa, Finland

WaveRoller is a near-shore panel that absorbs the energy from ocean waves with a series of pistons, pumps and hermeticallysealed hydraulic fluids. A subsea cable then connects the energy the WaveRoller stores to the electric grid, harnessing a form of green energy that many other players have failed to expound upon.

AW Energy, based in the Helsinki suburb of Vantaa, has won no shortage of admirers with the technology, which already has 30 patents to its name with another 43 slated.

So far $25 million has been raised in two rounds from four investors, including the European Union and Tekes, Finland’s state investment vehicle.

It has implemented projects across Europe, including in Britain, Ireland and Portugal.

And last December the firm got the chance to hone its own, unique ‘Mexican

wave’ with a project to deploy a 10MW wave farm off the Pacific coast of Mexico.

“I am highly pleased to see that we are making progress on various fronts, and with the Mexican agreement now extend our reach of commercial development to eight countries globally,” said CEO John Liljelund at the time.

It should come as no surprise that WaveRoller is accruing such a cosmopolitan fanbase, Liljelund and Tomasz Mucha, Business Development Director, tell Red Herring: “Wave energy is the largest untapped source of renewable energy with an energy generation potential equivalent to approximately 10% of the global electricity utilization,” he said.

The total estimated value of the wave energy market is in the range of $500 billion. Based on a global study of WaveRoller’s addressable market, the practical potential for its technology is currently estimated at over 500GW. This supports the view that the WaveRoller technology could in the future challenge wind energy in terms of installed capacity.

Roughly 170 technology concepts are actively developed, and WaveRoller is among the top 3% that has successfully passed piloting towards a commercial roll-out phase. And despite the energy industry’s notorious conservatism and reluctance to embrace new technology, AW Energy is sure it can capitalize on recent successes to grow even further, into new territories and markets.

The firm is now looking to deliver projects worth between $70 million and $90 million on shorter-term bases. AW Energy now has a raft of letters of intent and MOIs across the world, and is looking particularly to the Americas, as it chases yet another year of impressive growth. With a staff that includes plenty of offshore and military experience, that is looking incredibly likely.

It seems that Koivusaari, with hindsight, found something with far greater value than any ship’s treasure.

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Top 100 Companies: Europe

BIID

BioCatch

www.biid.com

www.biocatch.com

Jordi Masias

Eyal Goldwerger

ecurity

Security

Barcelona, Spain

Tel Aviv, Israel

» BIID was founded in 2014 to meet the need for safe and easy-to-use global solutions for identification and digital signature through mobile devices. The technology developed by BIID ensures the efficient use of digital certificates and revolutionizes the mobile industry because it offers a new layer of security, legality and electronic evidence in any transaction from a mobile. The company’s goal is to provide solutions for identity and electronic signature in multiple operations and scenarios from the telephone or mobile banking, access to personal information of the “Citizen Folder” of and transactions with the Administration (census data, fines, access to services public), signature and renewal insurance policies, access to medical records or making payments through electronic trading platforms, among many other options.

» Patent awards are not often likely to grab the attention of the global media. In July last year, Biocatch bucked the trend. Its cutting-edge security technology, which allows app developers to authenticate users based on their interactions with phones’ accelerometer and touch screens, became the toast of the summer’s security news, as the Tel Aviv, Israel-based firm pushed the boundaries of digital ‘pre-crime’.

Leadership: Jordi Masias is one of the founders of biidTM, CEO of Firmaprofesional and CEO of Agtic; three companies working in the environment of digital certification, security and compliance on the Internet. He also has extensive experience in the public sector.

Last December the behavioral authentication firm announced that more than 33 million banking customers annually are protected by its technology, including some of the largest banks in Europe, Latin America and North America. Its latest patent is able to measure physiological factors like press-size, hand tremor and hand-eye coordination, as well as usage preferences and device patterns.

No wonder banking giants are flocking to the firm.

That may sound a little too-Minority Report for some. But Biocatch, founded in 2011 upon over five years of research, innovation and engineering in the wake of the global financial meltdown, has quickly emerged as one of the security sector’s most promising startups. In those five years it has already won $12 million of funding, from heavyweights such as OurCrowd, Janvest and Blumberg Capital.

“The concept for BioCatch was based on the idea that innovative attackers could breach security systems by creating false personas, leveraging Peter Steiner’s profound revelation that, ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,’”

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says a company spokesperson. CEO Avi Turgemann is a former operative with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) prestigious 8200 unit who, through his military services, developed an acute awareness of white-hat hacking, system vulnerability management and network surveillance.

BioCatch’s director of product Natia Golan was also an 8200 member, many of whose alumni go on to found the estimated 70 security startups that are founded yearly. The Israeli government, seeing the success of this public-private relationship, has ploughed $26 million into early-stage startups. The 8200 label has become as prestigious a nod as ‘Germanmanufactured’ is to the automotive industry.

Turgemann and his fellow directors, including longtime fintech expert Gadi Maier (Currenex; FraudScience; Finjan Software) and Blumberg managing director Bruce Taragin, have since grown a company that includes several dozen employees and customers all over the financial world.

“The fintech market is blooming thanks to sophisticated fraudsters and cyber criminals, who use synthetic identities to commit financial fraud,” says the spokesperson. “Thus, the need for a disruptive, transparent, and - most important - frictionless authentication technology, was in high demand.”

The company finds itself among a sea of competitors offering high-tech security services to an industry whose value has more-than-tripled in recent years, from $4.02 billion in 2013 to a whopping $12.09 billion in 2014. But there are several key factors with which it is rising above the tide, including its products’ continuousness; complete transparency for the user; identification that cannot be lost, imitated or stolen; lack of impingement on user privacy; and easy integration.

Its tests, too, offer procedures that users

Top 100 Companies: Europe

cannot fail, unlike easily forgotten secret questions or failure-prone technologies such as SMS OTP. BioCatch is educating the market on a next-generation form of authentication, according to the company, which hopes to expand into even more verticals in the near future and who calculates BioCatch’s market opportunity at a Gartner-researched $2.4 billion.

With over a billion transactions currently monitored per month and counting, expansion appears as inevitable as the security of BioCatch’s product suite. With a Red Herring appearance under its belt too, the company looks set to become a global leader very soon.

Bluetector www.bluetector.com David Din Clean Tech Technopark Luzern, Switzerland » In March 2013, Bluetector closed a seed financing round of 600,000 CHF with the Zürcher Kantonalbank (ZKB). The financing was used as working capital to hire the core team and build a first pilot plant. Bluetector signed its first sales contract in October 2013 and built the first BlueBox Ultra, a containerized system to clean wastewater from toilet cabins. Due to the chemicals (biocides) in the water tanks of toilet cabins this wastewater is extremely difficult to clean. The BlueBox Ultra is the first system that is able to treat this extremely difficult wastewater.

Since December 2013 the client is paying Bluetector for the treatment of wastewater from rental toilet cabins. Early January 2014 the top management of TOI TOI DIXI came to visit the pilot plant. The management instantly decided to order several BlueBox Ultra containers, with the

goal of using the system of Bluetector on most of the over 100 sites of TOI TOI DIXI in the coming years.

The Bluebox is an IP-protected containerized wastewater system that is capable of treating heavily polluted wastewater with an innovative combination of an intelligent pressing system and a high performance bio reactor. There are currently no standardized solutions or products on the market that would enable the waste collection companies to treat their wastewater themselves, as the wastewater of waste collection companies is extremely difficult to treat with conventional methods.

Leadership: David Din co-founded the wastewater technology company Epuramat in 2005 and headed it for five years, first as Co-CEO and later as CEO. While Din was CEO, the company tested its technology in a research project with various industrial companies, developed the Box4Water and sold installations in Germany, France, Luxembourg, the United States, and Canada.

Due to his experience in starting, growing and running Epuramat for five years, Din has become an expert in the wastewater industry. His hands-on experience with treating many totally different industrial wastewaters at the clients’ sites is very unique.

Bonus Therapeutics www.bonus-bio.com Dr. Shai Meretzki Biotech Haifa, Israel » Some startups work for years to make the headlines. For Bonus Therapeutics it has been very easy indeed. That’s not surprising considered that it has, among other coups, managed to transplant the first human bone, grown in-vitro from a patient’s own tissue.

The Haifa, Israel-based biotech expert, supported by parent company Bonus BioGroup, has been developing its proprietary, innovative technology to generate viable tissue-engineered bone grafts since 2008, under the guise of a highly skilled management team that includes some of the world’s most respected biotechnologists.

Shai Meretzki is a former founder, CEO and CTO of Pluristem Therapeutics, a cell therapy company, while founder and CTO Avinoam Kadouri has over 15 years of research and development at Geneva-based leader Serono International. Alongside three other leading figures, the team has managed to grow Bonus into a remarkably successful startup - especially for the difficult and regulation-heavy biotech field.

Its market? A multibillion-dollar worldwide pie for the treatment of skeletal disorders such as bone and cartilage-related arthritis, and other bone injuries and affectations like fractures. Bonus’ technology is the culmination of over ten years of research

by Meretzki, in cooperation with leading scientists at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Rambam Health Care Campus and other prominent research institutes.

Its product, BonoFil, is a “unique, individually tailored and cost-effective autograft,” the company told Red Herring. www.REDHERRING.com

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Top 100 Companies: Europe

“It is generated from a small sample of the patient’s fat tissue. BonoFill is a highly innovative product for the repair of large defects in the cranio-maxillofacial and long bones.

“Bone reconstruction is clinically required in a multitude of situations, including trauma, accidents, bone cancer, periodontal diseases, restricted growth, and congenital bone diseases,” it adds.

“The gold standard clinical approach involves autologous bone grafting, during which bone is relocated from one organ to another in the patient’s body.

“This approach bear several shortcomings, including invasive surgical procedure, donor site morbidity, inadequate bone graft quality and imprecise fitting to the defect size and shape. Other solutions include bone grafts from another human (allografts) or from an animal (xenografts) source, synthetic materials and growth factors. These methods usually fail to repair large bone defect.”

The Bonus team has currently secured seven patents, covering all aspects of its technology and products. Its success has been down to a raft of industry and sociological aspects, including an aging population; a move away from extensive surgery; and an increasing awareness of the medical community to use natural materials, such as the patient’s own cells.

The company hopes to expand from a first clinical trial in 2014 to conduct more clinical trials in the coming year, which it says will “demonstrate BonoFil’s ability to serve as a bone graft for several clinical indications, including cranio-maxillofacial and long bone defect.” The trials will be conducted in Israel, the U.S. and Europe, following regulatory approval.

And that should pay off well, in a market - bone grafts and substitutes - valued at $2.4 billion globally in 2014, and which is expected to reach $3.5 billion by 2023 at a CAGR of 4.5% from 2015 to 2023. It will take plenty of graft - and grafts - but expect Bonus to be making many more headlines in the near future.

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Boxever

BrainSINS

www.boxever.com

www.brainsins.com

David O’Flanagan

Francisco Carrero

Marketing

Cloud Computing

Dublin, Ireland

Madrid, Spain

» Boxever’s predictive marketing platform helps airlines and online travel agents (OTAs) deliver personalized, 1:1 marketing experiences to their customers across all channels and at all stages of the customer lifecycle. The company, founded in 2011 in Dublin, provides a cloud-based customer intelligence and personalized marketing platform specifically tailored for the needs of the travel industry. It combines big data and predictive analytics into a tightly integrated marketing solution that provides a 360-degreee view of the customer. With it travel companies can develop insights into each customer, customer segments, products, and channels, and then take action on those insights in the form of personalized communications, including email, mobile, web, display, and more.

The solution enables travel retailers to deliver better customer experiences in real time, improve conversions, and drive revenue. The Boxever platform is a multitenant platform built in the cloud. Given the SaaS architecture, it takes only weeks – not months or years as with legacy “big data” solutions – for a customer to be up and running and experiencing benefits.

Leadership: David O’Flanagan is an experienced software executive with over 12 years’ experience. He has developed and managed enterprise software in a number of verticals including mobile telecoms, travel and cloud. O’Flanagan holds an MSc in Computer Science and a BA in Mathematics from Trinity College Dublin.

» BrainSINS is a cloud solution for digital commerce that enables SMB companies to compete at an enterprise level. The company does this using personalization and gamification technologies to deliver a great customer experience that increases sales uplift by an average 20% and improves loyalty and engagement. The BrainSINS solution incorporates Big Data and Adaptive Learning to offer a freemium model that delivers personalization for the masses. Also, the company has considerably reduced the main barriers for these kind of services, creating a product that can be integrated within five minutes, and is extremely easy to configure and maintain.

The company currently has more than 100 customers in Europe, North America and LATAM, and offices in Spain, U.K. and U.S.A. Leadership: Francisco Carrero is CEO of BrainSINS. He is a Computer Engineer, researcher and CEO since 1998. He is a former professor, business developer and consultant.

Top 100 Companies: Europe

CashOrCard POS www.cashorcardpos.com John Staunton Software Amsterdam, Netherlands » CashOrCard POS began life as loyalty platform Buzzoek, which allowed users to use smartphones as loyalty cards of any kind. “This started out very promisingly, but in order to grow further, we needed to integrate into existing point of sale (PoS) or cash registers,” John Staunton, CashOrCard CEO, tells Red Herring.

“We approached the existing players, but it quickly became clear that they were not equipped or ready for third parties to easily connect and offer value-adding services to retailers,” he adds. “It was faster, lower cost and quicker for us to create our own POS than to integrate with old-fashioned legacy systems available in the market today.”

Amsterdam was rated by TechCrunch as one of fintech’s five ‘dark horse’ cities in July 2015. CashOrCard is one of the Dutch capital’s leading pioneers in the field, alongside unicorn Adyen, which is valued at $1.7 billion.

CashOrCard is an end-to-end retail solution for iOS and Android: a multichannel, mobile PoS system with inventory control that is able to connect merchants, loyalty programs, data reports, scheduling and more. The big, black box one usually encounters at a store is replaced by a tablet - or even smartphone and no manual input to payment providers is necessary.

Customers are billed on an innovative, customizable subscription service, which is yet another feature with which CashOrCard hopes to beat competition including Lightspeed Retail and Revel Systems.

“We are in a competitive, although highly fragmented, space,” says Staunton. “There are no clear dominant players globally, and players who might be considered competition to us - iZettle, SumUp, Adyen, etc. - are close partners of ours with both sides providing value-add for retailers. The market is open for disruption.”

The company is currently looking for $1.7 million growth capital, to add to its existing $878,000 injection from angel investment.

It is currently reaching break-even, with revenues doubling month-by-month.

Besides that funding, its plans for the next 18 months include both growth and scale.

Staunton says that the staff base will be increased and customer base expanded to 10,000 retailers. beyond its current presence in 101 countries.

That will help it grab a piece of a market opportunity estimated at $9-10.1 billion.

“We are the only full-functioned free PoS on the market, the only one to fully integrate e-commerce platforms, the only one to allow any payment provider to connect, and the only one to create a full - open - marketplace of add-ons and third party services,” Staunton says. “In just 12 months we went from idea to active in 101 countries, with 2,500 signed-up retailers growing that base by 7% each week.”

CloudAgents www.cloudagents.com David Papp Professional Services Budapest, Hungary » In 2008, David Papp, a former manager at customer service provider Teleperformance, had a vision: could the traditional man-management way of customer service be replaced with a model based on the sharing economy? It would, he surmised, enable people to work from wherever, and whenever, they liked, as a call agent.

But it wasn’t so simple. Papp had to pool together VoIP, webinar and online CRM systems, build up a remote management process, a qualified workforce pool and develop a workforce management technology that guarantees seamless delivery.

Budapest has emerged as one of the European tech market’s most promising hubs. At the forefront of the country’s tech revolution is CloudAgents, a leading cloud contact center providing high-quality multilingual services in over 40 languages.

CloudAgents, which Papp describes as the “Uber of call centers,” provides customer support in any available language by home-based workforces globally. “Only big players provide multilingual support by their global service locations; however, this solution is expensive, limitedly scalable and native and not available under 50 full time employees,” he added to Red Herring.

“CloudAgents is one of the most reasonable choices for fast growing companies to support their multilingual customers globally.”

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Top 100 Companies: Europe

CloudAgents now has over 11,000 agents worldwide, and hundreds of full-time employees, working out of its Hungary HQ. It has also received significant funding, including a $1.5 million series A round in 2010, by compatriot fund Primus Capital. The firm is currently raising over $2 million more, which it will use to expand even further, with an exit in mind.

That should not be too difficult given the huge market opportunity at CloudAgent’s fingers. Global contact center spend stands at $300-350 billion, of which third party outsourcing accounts for nearly 20% The third-party contact center spend has grown at around 7% in 2013.

MarketsandMarkets forecasts that the global cloud-based contact center market is expected to grow from $4.68 billion in 2015 to $14.71 billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 25.7% during the forecast period. With a U.S. expansion in mind, Papp is sure that his charges can enjoy a year of unprecedented growth, even with strong competition coming from former employer Teleperformance, as well as Transom, Sitel, Stream, Sykes, Atento and others.

“I can state that CloudAgents is a premium service provider, therefore is able to deliver undisputed results in executing high volume projects,” says Balazs Toth of Amadeus IT Group. With such a clear roadmap in mind, and such expansive ambition, it is reassuring to hear Papp’s main goal for the next 18 months: “getting closer to our clients.”

Cogeon www.smath.com

Combain Mobile

Thomas Nitsche

www.combain.com

Mobile

Bjorn Lindquist

Berlin, Germany

Telecommunications Lund, Sweden

» Cogeon was founded in April 2013 in Berlin, Germany. Its goal is to create intelligent solutions for problems in education. The team combines experience, youthful creativity, a scientific background and economic thinking.

The outstanding feature of the ‘MATH 42 technology’ is, that it “thinks” like a teacher, working itself through problems like a student should do. MATH 42 performs real symbolic computation — without the use of any templates. MATH 42 has been developed completely in-house (without any third party components). The entire IP is owned by Cogeon.

Leadership: Thomas Nitsche is co-founder of MATH 42 and studied mathematics / game theory at the Albert Ludwig University Freiburg and the Technical University Munich. In the 70s he developed the chess program ORWELL and later the chess computer MEPHISTO(with Elma Henne). With the MEPHISTO III he became the 1984 Micro-Computer Chess World Champion in Glasgow.

In the 90s he obtained the patent for the ‘Learning Heating’, which anticipated the ideas of NEST and obtained the patent for the ‘Intelligent Switch’.

In the 2000s Nitsche developed a patternbased search-algorithm ‘Pattern Proximity’ and expanded the technology in 2008 to comprise Chinese. In 2006 ‘Pattern Proximity’ became the core-technology of his StartUp PROXIMIC (Holtzbrinck Ventures and Wellington Partners), with which he moved to San Francisco.

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» Combain Mobile has a singular vision: keep track of everything in the world.

Achieving that vision is anything but easy, however - especially when it hopes to attain the location of everything to within a few meters, anywhere on Earth.

Judging by the company’s recent history, though, that goal may not be so lofty. Since a 2009 founding Combain, headquartered in Lund, near Sweden’s southernmost tip, has developed market-leading positioning algorithms and one of the world’s largest positioning databases, alongside a focus on research that has seen it rise to become one of Europe’s leading such startups.

It all started a decade ago, says Combain CEO Björn Lindquist, “when Combain Consulting AB got a research assignment from Sony Ericsson to develop positioning algorithms, build a cell-ID database and do wardriving (the act of searching for WiFi networks while in a moving vehicle) in the woods of southern Sweden, to capture cell-IDs from Swedish mobile network operators.

“We had then and still have a passion about location based services and how to use mobile positioning to improve these,” he adds. “It quickly got its first customer within valuable goods tracking. The service has today evolved to a much better performing Combain Positioning Service (CPS). Today our team has managed to develop advanced positioning algorithms, patent pending, and build the world largest cell-ID and WiFi database.”

Market better. Sell better. Be better.

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zoominfo.com

866.904.9666

Top 100 Companies: Europe

Lund is home to a variety of tech high-achievers including Sony Mobile Communications, Ericsson, Doro and Microsoft. Combain may not have the size of those global giants, but it can claim a revenue growth far beyond. Since 2012 the company has been profitable, with revenues boosted by 30-40% year on year.

Positioning that works both outdoors and indoors has helped that growth, which Combain hopes to build upon, while creating its all-important IP, in the next 18 months. Combain’s competition are not minnows: Lindquist tells Red Herring that its biggest rivals are Google Geolocation API and Navizon. But with global customers and funding coming directly from those customers, Combain is in rude health as it seeks to do “even better global indoor location with floor positioning,” according to the CEO. In 2014 Combain surpassed 100 million devices catered for, while last year it announced a big deal with Mozilla, to supply its services to Firefox and Firefox OS users worldwide. And with a cofounder pairing of Lindquist, a longtime positioning executive with Sony Ericsson and Ericsson - and Rikard Windh, who has had many years’ experience at Sweden’s Teleca and Obigo AB, it looks clear that Combain really can see the woods for the trees.

Contentful www.contentful.com Sascha Konietzke Cloud Computing Berlin, Germany » In 2011 Sascha Konietzke, dissatisfied with existing web-focused content management systems (CMS), built StorageRoom, an API-first CMS. The Berlin company was a huge success, winning mission-critical applications by CBS, Viacom and Hyundai, and convincing future collaborator Paolo Negri, a longtime veteran of cloud services and APIs with previous experience at games company Wooga.

In 2012 Konietzke and Negri co-launched Contentful in the German capital’s trendy Kreuzberg district, raising $800,000 in seed capital from Point Nine Capital and Balderton Capital, starting the ball rolling on a company that has become one of the API world’s most promising. A year later a series A round added $3m from the same investors, and launched a beta version it hoped would be the gold standard in content management.

Whereas most CMS platforms try to cater to the entire smorgasbord of channels, Contentful has marketed itself as a master of a select few: namely, cross-platform publishing; mobile content management backend; rich web experiences and integration with existing applications. It is, as Contentful puts it, “a headless CMS with an API at its core, served via the cloud.”

“This approach tackles the three main problems of your usual CMS,” says Chris Schagen, Chief Marketing Officer at Contenful. “The latter focuses on managing

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your website not your content; monopolizes the presentation layer, giving designers less space for creativity, secondly; and, third, makes it difficult to add new channels like mobile apps, wearables, smart TVs without duplicating your content.

“Contentful distills content management down to its very essence and focuses on structured content that is free from presentation,” he adds. “Thus, content can be more easily shared and reused across properties and channels. Contentful is modular, which makes content programmable for every device and platform. Its API-centric design allows powerful integrations with third parties, which also means smoother upgrades.”

Using this approach Konietzke, Negri and co have won some impressive clients, including global giants such as Jack in the Box, Nike and Red Bull. Its revenues have been growing by 10% month-on-month, reflecting that while the CMS field has plenty of competitors - Wordpress; Joomla; Osmek; Parse; Kinvey; Vox; Buzzfeed and Adobe to name but a formidable few Contentful is showing that to veer from the all-in-one offering can provide huge industry wins.

“Content needs a technological environment where it can flow, and be distributed across all its locations and channels,” says Schagen. “And that’s what we do: we provide both content service and cloud infrastructure, so that anyone using it can focus exclusively on developing the product and nothing else.”

Contentful plans to use the next year to grow its team, and capture a greater portion of the estimated $3.5 billion traditional CMS market (the backends-asa-service market value is even higher, at $4 billion). The company is currently in the midst of establishing a US presence, too, as Konietzke and Negri look to spread their wings beyond Silicon Allee. It hopes to triple its annual recurring revenue in 2016.

Top 100 Companies: Europe

“The CMS of the past were really just terrible word processors,” says Gareth Ballester, lead engineer at U.S. retailer Nasty Gal. “Contentful is the first true ‘content management system’. A system that can manage any structure of content you can imagine, not just a sheet of paper.”

“The rationale for custom developments are that existing CMS are not cutting it,” adds Schagen. “The custom development segment is the real sweet spot for Contentful.”

guaranteeing to support also future technologies and updates software and hardware as required for all Cozify service subscribers.

Leadership: Kimmo Ruotoistenmäki is a handyman who changes hat between business development and technology like snapping fingers. He is a second generation entrepreneur and has a passion for startups and creating something new.

Decovry Cozify

www.decovry.com

www.cozify.fi

Steven Coppens

Kimmo Ruotoistenmäki

Internet/Online

Consumer Electronics

Oost-Vlaanderen, Belgium

Espoo, Finland » Cozify’s goal is to bring home automation to everyone. As the Internet of Things matures, more smart devices creep into homes and result in a clutter of apps that are not intelligently interconnected. Cozify Hub easily automates smart devices across different manufacturer specific silos.

The company operates using Lean Startup principles: it has a continuous dialogue with its pilot customers. Their feedback is used to create a product that fulfills their needs and exceeds expectations. Cozify has recently conducted A/B/C test sales campaign to 30.000 consumers together with a major ISP to fine-tune offering.

Cozify differentiates from other IoT hub companies with a strict focus to early majority of users, not to home automation enthusiasts or early adopters. This is visible in the beautiful design and supereasy user experience. In the area of smart connected devices, new radio technologies are constantly being developed. Cozify offers its customers peace of mind by

» Decovry is building the preferred Product Discovery Platform in Europe.

Decovry.com features weekly sales of unseen design brands (decoration, furniture, accessories), with a focus on authenticity and sustainability. The company cooperates with designers and brands worldwide and is very passionate about the story behind the designers and brands. As Decovry works directly with the brands it can offer exclusive products at special discounts.

Leadership: Steven Coppens was previously partner Venture Capital Internet/ Software at Gimv Venture Capital. As a Partner he was managing seed to late stage investment.

Currently founder of Decovry.com and Chairman / founder of Wineissocial. com (personalised wine subscription ecommerce company in Spain).

Ecoppia www.ecoppia.com Eran Meller Clean Tech Herzlia, Israel » On Ecoppia’s website there is a ticker but not one which describes the hits it has received. The counter shows the number of solar panels its robotic cleaner has wiped clear. At time of writing it stands at over 50 million.

Ecoppia, founded in 2013 and headquartered just north of Tel Aviv in the city of Herzelia, is one of the Red Herring Top 100 Europe’s most unique enterprises.

Its product, a water-free cleaning robot for the utility solar industry, was inspired not by a former startup or decades of expertise, but a magazine article. The piece, in the Economist, detailed the high cost, waterintensive problem of maintaining clean solar PV panels at large-scale industrial solar PV sites.

The natural soiling of these panels hits energy production hard. Dust storms - a regular occurrence in countries such as Israel and the Middle East, where solar energy is highly competitive, can cause “critical interruptions,” Ecoppia’s CEO and co-founder Eran Meller told Red Herring.

His team’s solution: an autonomous, waterfree robot, managed in the cloud with realtime analytics tools: “A smart, 21st century solution for the solar industry.”

The E4, according to Meller, “provides instant responses to adverse weather, complete site cleanings nightly and maintains peak production site capacity while providing significantly improved ROI over traditional cleaning methods.”

With five patents granted and an additional five pending or under provision, Ecoppia is relatively untouched in its field. No wonder

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Top 100 Companies: Europe

that it is funded by leading investors such as Swarth Group, GlenRock and Gandyr and is opening regional production facilities and offices “that will allow us to better expand and deal with the overwhelming demand we’ve seen.”

That is important in a global energy industry traditionally averse to new technology and disruptive startups like Ecoppia. “Our major challenge, like any newly made market with a relatively untested product, is that we need to demonstrate to solar-installation operators that there is an undeniably strong business case for our product to deliver value and it’s worth it to change their ‘business as usual’ approach to cleaning PV installations,” said Meller.

That said, the market is valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, and growing at a huge rate as solar continues to be implemented on greater scales across the world, particularly in emerging markets like Egypt and India.

And with Ecoppia being so respected that it was afforded a spot on the Israeli delegation to last year’s COP21 environmental conference in Paris, the company is becoming a fixture in the world of utility solar energy - and the potential bottom-line improvements it can bring to the industry: its most recent contract was a 40MW site in southern Israel, jointly owned by the French company EDF RE and Arava Power.

Ecoppia’s good news keeps coming. The company recently signed a massive new OEM agreement with Sanmina to produce robots in India, to reach 1GW capacity by 2017. There have also been on the ground deployments with two of India’s largest energy companies to celebrate, and the company is in discussions with several more. Back in Israel, the company projects it is on track to capture 75% market share in the country’s desert region (where the majority of the solar industry is situated) by the end of the third quarter of this year.

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ERPScan www.erpscan.com Alexander Polyakov Security Amsterdam, Netherlands » ERPScan is one of the most respected and credible Business Application Security providers. Founded in 2010, the company operates globally. Named as an ‘Emerging vendor’ in Security by CRN and distinguished by more than 25 other awards - ERPScan is the leading SAP AG partner in discovering and resolving security vulnerabilities. ERPScan consultants work with SAP AG in Walldorf supporting in improving security of their latest solutions.

ERPScan’s primary mission is to close the gap between technical and business security, and provide solutions to evaluate and secure business-critical applications from both, cyber-attacks as well as internal fraud. The company’s clients are Fortune 2000 companies from sectors like oil and gas, banking, retail and managed service providers whose requirements are to actively manage security of vast SAP landscapes on a global scale.

The company’s flagship product is ERPScan Security Monitoring Suite for SAP. This multi award-winning innovative software is the only solution in the market certified by SAP AG covering all tiers of SAP. ERPScan Monitoring Suite for SAP is specifically designed for enterprise systems to continuously monitor changes in multiple SAP systems as well as analyzing trends, manages risks, tasks and export results to external systems.

Leadership: Alexander Polyakov co-founded ERPScan in 2010. Recognized as an R&D professional and Entrepreneur of the year. His expertise covers the security of enterprise business-critical software like ERP, CRM, SRM and industry specific solutions developed by enterprise software companies

such as SAP and Oracle. He has received several accolades, and published over 100 vulnerabilities. He has authored multiple whitepapers such as annual award winning “SAP Security in Figures” and surveys devoted to information security research in SAP. Polyakov has authored a book about Oracle Database security and has presented his research on SAP and ERP security at more than 50 conferences and trainings in 20+ countries in all continents. He has also held trainings for the CISOs of Fortune 2000 companies, and for SAP SE itself.

fanatix www.fanatix.com Will Muirhead Social Media London, United Kingdom » fanatix is a mobile-first social network for the sports vertical. The technology makes it easy for users to discover and share sports media and opinion on their mobiles. The service functions both as a consumer-facing proposition and a technology platform that can be licensed by third-parties.

The platform is used by 10 million fans every month and has secured partnerships with key broadcasters, rights holders and sports blogs, including ESPN. Leadership: Will Muirhead is a technology entrepreneur, who set-up his first business, a video platform called SportEV, whilst at Edinburgh University in 1999. SportEV provided turnkey IP video solutions to the sports industry and was licensed by FIFA, UEFA and FA Premier League to manage the global delivery of their in-match video assets to media partners and fans in some 200 markets worldwide. The business was acquired in 2005.

Top 100 Companies: Europe

Finnay

Flexenclosure

www.finnay.com

www.flexenclosure.com

Riikka Lindström

David King

Mobile

Telecommunications

Helsinki, Finland

Stockholm, Sweden

» Finnay is revolutionizing gift giving.

Finnay Wayfinder is the world’s first adventurous gift app. It combines online and offline shopping together, bringing easiness and fun to gift shopping and more customers to corner shops.

The online gift shop has curated combinations of high-quality design gifts and local experiences available. When the gift giver buys a gift from the online shop the receiver gets a text message and the adventure begins. The Finnay Wayfinder app guides the receiver to the gift that is waiting beautifully wrapped at a local shop.

It is like a modern treasure hunt.

With Finnay Wayfinder the gift giver does not have to worry about shipping or wrapping. The business model is easily scalable with fast mobile localization and no own stock. The technology consists of three parts: the mobile app, the online gift shop and our shopkeeper’s interface. The company has attracted over 50 partners in just 10 months in Helsinki and Frankfurt.

Next the company is expanding to London, Berlin and San Francisco.

Leadership: Riikka Lindström is the founder and CEO of Finnay. International Design Business Management, dipl. in Creative Business, Master of Industrial Design, serial entrepreneur, CEO of design agency Kaltio, 8 years experience. Background in heavy industry (Metso/Valtra), usability/customer research, design and brand strategy (Magisso start-up).

» In emerging and middle income markets, telecoms companies can sometimes struggle with a lack of easy access to resources, namely data and power.

Flexenclosure, a designer and manufacturer of prefabricated modular data centers and intelligent power management solutions, provides companies with the means to cost-effectively expand their data and telecom networks, and improve their efficiency and profitability.

The company was founded in 1989 and is headquartered out of Vara, Sweden, although it works on a truly global scale.

CEO David King joined the company in February 2012.

“We have data centers in Angola, Nigeria, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Chad, Tanzania, Mozambique, Morocco and Sudan. So we’re quite well established as a data center provider in Africa. We’ve got hybrid power systems in Nigeria, Ghana, Chad and Tanzania. Nigeria we won a very large engagement this year so that will become our biggest market in Africa,” explains King. “Separate to that, we’re very present in Myanmar, the market opened last year and became a greenfield site for telecoms operators. We’ve passed the 1,000 site mark in Myanmar and more recently won a data enter project there. So we’re in Africa, Asia one country and one in Latin America.”

A major part of the company’s success is the cost efficiency it provides customers.

That puts Flexenclosure’s solutions in high demand, and not just in emerging markets.

“Within the data center offering, this product we called the eCenter, it’s a

prefabricated data center and its sold on the proposition that it’s a very capital efficient way to put a data center in place.

We see that there is a great growth in the need for data centers, not just in emerging economies and frontier markets, but also middle income markets. So having cut our teeth in Africa in the telco world, we’re broadening that and we’re looking at APAC more broadly, LATAM more broadly and beyond the telco sector. And we’re starting to explore central Asia as well, Kazakhstan and places. So I’d like to think that all of these, middle income and emerging economies are good potential markets for us,” says King.

That’s one of the major reasons why Flexenclosure has attracted $31 million in equity funding so far, and in May secured EUR 7.5 million in debt financing from the European Investment Bank. The next step is to go public – the company has already announced its intentions to launch an initial public offering on Nasdaq First North Stockholm.

King lists three major advantages the company holds over its competitors in the data center industry. The first is capital efficiency. “Many data center players, their business model is based on renting racks, they don’t want to build more than they need so they’re very interested in doing this in stages.”

The second advantage is in the design of the prefab units. With Flexenclosure, customers are able to customize the space to suit their needs completely. “We’ve discovered that customers want clear open white space that they can customize, they don’t want pillars in the way, they want to get good air flows in order to drive down their cooling costs, so the ability to provide a customizable space is important,” says King.

“The third thing, which is particularly applicable to Africa but also to other economies, is the predictability of the build. Building anywhere can be an unpredictable business. The telco world and the co-location world where we’ve got www.REDHERRING.com

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people who are trying to launch businesses in a certain period of time, they really like that we factory build and ship the whole module in one go, we can be in and out of a site quite quickly. It’s a matter of weeks, it’s not months and months. That predictability is an advantage.”

Flexenclosure has a great base of customers in important emerging markets, and with funding in place and an IPO on the way, looks set to provide its crucial telecoms services to even more parts of the world in the years to come.

years’ experience in mobile and payment technologies having previously worked as a senior consultant at Unisys, Motorola and Cisco. Mussie is also the founder and CEO of De la Phone Technologies Limited.

ForceManager www.forcemanager.net Oscar Macia Clean Tech

FloCash www.flocash.com Sirak Mussie Internet/Online London, United Kingdom » FloCash began with the vision to simplify doing business in Africa, by breaking down major barriers to trade and helping Africa to drive commerce at home and abroad. The company’s mission is to become the one stop partner providing payments, fulfilment and compliance for ecommerce businesses operating in Africa. Today, FloCash is Africa’s largest payment network and has established a direct connection with financial institutes covering 35 countries in Africa and can reach 100 million account holders in these territories.

FloCash provides ecommerce services to businesses operating across Africa. The company is generating revenue and proved that its business can scale by expanding to 14 countries. Its customers include industry leaders in ecommerce, travel and payments and showed that the award winning technology works.

Leadership: Sirak Mussie has over 15

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Barcelona, Spain » Streamlining was always, for ForceManager founder Oscar Macia, the key to great sales. The Barcelona-based entrepreneur, a longtime sales management professional, became frustrated with the lack of visibility of his field sales team’s activity and how he could help them improve.

Macia wanted that streamlined service, and more transparency. The problem was that when he set up a tool asking his team to directly report all their activity, it took away from the time they spent actually selling. It was then, when Macia together with his childhood friend, Xavier Bisbal, co-founded ForceManager.

The pair took their passion for delivering the best, most user-friendly experience to develop a unique mobile CRM that improves sales teams’ performance by providing contextual information and drastically reducing reporting time. The company was founded in 2011. Now, five years later, ForceManager finds itself one of Europe’s most sought-after mobile sales management software platforms.

An initial $453,000 cash injection from the IESE Business School fund (Finaves IV) has been supplemented with almost $6 million more investment from Nauta Capital, Banco Sabadell and other local

investors. Now with more than 80 employees in Barcelona, London, Madrid, Bogotá and Mexico, the firm is wellpoised to pounce on a market opportunity estimated at some $3.2 billion.

That market, however, is extremely competitive. “To remain competitive we have different products tailored to businesses depending on their relative size and needs”, Oscar Macia told Red Herring.

“For example, a smaller sales team with maybe 5-10 reps may not be looking for an expensive, in-depth analysis tool. They may want something more encompassing and affordable. You have to cater for that.”

The company is looking to capture more big business too, he told us.ForceManager’s tailored view is certainly catching plenty of attention. The company is now present in over 27 countries worldwide. It plans to use the next 18 months to repeat that success in even more territories, which it looked to with the recent opening of its Colombia and Mexico offices.

And that will help add to a client base that already numbers some of the biggest companies in the corporate world, including Vauxhall, Ford and BASF. ForceManager has allowed our sales team to be more productive and engage with our customer base by having all customer interactions recorded in one place,” said R. Smith, customer strategy manager at BASF. Rapid expansion will cement ForceManager’s already strong position in its industry, and one which it looks to have captured with innovation, and a keen eye for the sales sector Macia honed for years.

Top 100 Companies: Europe

GiPStech

Gobike

www.gipstech.com

Global Warning System

Gaetano D’Aquila

globalwarningsystem.com

Torben Aagaard

Mobile

Andreas Rodman

Clean Tech

Rende, Italy

Cloud Computing

Copenhagen, Denmark

www.gobike.com

Lund, Sweden » GiPStech is a startup company developing a disruptive technology platform to allow extremely precise indoor localization/ positioning/navigation without the need of costly infrastructure.

The company’s technology leverages any pre-existing signal (wi-fi, beacons, etc.) adding precision thanks to the integration of a proprietary algorithm that employs anomalies to the magnetic field present in any indoor location (because of ferromagnetic materials such as concrete rebar, piping, etc.) to build maps that allow a precise localization using a common smartphone without any new infrastructure.

The company was founded in early 2014 after completion of an early demo, and raised seed capital in Italy.

Leadership: Gaetano D’Aquila, CEO and core technology development for GiPSTech, has a degree in Computer Engineering in 2002, research Fellow at the CNR (Italian National Research Council), attended PhD in Systems Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Calabria. He then worked in the industry first as a security consultant in the field of TELCO and Banking in Value Team SpA and more recently as a Project Leader in a semiconductor company where he coordinated R&D and strategic activities in the automotive and car insurance field. He has published several papers in scientific journals and still continues to cooperate with the University and the CNR.

» Founded in 2009, triggered by founder Professor of Medicine Lars Lidgren’s firsthand experience of the SARS epidemic 2003, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the Mumbai terror attacks 2008, occasions at which lives could have been saved by targeted early warnings and reliable disaster information.

With the vision to save lives by making information available to all, Professor Lidgren founded GWS 2009. The services were first offered to corporate customers only, then late 2014 to consumers without an enterprise subscription starting in Sweden.

The company is led by CEO Andreas Rodman, an experienced innovator and entrepreneur, who among other things previously have founded, developed and successfully sold the tech company Bokks AB. GWS manages its own in-house development and research as well as external monitoring and analysis. The company headquarters is located in Sweden’s innovation hub IDEON in the city of Lund.

Leadership: Andreas Rodman is a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Lund. Rodman was the CEO, founder and largest private owner of Bokks AB, a company that was sold in 2007 to the Swedish stock listed company MultiQ AB. Rodman has been GWS CEO since 2009.

» Gobike is a young innovative technology company that has decided to develop a digital bike share solution (SMART BIKE) for Smart Cities. The company was founded in Copenhagen.

Leadership: Founder and Group CEO Torben Aagaard is experienced in innovation and start-ups. He has worked with business development, merged & acquisitions in the IT / Software industry the last 30 years.

Good Sign goodsignsolutions.com Taija Engman Software Helsinki, Finland » “What we needed,” says Tero Lappalainen of Fujitsu, “was a next generation mediation and billing system. Honestly? It was something that didn’t exist.”

Thankfully for Lappalainen, Fujitsu and hundreds of other customers, Good Sign was on hand. The Helsinki-based firm has been enabling automation for complex and dynamic billing, usage-based charging and subscription management of IT and telecoms services for nine years now.

Little wonder the company has been deemed a Red Herring Top 100 winner,

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when you consider that its customers uncover 10% non-billed revenue resulting into 30-50% profit increase with 70% increased improved cashflow, and 90% of manual billing admin eliminated. “(Our customers) are able to launch new services within a day,” Good Sign CEO and founder Taija Engman told Red Herring upon the company’s victory. Engman, who herself spent 16 years at Fujitsu, knows how important it is to streamline contract billing - and how big the wins can be when it’s done well.

Good Sign “was developed for a compelling need within a global service provider to enable intelligent automation for complex and dynamic contract billing, usage-based charging and subscription management of IT and telecom services,” she says.

“Our customers, such as Fujitsu, gain scalability and a totally new level of data accuracy and transparency in service revenues and margins,” Engman adds. “Good Sign removes barriers to flexibly offer end customers what they want and yet automatically provision multi-layered services and bill customer specific usage and pricing schemes with unmatched reduction in lead times and handling costs.”

The company has managed impressive growth, with revenues topping €2.6 million ($2.9 millio), without a funding round.

And this year, says Engman, will be spent expanding Good Sign’s footprint beyond its traditional hunting grounds of the Nordic and Baltic countries in Europe.

The opportunity, should that growth come off successfully, is huge: the industry is “a €50 billion ($55.7 billion) market for software for new service contract and subscription based business models by 2020 within our target industries,” says Engman. “This is on top of the traditional telco subscription billing market segment.”

To fuel that ambition Engman and co are currently looking for funding, with which they will attempt to accelerate growth and increase profitability beyond its current 30

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good health. “We’re able to support true heavyweight corporate operations and the chargeback, departmental complexities that come with it because our business platform incorporates a new philosophy of managing service data and information, and deep support of real, complex and variable business processes,” concludes Engman.

With a Red Herring award in the bag, that platform is sure to become even more attractive, in Europe and far beyond.

H&D Wireless www.hdwireless.se Pär Bergsten Mobile Stockholm, Sweden » H&D Wireless enables wireless sensor and multimedia data access to the Internet in an environmental friendly and cost effective way. H&D Wireless solutions are used in a wide range of applications ranging from smart energy meters for CleanTech to streaming data for Digital Media. The company’s technology is a world class Wi-Fi and connectivity system software. solution. The solution is supported on leading Microcontroller platforms, providing customers with quick design turnaround and the fastest possible time to the market.

Leadership: Pär Bergsten has 30 years of Telecom industry and wireless IC experience. He holds a MSc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and a MBA from Stockholm School of Economics.

He is a serial entrepreneur in the wireless Semiconductor and Telecom market.

Bergsten is a proud owner of a Gyrocopter, which he enjoys flying during his time off.

Habitissimo www.habitissimo.com Jordi Ber Internet/Online Palma de Mallorca, Spain » Habitissimo is the leading internet company in Southern Europe and Latin America connecting supply and demand in the field of home improvement and repair.

Homeowners can publish a service request for free, and therefore be contacted by up to four professionals in their area. At the same time, home improvement and repair contractors or servicemen can get leads to whom present a quote.

Habitissimo was created in 2009 and from then on it has become the biggest online community for home improvement and repair in Spain, Brazil and Latin America.

It is also present in Italy, Portugal and Turkey. It has more than 270.000 registered contractors and servicemen and has already managed more than a million service requests.

Top 100 Companies: Europe

HIL Applied Medical hilappliedmedical.com Sagi Brink-Danan Medtech Jerusalem, Israel » HIL Applied Medical is developing ultra-compact, high-performance systems for cancer Proton Therapy (PT). HIL’s advanced particle accelerator and beamline technologies are aimed to make PT widely accessible, thus creating a market potential in excess of $2B/year for HIL. HIL’s technology is in part licensed exclusively from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and is NOT expected to require clinical or animal trials.

Leadership: Sagi Brink-Danan has over 15 years of entrepreneurial and executive medical-device experience, mostly in the U.S., building and growing companies in pain monitoring, orthopedics, robotic spine surgery, advanced wound healing and urology.

Prior to joining HIL he was the founding CEO of Perfuzia Medical, where he took the company from inception through seed and A-round financing, product development, IP development, clinical studies and strategic partnerships. In his position as VP at SRS Medical Sagi led the international commercialization of an advanced urological technology, developed at an investment of over $100M. At Mazor Robotics he was hired as the second employee of the US subsidiary, rose quickly through the ranks to senior

management positions, and helped develop and lead the company’s nationwide presence and operations. Prior to his medical-device career Brink-Danan served in an elite a Navy unit of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), where he attained the rank of Captain.

He holds an MBA Cum-Laude from Babson College (Boston, MA, USA) in entrepreneurship and international business, and an MSc in Biomedical Engineering from Tel Aviv University (Israel) with a full merit scholarship; his Master’s thesis was spun out as a startup company funded by Israel’s Office of the Chief Scientist. Brink-Danan also holds a BSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from TAU (dean’s list, merit scholarship), and is a graduate of Israel’s Naval Officer Academy in Haifa. He has several scientific and medical publications, and holds numerous patent applications.

i-movo www.i-movo.com David Tymm Mobile London, United Kingdom » The online coupon market is on a steep upward trend. Last year Statista, an analyst, reported that the number of mobile coupon users alone surged from 92.6 million to 104.1 million in the United States alone.

Mobile will play a bigger and bigger role in this boom. “An eMarketer report about

online coupon statistics found similar numbers for 2014, predicting that over 70% of mobile users would rely upon mobile coupons to find the best deal for last year,” the report added. “Comparing these mobile coupon statistics side-byside, we see a healthy 26% gain between 2014 and 2015.”

In the U.K., several firms have emerged as key players in the mobile coupon - or in British English, voucher - market.

Among them is London’s i-movo, which has placed security as peak in importance.

David Tymm, CEO, spoke to Red Herring following his firm’s Top 100 victory - and stressed the long journey that has led to this point.

“Mobile vouchers are not a new idea,” he says. “Using mobile phones to distribute vouchers has been suggested almost since the introduction of mobile phones themselves. As a method it has never really taken off due to the inherent risk of duplication the digital route allows.

So, i-movo set ourselves the challenge of creating a ‘secure digital voucher’ system that was as ubiquitous as paper but as instant as digital,” Tymm adds.

“The key security issue lay at the point of redemption, as opposed to the point of issue. i-movo soon realized that utilizing retailers’ existing payment systems was the way forward. As such, we developed and patented the use of card payment industry messaging standards to process these payments forms, which is what all vouchers are.” i-movo, says Tymm, is the only “proven, scalable method of enabling digital vouchers issued by one party (e.g. brand owner) to be accepted by another (e.g. a range of retailers).” This, and two patents in five markets, has allowed the company’s statistics to speak for themselves. i-movo’s vouchers can be used at 60,000

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participating retailers, covering 99.1% of the U.K. population.

The firm has also delivered over 300 successful campaigns and has processed over 10 million vouchers worth over £10 million ($14.6 million). It has also won a raft of industry awards, including Best Cash Initiative at the FS Tech Payments Awards, and Best Use of Mobile Coupons and Vouchers at The Mobile Innovations Awards.

Little wonder, therefore, that despite an aggressive market that includes successful competition such as British neighbor EagleEye, i-movo has carved out a decentsized - and leading edge - chunk for itself.

In fact, as Tymm says: “The principle competition to the i-movo system is wellestablished alternatives. For the consumer goods and publishing sector it is the traditional use of paper vouchers.

“In the payments sector, the competitive landscape is defined by alternative payment instruments that can be used to claim cash, such as Postal Orders issued by the UK Post Office,” he adds. i-movo was entirely bootstrapped by its founders, and as such, with no plans for outside funding, its expansion is limited to the company’s organic growth. However with good profitability and launches planned imminently for Australia and New Zealand, Tymm is sure i-movo will be enjoying success that outstrips even that of its potential-filled market.

In fact, the biggest problem he faces is finding the right employees for his nascent field. “Given the niche nature of our industry it is difficult to recruit candidates with prior industry experience.” It is certainly not the worst-sounding issue a startup will face.

i4drive www.i4drive.com Adi Goren Mobile Tel Aviv, Israel » Last November U.S. telco giant Verizon awarded $6 million to 12 startups using technology to save lives. i4drive was among them. The Jerusalem, Israel-headquartered firm may have been little-known outside its home country until then. But with November’s award in its rearview mirror, the mobile safety venture can fix its sights firmly on an open, and profitable, road. i4drive was founded in 2013 by three experts in different fields, who had the vision to change driving culture and contribute to the fight against accidents worldwide. It is a fight that urgently needs fighting: according to the World Health Organization there were 1.25 million road traffic deaths recorded last year. That represents a statistical plateau. But, adds the agency, “the pace of change is too slow…

Urgent action is needed,” it continues.

Road injuries comprise the ninth-mostcommon cause of death globally, ahead of hyperintensive heart diseases.

Enter i4drive, whose trio of founders were intent on changing road safety. Reuven Ulmansky is a veteran of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) intelligence unit and former senior executive at Intel, Koor Industries and others. David Cohen was an Israeli police commissioner with 30 years of experience on the force. And Adi Goren is a high-tech specialist, certified professional racing driver and volunteer paramedic.

Few were better equipped to found a road safety startup.

“A while ago Adi’s team were called to a scene of a multiple car accidents with

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a number of casualties,” a company spokesperson tells Red Herring. “When they arrived they found one of the injured women still trapped in her car. In her hand was a mobile phone. Adi told her that the phone call she made to 911 rescue services probably saved her life. She replied: “The phone call was the cause of this accident.”

Her words stuck in his mind for years to come.

Today i4drive’s suite of products turn mobile products from in-car distractions to lifesavers, offering real-time warnings and other information. Its software-based system can be integrated in anything from smartphones and onboard entertainment hubs to Blackbox units. It analyzes driver behavior, allowing fleet managers to get “rich and reliable” analytics, “and drivers can improve their driving performance through real-time safety alerts, feedback and coaching,” Ulmansky adds. Each i4drive product can be stand-alone or embedded, with flexible pricing.

Tooled with three patents the company is now looking for Series A funding - mainly in the European and U.S. markets. It faces some competition from ADAS Systems, Blackbox units and UBI apps. But with fans like Verizon pushing its cause, i4drive can be confident of securing the runway it needs to transform driver safety.

And that enthuses Goren, who sees a market opportunity that’s “very, very big.

With so many players in the field such as manufacturers, technology companies, service providers, insurers and more, the potential becomes stronger. “i4drive’s target market is global,” he adds.

“We focus on customers from all around the world. Wherever there are drivers the company will offer its products and expand its operation.”

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Top 100 Companies: Europe

Inango Systems

INMatix

www.inango.com

www.inmatix.com

Jonathan Masel

Ronald van Tiel

Software

Mobile

Kfar-Saba, Israel

Hattem, Netherlands

» Founded in 2010, Inango is based in Kfar-Saba Israel with a subsidiary in Ekaterinburg, Russia. Currently 14 people. Products are softwrae products for residential use, particularly related to communications. Self-funded and profitable. Two main product lines: a stack of residential gateway and management software and an advanced cloud storage product we call the heep. The heep is the main focus of the company today.

Leadership: Jonathan Masel is a very experienced and successful entrepreneur.

Founded and managed two prior companies from start to exit: Inverness Systems (sold to Virata Corp in 2000) and Arabella Software (sold to Entropic Communications in 2006). He is highly experienced in management, leadership and vision and has technical experience in embedded software for communications systems.

» The telematics field is a competitive one indeed. Thankfully, it seems INMatix Technology Group has found the key to unlock its profit potential. The six-year-old startup, located in the eastern Dutch town of Hattem, has been growing quickly ever since it unveiled its high-end telematics platform.

INMatix’s platform is the backbone of its business, and includes functions such as an electronic drivers logbook; live tracking; driver behavior monitoring; messaging; dispatching and geofencing. Other companies may have similar offerings, such as TomTom Telematics, Spireon and Masternaut. But INMatix’s heavy reliance on innovation and a powerfullyexperience staff has helped it rise above the crowd.

“Standard telematics services are very competitive,” Ronald van Tiel tells Red Herring. “INmatix has a strong focus on innovations and is working on several new techniques. At the moment the UDS Remote Diagnostics platform is one of the most comprehensive solutions in the market.”

In addition to its Telematics Platform, INMatix offers a line of remote diagnostics, fleet management software and usagebased insurance (UBI) solutions, that have won it awards such as a Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Netherlands; Dutch Innovation Top 100 and, of course, a Red Herring Top 100 Europe win. Its management team are highly skilled and experienced, and it has managed to win millions of euros of custom without any outside funding to date.

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That is not to say, however, that the company is not seeking investment, which it says could help it grow quickly, and become “the standard platform/solution in UDS remote diagnostics.” Right now INMatix is looking to expand only in Europe. But with revenues doubling in the past two years, that may also change.

The major challenges it faces currently are finding talent and contracting Fortune 500 companies.

Those challenges faced, expect to see INMatix win far more clients, and awards, in the near future.

Intellipocket www.intellipocket.com Markus Grannenfelt Mobile Helsinki, Finland » Intellipocket is a Finnish growth company that makes plastic loyalty and membership cards obsolete with a mobile application. The company’s solution replaces the existing value chain by removing unnecessary intermediaries.

Its branded mobile app boosts sales and creates proved cost savings and its mobile app reaches and activates customers better than a traditional plastic card – it goes wherever the customer goes and works on 95% of mobile phones. In addition, the solution guides the customers effectively from online to bricks-and-mortar stores.

The application is suited to all – also to small and mid-sized enterprises, to whom the company offers a selfservice solution to digitizing customer relationship management and marketing.

Intellipocket has delivered more than one million mobile apps to more than 3,000 different (brand, model, version) mobile

Top 100 Companies: Europe

phones in E.U. and Asia. The solution is based on proprietary technology, which is protected by patents and design patents.

The company has 4 granted patents and 20+ pending applications.

Leadership: Markus Grannenfelt is a serial entrepreneur with 17 years of experience in marketing, marketing communications and digital media. Grannenfelt has university degree (Hanken School of Economics) in marketing. Grannenfelt is a specialist in marketing originated sales.

Grannenfelt founded digital advertising agency WhiteSheep and sold it to LSE listed Aegis/Isobar Network back in 2009.

Before Intellipocket Grannenfelt worked in Dentsu Aegis as a CEO of Finnish digital branch and CEO as South African digital branch. Markus was recruited from South Africa to lead Intellipocket into international success story.

Interworks www.interworkscloud.com Vassilis Zografos Cloud Computing Thessaloniki, Greece » Interworks, based in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, has already cornered its domestic market in helping companies kick-start their cloud business. Now the company is looking abroad. It already has over 1,000 end customers, and 56 partners in six countries. But with an aim to finding a strategic investor, which will help it venture further afield, roll out in the E.U., U.S., Latin American and APAC markets and develop local ecosystems, the firm is looking towards a big 2016.

Founded in 2001 by a team of software engineers, Interworks quickly established itself as a lead local player in cloud services

distribution by making it easy for IT companies to jump-start their businesses in the cloud. Now with offices in Athens and London, the firm has achieved a dominant Greek position “by creating the largest distribution network of cloud resellers, who are already servicing over 400 SMBs,” the company told Red Herring.

The company faces stiff competition in the form of IngramMicro, which recently acquired Odin’s service automation platform from Parallels Holdings, and San Francisco’s Appdirect. But, explained the company, “as Interworks.cloud platform is delivered online via a fully automated provisioning process, a customer is set up in a matter of hours, as opposed to weeks or months for competitive solutions.”

That means Interworks can cater to all scales of companies easily and swiftly, giving it the edge to expand even further. “Unlike competitors, Interworks’ business model relies on monetizing the Interworks.cloud platform value features, not on brokering margins,” the spokesperson added. “No other player lets cloud distributors expand their reach instantly, like Interworks does.”

It is a successful time for Interworks. As well as the company’s expansion out of Greece, which is seeing a promising startup ecosystem despite economic problems, it reached revenues of $2.1million last year, which it hopes will attract a heavyweight investor keen to capitalize on a total addressable market Interworks calculates at somewhere around $29.4 billion thanks to European and U.S. cloud computing spending. And that’s not to mention the average SMB spending through cloud distributors, which was $7.05 billion in the U.S. and $4.61 billion in Europe, in 2015.

“For 2016 solely, we aim on penetrating 14 more countries in Europe,” the spokesperson added. “For the next three years we target on continuing the U.S. and E.U. market rollout.” With glowing customer reviews across their market regions, Interworks is set to have a very good 15th year of service indeed. “The Interworks Cloud Platform, in addition to professional

and expeditious support, helped us strengthen our position as a market leader in delivering highly professional cloud services to our business customers,” said Metronet Communication’s Sanjin Katinic.

With Interworks, the cloud has never been closer.

INVEA-TECH www.invea.com Dr. Rostislav Vocilka Security Brno, Czech Republic » INVEA-TECH is a university spin-off and international vendor (manufacturer & producer) of network and security solutions specialized in flow monitoring (NetFlow/ IPFIX), network Behavior Analysis NBA, FPGA acceleration, IP DR and LI. Since the foundation in 2007, the main focus is on delivering high performance solutions with the best price/performance/ user experience ratio on the market. With over 500 satisfied customers (T-Mobile, HP, AVG, Ministries of Defense, Siemens, Saab or Allianz) and award in Deloitte Technology Fast 50 in CE, INVEA-TECH is the leader in a flow monitoring & NBA market which is considered by Gartner as the next generation network security trend complementing and enhancing legacy security products such as firewall and IDS/ IPS. Leadership: Dr. Vocilka received his RNDr. degree in mathematics and physics at Masaryk University in 1984 and CSc. degree in electro technics at Brno University of Technology in 1993. He has been working in ICT for more than 25 years, last 15 years in CEO positions (crisis manager, organizational change manager, general director). He has built or merged several companies for several investors, for example E Linkx, Dileris, A&A or

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AGORA Plus. He was responsible for the development of local or international business activities in all of these companies with focus on building the B2B channel. Dr. Vocilka was appointed by the investor and founders of INVEA-TECH to build and manage the company. He was responsible for the transfer of technologies from Masaryk University, Brno University of Technology and CESNET (Czech Education and Scientific NETwork) into INVEA-TECH. Under his leadership, INVEA-TECH has significantly increased its revenues and successfully expands to foreign countries.

IXcellerate www.ixcellerate.com Guy Willner Data Centers London, United Kingdom » Opened in 2012, IXcellerate Moscow One is a leading independent carrierneutral datacenter. IXcellerate offers IT outsourcing services ranging from pure colocation to cloud-based solutions (IaaS, SaaS). The Moscow One facility is set on a 15741 sqm secure stand-alone campus in a building with over 6,000sqm of usable space and project power of 13.7 MVA. Technical characteristics of IXcellerate’s officially certified facility meet the highest world standards, and comply with Tier 3 datacenter specification issued by the Telecommunication Industry Association

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in its TIA-942 standard. IXcellerate provides clients with a bespoke solution aimed towards solving their unique datacenter requirements, offering colocation services, including private and secure cages, combined with remote hands technical support 24/365.

Leadership: Guy Willner has over 20 years’ experience in the technology industry. In 1998 he cofounded IXEurope, a market leader in data center operations. It was later purchased by Equinix for $555 million.

After gaining industry experience Willner started to explore Emerging Markets and created IXcellerate. His is known for his charisma, “out of the box” thinking and deep understanding of the market and sector.

As a CEO of IXEurope he raised approximately $100 million in venture capital and the company’s revenue grew over 600% in its first three years. Prior to founding IXEurope, Willner worked for Compagnie Generale des Eaux (now Vivendi Group) between 1992 and 1998 both in the U.K. and in Hungary establishing a telecommunications operator culminating in $210 million in EBRD funding.

He began his career with Philips NV in Paris and Vienna, working in CDROM, Smart Card and Minitel technologies.

Prior to being sold to Permira in February 2015, Willner was a Non Executive Director of Teraco Data Environments, a South African based data center. He currently holds a Non Executive Director post at Lamda Hellix in Athens.

Iyzico www.iyzico.com Barbaros Özbugutu Internet/Online Istanbul, Turkey » Iyzico aims to create the easiest and most secure way for businesses of all sizes to accept online payments. Through added benefits like subscriptions, fraud prevention tools and one click integration, Iyzico is one of the most sophisticated and user-friendly payment platforms in the MENA region. Iyzico’s API platform connect 22 banks and payment companies with over 850 merchants, enabling merchants to accept online payments in the easiest and safest manner. İyzico’s primary products—IyziConnect and IyziCollect— allow its merchants to receive and collect payments via their own websites, offering a number of features that differentiate it from its competitors.

The first product, IyziCollect, targets startups and e-commerce firms that lack a payment infrastructure by providing a ready-to-use platform that already has contracts and licenses set up with banks.

The second product, IyziConnect, targets larger merchants with a more sophisticated payment platform, enabling subscriptions, recurring payments and one-click checkouts. Both products support multiple currencies and allow for one click checkout in order to increase the conversion rate of merchants. Iyzico also offers complex fraud filters and PCI-DSS certification.

Top 100 Companies: Europe

Most of the company’s clients are businesses in e-commerce, gaming and services though the company has also successfully partnered with major international clients outside these industries, such as IBM and BMW, to provide customized solutions.

Leadership: Barbaros Serdar Özbugutu, CEO of İyzico, has more than ten years of experience working for global companies in the payment and telecommunications industries. In 2005 Özbugutu began working for FIRSTDATA, the global market leader in credit card processing, where he set up a new direct sales unit based on telesales—single-handedly generating 50% of the company’s revenue in 2009.

Afterward he moved to KLARNA, leading European alternative payments company.

He built Klarna’s Germany’s business from scratch –72 FTE and 500M Euro in transactions within 2.5 years. During this time he established three new offices while creating a unique office culture that won him the “KLARNA Best Office Culture Award”.

Jahia Solutions Group www.jahia.com Elie Auvray Software Geneva, Switzerland » Jahia is an emerging open-source software vendor focusing on delivering an innovative digital platform based on its

avant-garde vision of convergence between Web Content Management (“WCM”), Document Management System (“DMS”) and application integration (portal) which perfectly positions Jahia as the best challenger to the most established vendors on the emerging java-based User Experience Platform (“UXP”) Market.

Recognized as a precursor with strong credentials and credible international distribution, the company, with operations in France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and North America, is in an ideal position to deliver superior growth.

Leadership: Elie Auvray, Co-Founder and CEO of Jahia Solutions Group SA, is a seasoned software entrepreneur with nearly 20 years in the industry. He founded his first software company, Voice, at age 22 to pioneer easy-to-use web applications with Vivendi Group as their first customer; in 1999, it merged with a company of the former President EMA of Cisco to create a global software provider, Reef Internetware. As General Manager for Reef France, Auvray’s initiative resulted in exceeding sales objectives for seven consecutive quarters, built the first U.S. sales team in San Francisco and led the Europe Presales organization which developed the company’s Partners network.

Reef successfully raised 85 million euros from international venture capitalists and the company was finally acquired by Mediasurface in 2002.

Auvray has a Master of Business & Tax Law from the University of Paris 2 (Panthéon Assas), a Masters Degree in Contract Law, Major in IT Contract from the University of Paris 5 (René Descartes) and is a graduate from the Business Law Institute (IDA) of the University of Paris 2.

jClarity www.jclarity.com Martijn Verburg Cloud Computing London, United Kingdom » If experience is what great startups are built upon, then jClarity is worth every bit of its growth to date. The London firm, founded in 2012, was created by three founders with 40 years of performance issue-solving experience behind them.

The trio realized that those performance issues were hiding “a scientific methodology which could be automated and scaled in software,” CEO Martjin Verburg tells Red Herring, after his company’s Top 100 Europe win. jClarity breaks ahead of its competition thanks to machine learningdriven analytics that “utilize kilobytes of data where others use gigabytes, therefore making it very lightweight,” he adds.

That competition comprises esteemed firms such as New Relic, App Dynamics, Riverbed and Oracle. But jClarity’s intelligent, lightweight solutions are winning a hefty client base that it hopes to increase - in breadth and size - in the next 18 months.

The company’s inception was not on the cloud, nor any digital format at all, but instead print. In 2012 Verburg and cofounder Ben Evans had just completed their first book, The Well-Grounded Java Developer. With some good reviews in hand the pair knew they wanted to, according to the firm’s website, “build

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something that would truly change the Java/JVM landscape.”

With that in mind Evans and Verburg contacted Kirk Pepperdine, a near-20year veteran of the high performance and distributed computing fields. The trio had spent many years debating Java and JVM on the conference circuit. Pepperdine invited them to teach his world-renowned performance tuning course, and shortly after the three of them contacted Moss (Mosimann; jClarity’s CFO and a 20-year financial services and capital markets executive) to help them put jClarity together and offer a guiding hand. jClarity now offers two products. Census is an intelligent tool that takes log files and from the Java/JVM garbage collection sub-system and gives users meaningful answers. Illuminate, meanwhile, is a performance diagnostic engine that tells users not only what problems are, but how to fix them. Both have a free trial option, and both have been helping jClarity win a portion of a market opportunity Gartner values at between $8 billion and $10 billion globally. “jClarity’s Illuminate shortens time to issue resolution by eliminating entire classes of issues,” says Paul Dale, principle architect at Elemica. “Instead of spending hours manually eliminating possible causes we can quickly zero in on the real cause of the problem.”

The biggest challenge jClarity currently faces, according to Verburg, is “getting larger clients to take the perceived risk of working with a startup,” while he hopes that his firm will soon realize more than $1 million in recurring yearly revenue.

With banks of expertise on hand, and a Red Herring Top 100 award in hand, it shouldn’t be long before that goal is realized.

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Kompyte www.kompyte.com Pere Codina Cloud Computing Barcelona, Spain » Pere Codina and Albert Colmenero were students in 2006, when they started their first company. The pair developed software for firms, but quickly realized most of them had real problems when handling competitors’ online activity. One of Codina’s and Colmenero’s most loyal customers’ sales dipped 30% in just one week - just because one of his competitors had changed a banner offering free shipping.

“Such a small change and yet such catastrophic consequences,” says Codina today. From then on, it became their mission to solve this business pain. Then, a revelation: what if they could track all their clients’ competitors and all in one place?

By realizing their competitors moves on time, they would be able to adapt their offering faster.

Joining forces with Sergio, Kompyte’s IT genius, Codina and Colmenero developed in six months what should have taken years to achieve: a powerful competitive intelligence software (CIS) platform using AI and Big Data.

Ten years on they are co-founders of Kompyte, a Barcelona-based competitive intelligence (CI) software that has been winning plenty of attention at home and abroad for its deep analysis. Compote’s SaaS platform “tracks and analyzes all your competitors’ online activity in real-time,” says Codina. “Kompyte’s users don’t have

to waste time checking their competitors’ updates manually. “Kompyte visits competitors’ websites, advertisements, social profiles, newsletters, and much more, and users get alerted every time they have a new feature, change pricing, launch a new campaign, enter a new market or a new player breaks into the scene,” he adds.

Codina is under no illusions as to his firm’s ambitions: it has barely been extant 18 months and Kompyte has managed to accrue hundreds of clients and $514,000 in two funding rounds from investors like Rose Tech Ventures and Alantis Capital.

Another financing round is due this year, adds Codina, who stresses that this year will be one of “learning the most from every single user,” as well as building margins.

“Since May 2015, when we launched Kompyte in the U.S., hundreds of companies and we’re growing over 30% month over month by adding tens of new customers to our active customer base every month, and we expect to keep growing according to our plans during 2016,” he says.

Growth should reap considerable awards too, considering that there are over 120 million companies selling online in different industries worldwide. Sooner or later, Codina says, each will face fierce competition in their online channels.

“Now, as every single startup, Kompyte is leveraging the traction provided by its early adopters, most of them in computer software, tech and e-Commerce industries,” he adds. “However, while other industries’ competitive scenes move their epicenters to the Internet, online competitor tracking software will become a basic need for any single company, emerging Kompyte as the leader in the category.”

Top 100 Companies: Europe

Lantia www.lantia.com Enrique Parrilla Entertainment & Media Seville, Spain » Lantia is a software and technology company that is turning the publishing industry upside down by optimizing and accelerating the processes required to bring books to market through the use of big data, patent-pending algorithms and Internet technologies that connect authors, distributors, bookstores, and readers.

Lantia has launched and maintains several unique tools that provide functionality so revolutionary that companies such as McGraw-Hill or author Paulo Coelho have forever changed the way they do business and interact with the publishing industry.

Lantia enables large corporations to greatly reduce costs and increase efficiency while making it possible for a single individual to run a publishing company and produce both print and ebooks with little more than access to Lantia through a web browser.

Its core product, the Lantia´s White Label publishing platform provides workflow and quality control along with management and reporting of multiple sales channels across worldwide markets through a single control panel that automatically calculates and distributes royalties, commissions, costs, and profits.

The company also operates Pentian, a books-only multilingual crowdfunding tool; Liberis, the first all-digital book production center in Southern Europe; ebl.com, a subscription service that offers unlimited access to the books

in its collection; DRMSocial, which unburdens users from useless current DRM technologies, and Libros.cc, which empowers bookstores.

Leadership: CTO and president of Lantia, Enrique Parrilla is an alumnus of the University of Houston, where he studied electrical and computer engineering and specialized in internet topology and cryptography. While still in college he joined Luminant Worldwide Corp in 1999 as a technical architect and senior business analyst where he assisted Fortune 500 companies such as Dell, AT&T, Hilton, IBM, KPN, Reliant Energy, BP, Sprint, Enron, HP/Compaq and others in launching their first large-scale internet operations.

Two years later he started his own firm specializing in the integration of large disconnected silos of information into single meaningful systems that provided commerce and business intelligence for oil field service companies, energy delivery operations, and health care institutions.

This practice, which later became known as “big data”, proved to be crucial knowledge and expertise when a decade later he decided to apply it to the publishing industry and the challenges it faces as it shifts its paradigm.

Parrilla sits on the board of numerous companies that have implemented some of his systems or patents in the telecommunications, M2M, energy delivery, and retail industries. He splits his time between his Pentian offices in Santa Monica, California and Lantia´s headquarters in Seville, Spain. He has been featured as a speaker in several events including the Frankfurt Book fair where he debated the head of the Creativity Unit of the European Union.

Lendstar www.lendstar.io Christopher Kampshoff Mobile Starnberg, Germany » Germany has seen a recent boom in fintech. Among it is Lendstar, a Munichbased social finance app with which users can lend, share and send money alongside a host of social features. The company, which was founded in 2013 as a peer-topeer transfer app, has quickly won praise from tech media, including a Best Finance App of 2014 by Android magazine.

Last September the company won its biggest publicity - and a fair bit of investment - when it appeared on Lion’s Den, Germany’s version of Shark Tank (or Dragon’s Den, for U.K. readers). Jochen Schweizer, extreme sports entrepreneur and one of the show’s ‘lions’, decided to invest €250,000 ($284,000) for a 6.14% share in Lendstar.

“The founders of Lendstar convinced me from the beginning,” said Schweizer. “They simplify the organization and financial management, for example a gathering for an experience gift, for between two or more people, more clearly.”

“We were naturally tense and excited,” said CEO Christopher Kampshoff after the show. But overall, he added, the company is happy with its product - and believes it is at the start of a fintech curve that is sweeping across Europe.

Lendstar, which is available in German and English on iOS and Android, allows users to perform all of its functions in real-time.

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It is also able to organize one-to-many transactions, which the company says are one of the most complex things to get right with such products. “This adds a true viral component to Lendstar,” a company spokesperson told Red Herring. “We allow immediate money transactions, no hassle to chase your savings.”

Germany is emerging as one of fintech’s global centers. In total there are over 200 fintech firms in the country, with key players including the likes of Paypal, as well as Berlin upstarts Number26 and Cookies.

Munich might not be as well-known abroad as Silicon Allee when it comes to churning out successful tech firms, but with an abundance of investment capital available, and some of the continent’s best technical universities, playing host to companies with the profile of Lendstar will soon become commonplace.

In total Kampshoff and co have raised $2.19 million across three rounds, from three investors including Schweizer. The other two in its capital triumvirate are DvH Ventures, of Cologne, and Munich’s own Lunar Europe. Thus far Lendstar is a domestic affair. But with that backing, and the app gaining traction at home, Kampshoff wants the next 18 months to include an expansion to the European and global marketplaces.

In Germany alone the company sees a potential of 59 million peer-to-peer transactions, and the global market is huge. There is plenty to be cheerful about at Lendstar HQ: “Solve your financial needs where they take place, in real life, for real-life issues.”

LeukoDx www.leukodx.com Julien Meissonnier Life Sciences/Biotech Jerusalem, Israel » Founding a company through a NASA program is a surefire way to excel at the technical things. LeukoDx has taken that expertise and run with it. Now, the company is hoping to go into orbit.

The Jerusalem-founded firm began when the U.S. space agency was looking to develop a compact device that would perform red and white blood cell counts, and white blood cell differential analysis, during space missions.

“The original project partners in the NASA-funded project, Caltech and IRIS International, licensed the technology to LeukoDx exclusively in September 2009,” Julien Meissonnier, president and CEO of LeukoDx tells Red Herring. “Dr. Harvey Kasdan, the co-investigator for the NASAsponsored contracts, co-inventor on the in-licensed IP and Chief Scientist at IRIS until mid-2007, is a founder and the CTO of LeukoDx. “While the original NASA project work was centered on red blood cell/white blood cell counting and white blood cell differential analysis, the LeukoDx platform has broad capabilities and many potential fields of application,” he adds. “The current application is based on cell surface marker analysis.”

LeudoDx’s platform, Accellix CD64 Assay, is a significant advance in the automation of flow cytometry (that is, tech employed in cell counting, cell sorting, biomarker detection and protein engineering by means of suspending cells in a stream of fluid and passing them by an electronic detection apparatus).

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The company, which has thus far attracted almost $17.5 million of funding, hopes its solution can be used for widespread clinical diagnostic applications. Right now flow cytometry technology is used primarily for research, with only 20% of use slated for diagnostics. That, Meissonnier says, should change.

“Standard blood culture takes two to three days for results and, therefore, cannot influence therapeutic decision-making,” he adds. “Routinely used biomarkers of infection and sepsis lack sensitivity and specificity. Recently developed methods such as PCR and mass spectrometry are used for pathogen identification generally following blood culture. These methods are expensive and take too long to get results and, therefore, are not suitable for monitoring.”

The company has a strong IP portfolio which consists of five patent families one granted, four pending - and four exclusively licensed patents, all of which have been granted. It joins a number of other Red Herring Top 100 winners in being a part of the now-famed Israeli biotech community, which is one of the world’s leading domestic tech sectors.

There is a large market opportunity at stake, too: for Accellix CD64 Assay, the company sees $500 million in the U.S. and E.U. alone, while a planned expansion to the pipeline of the product will see the total opportunity rise to around double that.

Competition is tight with players such as Becton, Dickinson and Beckman Coulter all involved in the field. But LeukoDx wants to secure a $15-20 million Series B round soon, to fund commercial launch of Accellix CD64 Assay towards the end of this year. “Proceeds will also be used to complete development of the Accellix CD64 Assay in the U.S., with projected FDA clearance and market launch in late 2017,” says Meissonnier.

Little wonder that Meissonnier is upbeat about his firm’s future chances: “It is an exciting time for LeukoDx as we are just

Top 100 Companies: Europe

moving for product development and regulatory approvals to market launch in Europe, we are excited to start having an impact on people’s life in the Intensive Care Units.” LeukoDx may have originated as something out of this world. But its sights are firmly focused on global success.

Limes Audio www.limesaudio.com Dr. Fredric Lindström Software

mind, deep market insight, technology know-how, optimistic approach to life with excellent team building skills. This has allowed him to both drive the innovation of technology as well as build a super strong team of A-players.

To Lindström, Limes Audio is a large part of his life, but he also enjoys spending time with family and friends and outdoor activity in particular the downhill skiing.

Lindström earned a Master of Science in Applied Physics from Uppsala University in 2001 and a Ph. D. with Dissertation title: Digital Signal Processing for Audio Conferencing Systems in 2007, from Blekinge Institute of Technology.

Umeå, Sweden » Limes Audio are experts in echo cancellation and noise reduction, and are all about creating the perfect audio experience. The company develops technology that makes speakerphones sound better, without echoes, noise and other unwanted artifacts.

Limes Audio’s software TrueVoice is a patented and proven solution, which provides outstanding performance while minimizing audible artifacts in audio communication systems. The company can provide a part, or a complete solution, tailored for different customer needs.

The technology brings reliable voice communication through a crystal clear sound, and the firm’s goal is to become the number one provider of audio conferencing technology in this booming market.

Limes Audio was founded 2007 based on academic research in the field of acoustic echo cancellation and noise reduction, conducted by Fredric Lindström and Christian Schüldt, both holding Ph.D. degrees in Applied Signal Processing from Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden.

Ever since then, Limes Audio has been all about perfect audio.

Leadership: Fredric Lindström is a true entrepreneur, he combines an innovative

Mapz.com www.mapz.com Tim Kober Entertainment & Media Koln, Germany » Cologne, Germany-based outfit mapz.com recently stumbled upon a cartographical conundrum: a lot of companies were using maps daily for their products, or for their marketing communications. Trouble was, a lot of these companies - from travel guides and real estate firms to newspapers - make their money not only online: a huge number of their publications need to be printed as well. If they use Google Maps, they can’t print them.

“The quality is bad,” CEO Tim Kober tells Red Herring, after the company’s Top 100 victory. “And licensing is difficult. If they use traditional maps, they are nice to print, but they are not interactive at all.”

Step in mapz, which created an API that gives users the detail, customizability and printability they couldn’t get anywhere else. After five years of development and

bootstrapping by Krober, the company got off the ground - and has been winning clients up and down Germany, from Humboldt Travel to the German Swimming Pool Federation. The latter’s Dieter C. Rangol praised mapz.com’s “rapid, easy access to professionally designed location maps… for websites, brochures and catalogs.”

“A lot of these companies use both kind of maps,” adds Kober. “Interactive maps for online use and static maps for print.

So they produce them twice! We thought that‘s crazy. It is not efficient and it is expensive. So we did intense research and development to find a solution. And we did.

“The mapz-API will enable you to integrate maps with metadata into websites and applications - in screen resolution or retina resolution,” he says. “This is what Google Maps does just as well. But with the mapzPrint API, you can automatically retrieve high resolution files of your interactive online maps in PNG, JPG, PDF and editable EPS file formats and easily integrate them into any print workflow.

“All subsequent products will retrieve an updated map on the fly - just by using the same parameters once again. If your POI database changed in the meantime, the POIs will be updated automatically as well. In comparison to manual editing the team play of API and Print-API facilitates a significant cost reduction for the initial production and all following production.”

Kobe admits that in mapz’ niche market it has competition from MapBox and CartoDB. “But they do not focus on our target group and technology.” With revenues totally $500,000, and a market opportunity Kober calculates at around $65 million, there is plenty of scope for expansion - especially if his charges can, as he wishes, grow the brand internationally and spread beyond Germany.

And that, Kober says, would allow mapz to grow - and perhaps to win some funding with which to do so. At that point, there’d be as much chance of mapz getting lost as its users. www.REDHERRING.com

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Medigoo

MentAd

www.medigoo.com

www.mentad.com

Dr. Mika Karilahti

Yuval Baror

Internet/Online

Marketing/Advertising

Helsinki, Finland

Tel Aviv, Israel

» Medigoo Oy Inc. was established in 2007 in Helsinki, Finland. The company provides free online health and medical information for consumers, and has a repository of thousands of pages of health and medical information. The user can type in search words and get a list of the best matching articles for the search words.

The user can then open the articles to see the details of the condition. Medigoo will next start selling home medical diagnostic devices and test kits.

Leadership: Dr. Mika Karilahti has wide technical and business management experience working at Nokia and Samsung for over 15 years. Doctor of Science in Technology degree from Helsinki University of Technology in 2003.

Working on getting the Doctor’s Degree in Economics at Aalto University Helsinki School of Economics. Visiting Scholar at MIT for 6 months during y.2008-2009.

Partner in several past and present startup companies such as Mediadrive web hosting, Frozenbyte games, TactoTek touch panels.

» “Your next customer will similar to the last,” says Tel Aviv’s MentAd, which has been winning considerable attention across the world for its cutting edge predictive analytics platform.

Like so many firms coming out of the bountiful Israeli tech scene, MentAd, which is also based in Palo Alto, California, makes expert use of the wealth of Big Data today. What’s unique is the way it is used.

Using a crack team of scientists of marketing experts MentAd has developed a platform that identifies potential new customers by collecting first-party data from a client and developing a detailed customer profile along with information from social networks, information in public data depositories and acquired third-party data.

“Just as in every sector of business, there are rarely innovations that are new - only companies that perform better and excel at customer retention,” Daniel Romano, MentAd co-founder and CEO, told Red Herring.

“Like competitors, MentAd analyzes companies’ big data in order to better understand customer demographics and retention,” he adds. “However, unlike the platforms that focus primarily on internal historic data, MentAd also analyzes thirdparty data in real-time, which immediately detects when a specific campaign stops performing and suggests new targets eliminating ineffective, budget-busting campaigns.”

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Romano came to MentAd with a history in online performance advertising, and managing millions of dollars in budgets.

His co-founder Yuval Baror, on the other hand, is versed in Big Data, machine learning and leading engineering teams.

The pair met through their wives, who are childhood friends, and spoke plenty before realizing there might be a company in their shared passions for startups and technology.

That was in 2011. Now, five years later, Romano and Baror have built a success from scratch - and they’ve found backers to the tune of $4.7 million across two investment rounds - the latest of which came last June courtesy of Blumberg Capital and OurCrowd.

MentAd is certainly competing in a crowded sphere, with firms such as Custora, Emarsys and Retention Science hot on their heels. And Romano bemoans an industry “full of companies saying that they can do things that they actually can’t and this noise makes it difficult for smaller companies to get the attention of the big players.

“Still,” he adds, “every time we get the chance to meet a big potential customer we go home with a signed deal.”

Each trip is another small slice of a pie worth some $60 billion in the U.S., as digital retailers take control of the advertising industry. And looking ahead, Romano sees potential in expansion out of MentAd’s established customer bases.

“While we already haven’t international presence with offices in the U.S. and Israel, expanding our reach to other markets such as South America and Europe is a definite must,” he says. “Businesses in every country should have capability of analyzing big data in real-time, in order to maximize customer acquisition and should not be limited by geographic location.”

Top 100 Companies: Europe

Midaxo www.midaxo.com Kaija Katariina Erkkilä Cloud Computing Helsinki, Finland » Mergers and acquisitions can be messy business, with so much information to integrate and systems to organize. Midaxo, which was founded five years ago in the Finnish capital of Helsinki, is a one-stopshop to alleviate and simplify M&As, which can border of chaos without a smooth workflow.

Midaxo’s management is brimming with expertise in the fields of M&A, as well as a variety of other related, and vital, sectors.

Co-founder Kaija Erkkilä is a veteran of the M&A field, have coached, lectured and even penned books in her 30-year career.

She has held senior sales, marketing and general executive roles in large medical devices companies in the US and Europe.

Her co-founder, Kalle Kilpi, is a successful software entrepreneur, founder of Aspida Ltd, and a co-founder of the related company Tilaajavastuu Oy, which has over 30,000 customers. Kalle specializes in product management, customer experience management, and developing associated services.

Together the pair have developed a B2B, cloud platform that aims to redress an alarming fact: that 70% of M&A deals fail to meet their intended objectives. Those failures are often attributed to issues with the underlying process and supporting tools, according to Erkkilä. “With Midaxo’s cloud-based M&A platform, buy-side M&A professionals drive disciplined and repeatable processes that ensure systematic deal evaluation, avoid risks, capture synergies earlier, improve execution efficiency, and achieve cost savings,”

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she adds. “It includes all tools M&A professionals need to manage their M&A.” The first wave of M&A software players emerged in the 90s, and for the most part the market has stayed similar, with many companies losing some of their flexibility and agility. Not so Midaxo, whose user interface is simple to learn, and whose “applicability across other processes makes it unique.”

Customers, it seems, are glowing. “We have a detailed M&A process with many stages and looked for a tool to fit,” Sergio E. Letelier, of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said. “We found Midaxo and discovered how flexible it is to configure to our needs.

We have launched Midaxo full speed and use it as our single platform for managing M&A transactions.

“There is no tool that compares to Midaxo in terms of ease of use and user-friendly interface.”

Investment, too, has been forthcoming. In March 2015 Midaxo raised $1.7 million from Finnvera, Hiidenkivi Investment, and other private investors. They have recognized Midaxo’s growth, which reached 400% in 2015, and a market opportunity that is huge. “In 2015, there were 100,000 M&A transactions in the world, worth about $5 trillion,” says Erkkilä. “Overall, the market to support these transactions with technology is well over $1 billion, with 30% growth. For example, the virtual data room market, that can 75% be replaced by Midaxo, was approximately $1 billion in 2015.”

With that in mind, the company is seeking rapid expansion in 2016. From its current focus on the US and western European markets, Midaxo is looking to move into Asia, particularly Japan and China. The company’s demand generation, sales, and customer success teams are all based in the U.S. now, while HQ and development are in Helsinki and Riga, Latvia respectively.

With that firm base, this year could be a big one of growth for Midaxo.

Mistral Mobile www.mistralmobile.com Ludwig Schulze Mobile Oulu, Finland » Mistral Mobile solutions unleashes mobile devices for secure use in banking, payments and commerce. Mistral Mobile’s market-proven mobile front-end solutions are used by retail, issuing and acquiring banks and other financial service providers to offer secure and flexible solutions to rapidly introduce mobile payments, mobile banking and mobile authentication services independent of mobile operators and for all mobile phones, from smart to simple phones.

The company was founded by former Nokia Money leaders who believe in both the commercial and socio-economic benefits of mobile financial services globally.

Mistral Mobile is privately held with offices in New York City, USA, Finland and India.

Leadership: Ludwig Schulze has held executive roles in mobile and enterprise software companies and was a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group. Prior to founding Mistral Mobile, Schulze was General Manager for Nokia’s Mobile Financial Services global business activities.

Lu Schulze dwig holds a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University and a Masters of Business Administration from Columbia University.

Top 100 Companies: Europe

MOBGEN www.mobgen.com Ron Vrijmoet Mobile

Officer Europe for JWT/WPP, a global marketing services firm. Prior to the COO role, Vrijmoet worked internationally for WPP in Asia, UK, Nordics and Germany on the (digital) marketing activities of international brands like Unilever, Vodafone, Shell and Bosch.

To make this happen MOBGEN specializes in IT-systems & software for mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets. The company has chosen this specialization because ‘mobile’ has fast become the most important digital channel in people’s life.

With more than 100 mobile specialists working from four locations, Amsterdam, London, Singapore and A Coruña, MOBGEN helps companies to become more efficient, customer oriented and competitive by making the best use of the mobile channel in the B2C, B2E and B2B area.

The services that MOBGEN provides include: Mobile strategy, UI/UX design, usability testing, system architecture, system-development & integration, mobile portal development (native, hybrid, html5), quality assurance and run, maintain and analytics of mobile platforms. In addition, MOBGEN provides SAAS-based mobilesolutions for retail CRM & loyalty, salesenhancement and (private) banking.

Leadership: Ron Vrijmoet is co-founder and Managing Partner of MOBGEN, one of Europe’s leading mobile solution specialists.

www.muvinteractive.com Rami Parham Consumer Electronics

Amsterdam, Netherlands » MOBGEN delivers mobile platforms that strengthen the relationship between customers and brands as well as companies and their own staff. The company aims to make mobile interaction easy, engaging and rewarding, so that users become loyal and life-long brand-ambassadors and staff more efficient.

MUV Interactive

Moovly www.moovly.com Brendon Grunewald Cloud Computing Diegem, Belgium » Moovly is a cloud-based online digital media content creation platform. What does this mean? It means that you only need a browser and internet access to make fantastic mixed media content for a wide spectrum of purposes from impressing friends, family or employers to growing your business or educating young minds.

The company was founded in 2013 when Geert Coppens and Brendon Grunewald realized that video is a superior communication format but users and businesses lacked an intuitive and affordable solution to make great videos. Equipped with years of experience in bespoke custom video creation and e-learning, they developed the base technology that allows powerful mixing and sharing of pictures, sounds, animations and video.

Leadership: Brendon Grunewald is a serial Entrepreneur with venture experience and a large international network.

Herzliya, Israel » MUV Interactive is a wearable solutions company, developing technology to provide accurate 3D location and motion sensing, and enable intuitive and natural interaction with the surrounding digital environment.

MUV delivers an advanced and innovative wearable device that simply fits on the user’s index finger.

Intuitive interaction with displayed content is achieved from anywhere in the room, with revolutionary technology that aggregates the entire spectrum of interactive techniques: Touch, Remote Control, Depth Sensing, Gesture Control, Mouse Functionality, Voice Commands, and even a Laser pointer.

MUV provides users with the true ability to own the room from the tip of the finger.

Leadership: Rami Parham began privately as a game developer where he first realized the importance of interaction between users and their content. After graduating from the Technion Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Management and Engineering (Magna Cum Laude), he began his professional career as the information technology manager at Systematics Inc., going back to his core, Parham moved on to found MUV Interactive in 2010 where he is creating the next generation of human sensing technologies.

Prior to the launch of MobGen in January 2009, Vrijmoet was Chief Operating www.REDHERRING.com

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Top 100 Companies: Europe

Netstream

Numberly

www.netstream.com

www.numberly.com

Alexis Caceda

Yseulys Costes

Telecommunications

Marketing/Advertising

Dübendorf, Switzerland

Paris, France

» Netstream was founded in 1998 by Alexis Caceda, Reto Kasser and Dominik Breitenmoser. Since then the company has seen steady growth. Starting out as a classic hosting provider, today Netstream offers a wide range of services and technical solutions. Over ten years after its founding Netstream is focusing its services in its three business categories: solutions provider in the telecommunications industry, Business ISP, and the B2C sector. Netstream employs a staff of over 70.

Leadership: Alexis Caceda is CEO and cofounder of Netstream. The company was founded in 1998 and has since grown into one of the leading telecommunications provider for business customers in Switzerland. Over 25,000 customers benefit from the services offered by the company in the areas of Internet, fixed and mobile telephony, hosting, security, streaming and wholesale solutions. Netstream provided services include hosting solutions for Lync, Exchange, Web, Sharepoint, Database and Online Backup. All services are hosted on servers in Switzerland.

» Numberly is part of the 1000mercis group.

1000mercis pioneered the interactive-data marketing revolution with its award-winning solutions for companies willing to optimize their customer acquisition and retention through online media and platforms (internet, mobile devices, social media and RTB CRM displays). 1000mercis has become a major player on the market by combining the acquisition of new clients with the successful management of customer loyalty.

With strong investments in research and a scientific counsel composed of prestigious professors, 1000mercis constantly aims at proposing its customers top innovations and new products.

Created in 2000, 1000mercis employs 300 people worldwide and its annual turnover soared to €40.30 million in 2013. A third of global sales came from Ocito, its mobilemarketing subsidiary. Based in London (UK), Paris (France), New York and San Francisco (USA), as well as Dubai (UAE), 1000mercis operates in more than 30 countries; 1000mercis is a NYSE Alternextlisted company.

Leadership: Yseulys Costes’ profile combines a research and academic background with a deep sense of entrepreneurship.

Costes is a graduate of the “Magistère de Sciences de Gestion” and has a Masters in Marketing and Strategy from the University of Paris IX Dauphine. She discovered the internet in 1995 while studying for an MBA at the Robert O. Anderson School, USA. As a researcher in interactive marketing, she was a guest lecturer at Harvard University and taught Interactive Marketing at several prestigious institutions such as HEC, ESSEC and University Paris-Dauphine.

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When she came back from the U.S., she spent two years as the coordinator for the IAB France before founding 1000mercis in February 2000. Costes is the author of numerous books and articles on online marketing and databases. She is a board member of Kering, Vivendi and Groupe Seb.

Onegini www.onegini.com Denis Joannides Mobile Woerden, Netherlands » Four years ago, Dutch entrepreneurs Denis Joannides and Jeroen Starrenburg saw a desperate need for better security and manageability of consumer apps.

That’s when the idea for Onegini, which brings consumer personal data to mobile apps, was born. Today, the company, based in the central city of Woerden, has won a spate of high-ranking contracts from companies as esteemed as Infosys, which have strengthened their digital offerings alongside the startup.

“Companies that needed to undergo a digital transformation to stay current, had to open up personal data to their consumers which posed a challenge with regard to security and usability of web and mobile apps,” a company spokesperson told Red Herring. “Generally higher security meant more hoops for consumers to jump through creating a bad user experience. We believed you can offer the highest security - bank grade - without compromising user experience.”

The Onegini solution is low cost compared to others in the market, better because it offers out of the box functionality and flexible to play with others and faster to deploy enabling the shortest time to market. Though the general market is well

Top 100 Companies: Europe

populated, with players such as Gemalto, Encap Security, IBM and Oracle, the company says it “plays well with all of them.

“Onegini can be integrated with a lot of existing solutions in the market respecting the investment made,” the spokesperson adds.

That is good news considering that the platform upon which Onegini works is proliferating like few in history: the company’s total addressable market is 2.6 billion smartphones, with a prospected 6.1 billion smartphone users globally by 2020. With a minimum of two apps running Onegini this totals to 5.2 billion licenses with a prospected growth to 12.2 billion by 2020, according to the company.

Alongside its Dutch headquarters, the firm also has an office in the Polish city of Gdansk. And with $1.59 million in funding under its belt, and a growing footprint in its home nation, Germany and the U.K., Onegini is targeting the U.S. market for its next big expansion.

That’s unsurprising given the glowing reviews Onegini has received from its many existing customers and also its investors. ““Onegini has proven its ability to deliver a crucial component for digital transformation,” says Rudy de Back, cofounder and managing partner of The Hatch Firm. “Onegini allows companies and governments to bring their mobile strategies to the export market in a safe way.”

OneVisage www.onevisage.com Alexandre Benhamou Security Lausanne, Switzerland » OneVisage is a Swiss cyber-security company founded in 2013 with the vision to bring secure and convenient authentication services to mass-markets using standard mobile devices (BYOD).

As current password-based or biometric solutions don’t match security, usability and/or cost-efficiency criteria to address digital mass-markets, the idea was born from Christophe Remillet that 3D facial authentication on standard smartphones and tablets could drastically change it.

As a spinoff of both universities thanks to the support of the Commission for Technology and Innovation (Swiss Federal agency), Onevisage shall develop its main activities in Zurich.

Offices in Ziruch allow the gathering of the founders, Christophe Remillet, Alexandre Benhamou and Ronni Guggenheil with the software developers and Onevisage Research team led by Thomas Vetter, Marc Polllefeys Mand some of their resident researchers.

Leadership: Alexandre Benhamou boasts more than 20 years in Telecoms, HiTech and Management Consulting, with a successful fast track career as Project Manager, Engineering Department manager, Partnership Manager, Business Developer, Management Consultant and Entrepreneur.

His record track includes the setup and management of whole access engineering and laboratory of Neuf Telecom (SFR today) that led to launch of market breakthrough services (Triple Play Services, TV and

VoD). He also established both business consulting services, partnership program and complete interoperability service for Comverse-Netcentrex Centrex solutions.

And he incorporated KDH Europe, the European branch of a Taiwanese design house of consumer electronics close from Foxconn and Pegatron.

Already busy with his family life, Benhamou is an active board member of Columbia Business Club of France.

Peak Ace www.pa.ag Bastian Grimm Marketing/Advertising Berlin, Germany » Peak Ace (formerly known as Ads2people, founded in 2008), headquartered in Berlin, Germany is a full-service performance marketing agency offering technologydriven, large scale and fully customizable solutions for paid- (PPC) and organic search (SEO, Content & Online PR) in more than 10+ languages all across Europe. The company is developing and maintaining two dedicated software stacks (PPC: multi-lingual approach to unified campaign-, bid- & ad-management / SEO & CM: campaign-, workflow-, reportingsolution) enabling its clients not only to save on third party expenses but also allowing a streamlined approach to global search marketing, thus saving significantly in marketing spend.

Leadership: Bastian Grimm has a background in software development and started his first business, a web development company, at the age of 16. Having gathered almost 15 years of experience in online marketing, Grimm still hugely enjoys all aspects of search engine optimization (SEO), one of Peak

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Top 100 Companies: Europe

Aces’ core offerings. Grimm is a renowned expert for large scale SEO handling sites with 1 million+ pages. Having spoken all around the globe at almost every major industry event including SMX, SES, PMI, SEOkomm and others, Grimm enjoys travelling and meeting new people. Prior to running his own companies, Grimm set up and trained in-house SEO teams for brands like Fox Mobile Group and oversaw their SEO activities in 25+ countries and for 100+ websites.

PRODAFT www.prodaft.com Can Yildizli Security Istanbul, Turkey » PRODAFT (Proactive Defense Against Future Threats) has become a pioneer of security innovation. Focusing on highend field of information security such as “Cyber Intelligence”, PRODAFT continues to serve governmental agencies and private organizations with success.

Having its headquarters based in Teknopark Istanbul, technological innovation facility initiative of Turkey’s Undersecretariat for Defense Industries, PRODAFT has already proven itself as a trustworthy security and intelligence partner for a wide range of organizations including governmental agencies, financial institutions, leading ISPs and multinational defense corporations.

Incorporating different teams for each field of expertise such as cyber intelligence, cyber crime response, penetration testing and security management, the company currently employs top security professionals with true hacker mindset accustomed to requirements of information security industry.

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Leadership: Cyber security researcher since 2000, Can Yildizli’s main areas of expertise are cryptovirology, malwares, botnets and digital forensics.

Yildizli has contributed numerous cyber security projects throughout his academic career in Sabanci University(Turkey) (B. Sc. & M. Sc.), Technische Universität Berlin(Germany), Università degli Studi di Milano(Italy) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute(Troy, NY, USA)(Ph. D.) Yildizli’s most exceptional achievement is definitely his victory in the U.S. Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center Digital Forensics Challenge which is known to be one of the most prestigious challenges in the world of information security and digital forensics. Competing against teams of three or four, Yildizli individually managed to get ahead of all participating teams to become the Grand Champion of the challenge. To understand his success even further, perhaps it’s better to look at the teams that represent major corporations, organizations and state institutions that Yildizli left behind which include Northrop Grumman, U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Air Force.

PulseOn www.pulseon.com Heikki Jaatinen Mobile Espoo, Finland » PulseOn is a Finnish mobile wellness technology company founded in 2012, as a spin-off from Nokia. The company was founded by five individuals with worldclass expertise to bring their vision of truly accurate and reliable optical heart

rate monitoring to life. The company is headquartered in Espoo, Finland with a subsidiary in Neuchatel, Switzerland.

At the core of PulseOn is the company’s patented sensor innovation for the most accurate and reliable optical heart rate monitoring. Decades of combined expertise in biotechnology, sensors, minituarization and engineering have allowed the company to develop and design our proprietary sensor platform and highly sophisticated algorithms to provide the best signal quality in a variety of conditions, from high endurance sports performance to beat-to-beat detection for heart rate variability analyses.

Rooted in world class technological expertise, combined with a flair for superior usability and beautiful design, PulseOn is committed to building great products around its core technology – for the most meaningful insights into fitness and wellbeing. PulseOn’s groundbreaking wrist device and mobile application will transform the accurate heart rate data into meaningful feedback on the effect of training on your body, making it truly personalized and heart rate monitoring easier than ever.

Leadership: The team consists of researchers and experts in sensor technology, biotechnology, algorithms and mobile technology having developed and patented our core sensor innovation for the most accurate and reliable optical heart rate monitoring.

Top 100 Companies: Europe

purechannelapps

Qvanteq

purechannelapps.com

www.qvanteq.com

Olivier Choron

Arik Zucker

Software

Medical Devices

East Sussex, England

Zurich, Switzerland

» purechannelapps develops enterpriseclass e-communication and social media amplification software, named newsondemand and socialondemand®, respectively. The company helps brands to share, in a targeted manner, their messages with their sales partners, employees and other brand advocates, enabling these parties to share this content with their own contacts via social networks.

Leadership: Over the last twenty years, Olivier Choron has become an expert in the development and implementation of channel programs in the high technology sector. Choron spent his early days developing industry-first SMB initiatives in EMEA and globally with IT players such as 3Com and Nortel Networks, at a time when all vendors focused solely on enterprise markets. He subsequently moved to the Partner Relationship Management (PRM) industry with Allegis Corp/ClickCommerce – the major force at the time – where he was responsible for key accounts including Microsoft Europe, GE Finance, Subway and BT Ignite.

In 2003, Choron set up purechannels, which now operates as a full channel marketing agency across Europe. Current customers include Adobe, Avnet, Citrix, Jabra, Symantec and Trend Micro, among others. Choron founded purechannelapps in 2011.

» It is 30 years since Jacques Paul and Ulrich Stewart implanted the world’s first successful stent, in Toulouse, France. Now, in neighboring Switzerland, Qvanteq is working on a next generation of vascular stents that it believes will revolutionize the field.

The company has been seven years in the making. In 2009 it was spun out of Zurich’s Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) by two experienced medical technologists. Arik Zucker, who is now Qvanteq’s CEO, has worked in a large number of medtech firms, as well as The Boston Consulting Group. His partner, Dr. Armin Mäder, has worked in medtech and finance for brands such as AC Immune SA and UBS Investment Bank. He is now Qvanteq chairman.

The field of vascular stents, “small, tubelike meshes that are implanted into blood vessels to restore disturbed blood flow,” as Zucker told Red Herring, is “very competitive. The market is mature and yet the idea product has not been developed.”

Existing stents have been broadly successful in restoring blood flow. But they can also cause restenosis (re-narrowing) or thrombus (blood clot) formation, which can lead to damaging and potentially fatal complications like emboli, heart attacks and strokes.

“Qvanteq develops novel bioactive vascular stents to address and overcome

clinical adverse effects of today’s devices,” added Zucker. “Qvanteq’s bioactive stent technology promises fast and controlled healing. This reduces the risk of restenosis and thrombosis while increasing patient’s quality of life by limiting the need for anti-coagulation medication to only one month, or even less.”

The company, which has seven patent applications and patents for the final device granted in main markets, is competing with illustrious brands such as Abbott Vascular, Medtronic, Boston Scientific, Bard and Cook.

But Zucker and Mäder are certain their bioactive surface technology can win a huge chunk of the global vascular stent market, valued at around $10 billion. And beyond that the pair said the technology can be transferred to a number of other uses that will prove vital in Qvanteq’s progress.

The firm is currently financed by a number of private investors, including a 2013 Series B round of $4.1 million which its founders say will help it on the way to a broader, more international focus in the coming years. Qvanteq’s first patient was enrolled in November 2014, and it expects far greater things to follow.

“The company raised enough funds to develop at least its first product until market approval including also a clinical study,” said Zucker. “The company is currently not looking for equity investors, but rather for strategic partners.

“The company has an international focus,” he added. “After build-up of the European market the U.S. and Asian markets will definitely be targeted. For this, the company has set up its IP protection strategy accordingly.”

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Top 100 Companies: Europe

Real Impact Analytics realimpactanalytics.com Sébastien Deletaille Big Data/Storage Luxembourg » For Real Impact Analytics’ founders, the telecommunications firm was their ‘Goldilocks’ investment. It was late 2009, and former schoolmates Sébastien Delataille and Loïc Jacobs van Merlen made the jump from salaried employment to entrepreneurialism.

The pair, already with years of analysis and consultant experience under their hats, began with three companies. One went bust and one didn’t take off. One, however, went really well: Real Impact Analytics (RIA).

“To launch RIA, Sébastien and Loïc called some of their clients from their consulting days,” a company spokesperson tells Red Herring. “They asked MTN Côte d’Ivoire if they could get access to their telecom data.

“One main issue was really bugging the telco,” the firm adds. “In their sales and distribution department, they only had country level KPIs. They knew how many subscribers they had but didn’t know where they were. RIA’s first MVP addressed that issue. With city level KPIs, they could differentiate strategies and be more targeted.”

“The project was so successful that RIA quickly got attention from top leadership to roll it out across their entire footprint.

Since then, we more than doubled revenue and team size every year; we did not stop looking for more applications to address, and technologies to master,” says Delataille.

RIA, based in the Belgian capital of Brussels, deploys end-to-end platforms that cover

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the entire analytics value chain - from technology and applications to processes and people. “With our clients, we behave like partners that adapt to their ecosystems’ challenges,” Delataille says. “When they are confronted with data quality issues, we help them fix them.”

RealityMine

RIA claims to be able to deploy its platforms two-to-ten-times faster than any other competitor. And that’s handy in a field that is packed with esteemed and experienced companies. Accenture, Guavas, Huawei, IBM and SAS are just a handful of the firms with which RIA is competing. However RIA’s focus on the telecommunications sector only, gives it an advantage over their wide-spread adversaries.

Manchester, UK

“Telecom operators are facing a market where competition is fierce,” says Delataille. “Growth is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. Therefore, the need for operational and subscriber value optimization is constantly growing.

Analytics provide operators with powerful tools to compete in an ever-evolving market. Therefore, every telecom operator needs analytics to survive in this changing market.”

RIA currently has over 130 employees, most of whom are centered on the African and Latin American markets. The next 18 months will prove to be the company’s most active yet, as it continues to secure investors and funding for global expansion.

It has already committed to the Asian market, where it opened an office as recently as March. And RIA will, it says, expand its Latin American footprint as well as western and eastern Europe and the Middle East. Little wonder the rapidly expanding firm has found itself on Red Herring’s Top 100 Europe list.

“We find quick wins from the first day of implementation because we know what the value is,” concludes Delataille.

www.realitymine.com Garry Partington Mobile

» Organizations that want to understand consumers better today are faced with two key challenges: how to gather the data from a wide range of devices and operating systems, and how to do so quickly and efficiently.

RealityMine is one of just a handful of companies that address these concerns, and is unique in being the only independentlyowned company of its type. It is also the only company in this space whose heritage lies in both mobile and research.

RealityMine’s ability to capture both active and passive data from more than 50,000 panelists worldwide (representing more than 350,000 days of data and generating nearly 1,000,000,000 behavioral datapoints per year) provides an unmatched granularity into the daily lives of consumers, creating one of the richest behavioral and contextual databases available. It is the sole syndicated source of the environmental, contextual variables that impact marketing receptivity. This data can be applied to various industry verticals.

The company, based in Manchester, U.K., began life in 2012 as the brainchild of mobile industry veteran Garry Partington and market research expert Rolfe Swinton.

They identified the need to provide a deep understanding of “exactly how customers use their mobile devices, recognizing the powerful insights this provides into consumer behavior,” a spokesperson recently told Red Herring.

Powerful indeed: in just four years Reality Mine has managed to command a sizable chunk of its industry, winning high-profile

Top 100 Companies: Europe

clients like Intage, Ipsos, Lightspeed Research and Kantar. That has in turn enthused investors, who have injected over $18 million into Partington and Swinton’s venture across two rounds.

The backers, who include AXM Venture Capital, Kennet Partners, Bullhound Sidecar III LP and The North West Fund, see how RealityMine’s granular analysis brings marked benefits for clients, across the research, media, manufacturing and advertising industries.

“And within these types of companies, we are targeting the multinational companies,” the company says. “Although the market we operate in has many businesses which we consider to be competitors, RealityMine is one of just a handful of companies that can provide this granular level of insight into consumer behavior,” the company adds.

“Our main competitors are Nielsen, GfK (Nurago Meter), Symphony Advanced Media, Verto Analytics and Wakoopa. We were one of the first to market and have grown rapidly, offering market-leading technology on a global scale. Interestingly a number of our competitors partner with RealityMine on individual client projects to provide services and pieces of the jigsaw that they themselves are unable to offer.”

Revenues have been rising almost 100% year-on-year, with the company expecting to see similar numbers posted by the end of the year. Besides the figures, RealityMine is hoping to make 2016 one in which it grows its international presence - and staff - which will help it deal with everexpanding banks of data.

ReklamStore

Responda 113

www.reklamstore.com

www.113.fi

Sencan Ozen

Petri Kokkonen

Marketing/Advertising

Internet/Online

Istanbul, Turkey

Helsinki, Finland

» Reklamstore is a global ad-network that has been in this sector since 2007.It started as a performance network in Turkey and now is one of the biggest players in global market by performance activities on display, mobile, video and affiliation.

Leadership: Sencan Ozen graduated from one of the most well know high schools of Turkey, Tarsus American Collage in 2002.

He founded ReklamStore on 2007 just after he graduated from Koc University, Business Administration major. Ozen turned ReklamStore from an ad-network to a performance based marketing platform with display, mobile, video and affiliation abilities in seven years. Currently ReklamStore is one of the leading online marketing companies of Turkey, with a team of 50 people. Ozen is also co-founder of Evim.net, which is the leading home goods focused ecommerce site in Turkey.

Ali Ozen, Sencan’s brother is currently the CEO of Evim.net.

» Responda 113 is one of the most cost efficient and advanced service provider for 24/7 alarms, data and security monitoring.

The company is a global 24/7 ”Internet of Everything” and ”industrial internet” control and alarm monitoring service provider. Responda makes sure it supports customer’s business by analyzing critical and risks related information.

Leadership: Petri Kokkonen previously headed an elderly care services firm for five years. He also spent three years heading up Nokia South Africa’s product marketing. He has had several roles within Nokia, including technology marketing manager for Nokia Multimedia, system architect for mobile internet applications and system marketing manager for Nokia Telecommunications.

No wonder the outlook is bright for this British success story, which adds, “Our target clients attend a very specific universe of trade shows and events allowing us to undertake targeted marketing initiatives that reach the majority of our target clients.”

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Top 100 Companies: Europe

RingCredible www.ringcredible.com Hans Osnabrugge Telecommunications

networks and business partners for entrepreneurs and ventures. Previously, he was a Sr. Relationship Manager at Schretlen & Co, where he guided top clients in their financial planning and wealth management, and set up deals with top investors, large corporations, and traditional media.

Enschede, Netherlands » RingCredible offers consumers, all over the world, a new alternative to make (international) telecom calls. The company has proven itself as the next solution in the industry, poised to expand around the world. This alternative is interesting for both single users as for businesses, as it offers, especially international calls for a much better price than the traditional Telcos. Customers can call any landline and mobile phone in the world, for just a few cents per minute, with the same user experience and quality as a regular call.

By promoting RingCredible inside and outside the travel segment, the company makes sure it reaches a huge audience that is looking for a better alternative to make international calls.

Leadership: Hans Osnabrugge is the CEO of RingCredible, one of the world’s most popular Travel and Communication Apps and Partner at the venture capital firm Brooklyn Ventures.

He’s a pioneer in mobile VoIP solutions, and has extensive experience in wealth management and start-up sectors, where he has consistently netted proven results.

At RingCredible, Osnabrugge and his team pioneered the world of VoIP, and led the app in surpassing global competitors across the globe getting more than 2 million active users just 12 months. Osnabrugge turned RingCredible into the next solution in the industry, poised to quickly expand around the world closing partnerships with wellknown brands in more than 50 countries.

His strengths include successfully bringing new products to markets, as well as arranging funding and finding strategic

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Rivo Software www.rivosoftware.com

Leadership: Karl Campbell is Rivo’s CEO, leading the strategic vision and growth of the company. Campbell is a well-respected visionary and inspirational leader with over 20 years’ experience. Campbell has spent the last five years leading businesses in the Risk, Sustainability and Energy Management sectors.

Prior to joining Rivo, Campbell was CEO at Cura Software Solutions, a global provider of Governance, Risk and Compliance solutions.

Karl Campbell Software

Seabery

Warwick, England

www.seabery.es

» Rivo is the market leading risk management cloud platform for Safety, Security & Sustainability. The company has offices in the U.S., U.K., Switzerland, Romania, Singapore and Australia. It has grown by 30% each year for the last three years. Rivo now has over 200,000 users in 87 countries and is used in over 40 languages. Rivo is accessible anywhere in the world, 24/7 and supported 24/7 as standard.

Rivo was invested in by two leading technology investment funds in 2013 that has led to a massive investment in both the technology platform positioning it to be the leading risk management cloud platform in the global market place in the next two years. Rivo is executing a roadmap that is harnessing powerful capabilities to integrate into devices as the Internet of Things market explodes, aligned with delivering risk management capability across all online and offline mobile devices in the workplace. Rivo is also expanding its technology alliance network to work with technology and content partners to increase the value proposition of its platform - from out of the box content for solutions such as sustainability reporting or safety auditing to developing industry vertical specific offerings in all its territories.

Alejandro Villaran Other Huelva, Spain » Of all the things that augmented reality (AR) can do, it is in the spheres of e-learning and training that some of the most exciting startups have emerged. Of these, Spain’s Seabery is a real attention-grabber.

The company, based in the historic southern city of Huelva, has developed an edtech platform combining augmented reality, real time simulation, software for teachers, cloud services and apps for smartphones (and glasses when they hit the market).

The aim? To help attract youth to vocational education and “train skills better, faster, safer and more efficiently,” a company spokesperson recently told Red Herring.

“Seabery decided to develop its augmented training platform on a first commercial application, to demonstrate the market that the technology is ready to improve skills training processes. We though that the market was still not ready for generic augmented reality platforms.”

Top 100 Companies: Europe

The market is an exceedingly promising one. This January, Goldman Sachs reported that investments in virtual reality (VR) and AR were skyrocketing, reaching a total of $3.5 billion in 2014 - and that didn’t include the $2 billion Facebook acquired Oculus Rift for, in May that year.

The investment bank estimates that the global AR/VR industry will be worth $80 billion in 2025.

“Skills training market is claiming for modernizing as there is an increasing skills gap both in emerging and advanced economies,” the company told us.

“Augmented reality can bring a lot of value here.” Seabery, which already has five patents secured, has representatives in Germany, the U.S., Brazil and Chile, with 40 distributors in 30 countries.

The firm has, without VC funding, managed to win a seven-figure revenue since its 2008 foundation. “The company is profitable, indeed we have recently closed a participative loan and we are reinvesting our profits to keep to growing. “(We are) currently working on the first VC round planned for the end of 2016 to boost our business plan, grow in research and development and international expansion,” the company adds.

In fact, Seabery’s biggest challenge right now is finding the right employees for the task - especially in such a highly-technical and cutting edge industry as AR. With clients such as Volkswagen and Abicor Binzel, it is confident that 2016 will bring even more success. The numbers are certainly enticing. “(The) augmented reality market is expected to become 150 billion by 2020,” the spokesperson told us. “We want to lead the skills training applications globally.”

SecurIT www.securit.biz Marc Vanmaele

Benelux, a value added distributor for software to large enterprises. Vanmaele is a recognized authority in the field of identity and access management and renowned speaker at several conferences over the past years.

Security Gent, Belgium » SecurIT was established in August 1999 in order to focus entirely on the domain of Identity & Access Management.

Today SecurIT is one of IBM’s most knowledgeable business partners, with over 13 years of practical experience in this field.

Based on the knowledge and experience obtained in large scale projects and the ability to listen carefully to the customer, the company decided to develop its own software product, TrustBuilder, complementing the offerings of large IAM vendors in a first phase, but now ready to address sophisticated cloud identity requirements autonomously.

The solution is already in use at large organizations in Europe and the USA, including major banks, telecommunication providers and government organizations, serving authentication and authorization requirements for over 30 million users.

The company is in the process of setting up a new entity with venture capital funding to act as a pure product company for TrustBuilder.

Leadership: Marc Vanmaele is Chief Executive Officer and Founder of SecurIT. In addition to his general management task, he also looks after the commercial activities. Vanmaele has over 30 years of experience in ICT with large organizations around networking, systems development and infrastructure solutions. He holds a Bachelor of Electronics from the Hogeschool of Gent. Prior to creating SecurIT in 1999 he was managing international large projects at Philips and co-owner of Management Software

SendinBlue www.sendinblue.com Armand Thiberge Cloud Computing Paris, France » SendinBlue is focused on bringing a comprehensive low-cost suite of marketing tools (email marketing, email transactional, SMS) to SMEs and marketing agencies.

The company describes itself as the nextgeneration direct marketing platform.

Email marketing, SMS marketing and marketing automation are now available on a single platform. Every day, thousands of SMEs all around the world use the company’s user-friendly and powerful platform to launch comprehensive marketing campaigns.

Leadership: After graduating from Ecole Polytechnique, the most prestigious French engineering school, Armand Thiberge started his career as a web project leader in India. A true entrepreneur, he founded Silverline IT Solutions in 2007, a company specialized in developing web applications.

Now living in Paris, Armand Thiberge founded SendinBlue in 2011 and officially launched it in September 2012. Thiberge is now making of SendinBlue a global reference direct marketing solution.

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Top 100 Companies: Europe

Sentrix www.sentrix.com Ofer Wolf Security Kfar Neter, Israel » Sentrix (acquired by Trusted Knight) provides cloud-based website security solutions that protect websites against a wide range of costly cyber-attacks including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), data breach and defacement, using a unique approach. Sentrix solves fundamental problems inherent in today’s website security landscape. Attackers are getting more sophisticated, the number of new threats discovered daily is increasing, and websites are increasingly complex. All these make it extremely difficult to protect websites and to manage the overwhelming amount of information associated with website security.

Sentrix was founded by cyber security experts, who were frustrated by the inability of traditional website security to solve these growing pains. They came up with a revolutionary approach that challenges the traditional paradigm of inspecting incoming traffic for attack signatures and anomalies, and developed a contextaware approach that defends websites by understanding their functionality. Sentrix decouples the customer website and replicates it to the cloud – a patent pending process unique to Sentrix. Significant elements of the website are served from the cloud replica, away from the customer back end, distancing it from attacks and keeping it secure.

The Sentrix solution is being used by a growing number of enterprises who testify that Sentrix has revolutionized their ability to protect their websites, improved their level of security and reduced their cost of operation.

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Leadership: Ofer Wolf is a recognized leader in the technology space having served in several senior management roles at leading firms over the past 15 years. Before joining Sentrix, Wolf was CEO of SterGen, a developer of groundbreaking 3D video conversion solutions for broadcasters.

Prior to SterGen, Wolf served at the senior management team of Check Point Software (NASDAQ: CHKP), a leader in Internet Security, as VP of Worldwide Technical Services. Prior to Check Point, Wolf held VP and GM roles at Comverse, a leading value added services and billing supplier.

Wolf has a BA in Computer Science from the University of Tel Aviv and is a graduate of the Stanford GSB Executive Program.

He is a Lt. Colonel (Res.) in the Israeli Air Force.

Siltectra www.siltectra.com Wolfram Drescher Clean Tech Dresden, Germany » It hardly needs saying that outside of Berlin’s ‘Silicon Allee’, there is plenty of tech innovation in Germany. One such example is in the southern state of Saxony, where an exciting stable of young companies has spawned its own cluster, now known as ‘Silicon Saxony’.

Among them, in Dresden, Saxony’s historic capital, is Siltectra, a clean tech firm which is making use of a little-known discovery that owes its inception not to Germany, but the United States.

In 2008 a medical research team at Harvard University quickly realized that their work, on a process called the Cold Split effect, was far better suited to the wafering industry -

the process by which silicon crystals are made into thin slices used in a wide variety of sectors.

That was handy considered the rush for solar power that characterized the era.

In 2010 the Harvard team succeeded in finding seed capital from MIG AG, a German VC with funds in excess of $900 million and over 20 flourishing businesses in its portfolio.

Cold Split could, the team found, amply substitute the wire saw standard for wafering. “Cold Split spalls wafers off ingots made of semiconductor materials and even of sapphire, bulletproof glass or diamond,” CEO Wolfram Drescher told Red Herring. “Spalling avoids the sawdust created when sawing. Cold Split wafers also have superior geometrical properties.

“Due to a unique laser conditioning process, the layer along a wafer spalls off is precisely defined,” he added. “Subsequent lapping is not required. No sawdust and no lapping saves up to 50% of precious material. Saving material equally saves crystallization capacities. This means lower investments in furnaces and lower spending on energy, while keeping our environment clean from sawing agents and sawing abrasives.”

Saltcellar has stumbled upon a leap in an industry in which, according to Drescher, “innovations are rare and slow…Cold Split therefore will potentially fully replace wire sawing in a paradigm shift within the next few years.”

His company is well prepared. It already has three patents granted worldwide, and another 40 filed. That is vital in an industry that even Drescher admits is one of the most competitive in the world. Five major firms - MEMC; Siltronic; SUMCO; ShinEtsu and LG Siltron - share 93% of the multibillion-dollar trade.

China has made a major push in recent years. Its move to domestically produce silicon chips has already garnered funds of $150 billion, including plans to produce a

Top 100 Companies: Europe

complete pipeline including crystallization and wafer production. “Chinese firms will challenge the currently dominant players also for high value wafers made of, e.g. silicon carbide,” said Drescher.

“If the announcements become reality, the worldwide production capability for silicon carbide wafers will be doubled over the next two years.” Currently, Siltectra’s market opportunity is estimated at $3 billion from 2017 to 2020.

For something as potentially disruptive as Cold Split, the challenges are many, not least the carefully bespoke automation and manufacture recipes that each separate wafer type requires. Siltectra, armed with over $20 million funding, will spend its next 18 months partnering up with firms in “several material domains,” like silicon; silicon carbide; gallium nitrade and display cover glass for the smartphone industry.

“Siltectra will develop Cold Split equipment systems, will set up the supply chain for Cold Split polymer foils and will build up second level support capabilities,” said Drescher. “Siltectra is positioned in the industry as a process technology developer and consumables supplier. Since the Cold Split process is now ready to go to market Siltectra’s first year of significant revenue in consumables will be 2016/17.

“Based on the business model of selling the polymer foils required to run the Cold Split process the company plans sales of $16 million in 2017 and $120 million in 2020,” he added. “According to the current business plan the company will break even in first quarter 2018.”

With that in mind, it is not surprising Drescher and co are confident that, with a Red Herring Top 100 in hand and plenty in the bank, this could be the year it pushes on and makes Cold Split the wafering industry’s hottest buzzword.

SimilarWeb www.similarweb.com

every website on the internet, which then grew to become SimilarWeb measurement platform in 2011.

Or Offer Internet/Online

SimpleSite

London, United Kingdom

www.simplesite.com

» SimilarWeb was established in 2009 as an information technology company offering market intelligence for the digital world. The company is headquartered in the U.K., with offices across the globe.

Thus far SimilarWeb has raised over $40M in funding and has over 100 employees.

SimilarWeb.com offers free traffic and engagement analytics for websites, mobile web and mobile apps, while SimilarWeb PRO (launched in 2013) is a paid platform offering in-depth competitive analysis for websites, mobile web and mobile apps.

SimilarWeb measures the digital world.

The company provides companies with the data-driven insights that empower them to make better business decisions and recognize new opportunities. SimilarWeb collects, cleans and delivers market intelligence data from tens of thousands of different sources and tens of millions of users. The company’s data panel is the largest in the industry and the only one that offers website, mobile web, and mobile app data.

Leadership: Or Offer is the Founder and CEO of SimilarWeb. Offer founded SimilarWeb In parallel to his BA studies in Business at the age of 24. He was also a founding partner at AfterDownload, a company that built the largest CPC platform to monetize the download funnel which was acquired by IronSource in 2013.

In addition, Offer is an active earlystage investor and an advisory board member at other high tech start-ups including MoonActive, Spot.im and Spark Beyond. SimilarWeb started as websites recommendation technology that analyzes

Morten Elk Cloud Computing Copenhagen, Denmark » Morton Elk is no stranger to explaining the internet to the uninitiated. Today it’s with SimpleSite, the startup with which he hopes anyone, from anywhere on Earth, can build their own professional website.

Twenty years ago, it was the people of Copenhagen.

Back then Morton, and brother Jacob, had recently completed studies in the Danish capital, and had just returned from a year’s research at the University of Southern California. Looking for a new challenge, the brothers decide to create websitebuilding tools even their computerilliterate father could use.

They were the internet’s early days: Jacob would knock on doors, extolling the virtues of the new information superhighway. “He must have sounded to most Danes like he had just come from outer space,” Morton said recently.

Today, that door-to-door rapacity appears to have paid off. Morton and Jacob now sit atop a company that is making $10 million in yearly revenue, with over 100,000 subscribers worldwide. Over 400,000 new websites are launched monthly on the platform, which was founded in 2003.

The Elk brothers’ vision was to create a set of tools even ‘Mr and Mrs Denmark’ - two hypothetically non-skilled users - could use to make a top-notch website. The

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company quickly went global, launching an English-language service within a year of operation.

Today SimpleSite supports 24 languages and has customers in every country in the world - except three, according to the company. The company also employs over 50 staff at its Copenhagen headquarters.

SimpleSite’s features include photo albums, blogs, video embedding, music, guestbook, maps, games and many more.

The company also offers 24/7 customer service. The company pledges that any user can have their website up and live within ten minutes of signing up.

As global internet use has soared, it has seen huge growth in emerging markets.

The majority of internet users now live in developing countries. China has the largest number of web users, followed by India, the U.S. and Brazil. Nigeria comes seventh in the list, while other large emerging markets, such as Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines all feature in the top 20.

“The target audience was the key factor in SimpleSite’s decision on how to operate,” the company said. “Everything was about helping non-skilled IT users create their own websites, through an extremely easy way to get online with your own domain name and updating and maintaining your website.

“Enabling a segment unfamiliar with IT to get a website without spending money on specialists, proved profitable,” a spokesperson added. “SimpleSite refined their business model over the years and used search engine marketing to approach new countries from the headquarters in Copenhagen, igniting bursts of growth each time they conquered a new market.”

That new market is huge. But it is also a congested one, including major competitors like WIX, Weebly and Squarespace. “There is a wide range of quality services at many levels of customer needs,” the spokesperson said. “We believe that we have a very defensible niche in serving the customers

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who have the most basic needs, have fewest means and a need for simplicity, but also need websites that function flawlessly on mobile phones.

“The segmentation of this market makes it very fragmented, and SimpleSite addresses a market niche with only a handful of competitors. The closest competitors target small businesses of two to 10 employees, but SimpleSite’s target is below that mark, delivering to personal websites and single person businesses.”

Maximizing engagement and value creation for its freemium usership is what SimpleSite counts as the biggest challenge right now. The company left the “trial period and premium” business model in 2015 and turned it into a freemium model.

“Our freemium model holds huge potential and is also a shift in mindset for SimpleSite, because now we have to create long term value and engagement for both our free users and paying customers,” the company said. “That means even more focus on customer experience and on websites that function flawlessly both on mobile and desktop.”

That commitment to freemium comprises the company’s biggest goal - to increase their numbers and make a larger base of SimpleSite’s users active, long-term subscribers. Then, the company can “drive viral effects and ultimately convert freemium to premium users.” The firm already has revenues of $10 million, and expects a 25% year-on-year growth rate.

The European Union alone has 20 million businesses, of which 92% are micro-businesses of 10 employees or less, according to the company. “SimpleSite’s market is the whole world, and with the third world rapidly getting online, the market is huge and growing.”

That is not to say the founding brothers have any intention of leaving their home country. Morton is a key figure in Copenhagen’s local startup community, having founded Nordic Growth Hackers

in 2014 to increase communication within the ecosystem.

SimpleSite’s funding, too, is fully Danish: in 2012 the company won a $2.2 million funding round from local angel investor Kaare Danielson, who has also made significant contributions to car rental platform GoMore and phone solution Firmafon. SimpleSite was the only Danish company to appear on Red Herring’s Top 100 Europe list last year - yet another achievement of which the Elk brothers can be immensely proud.

It seems certain that, with so much global growth and a rapidly expanding user base, all those door-to-door visits were well worth it. SimpleSite is bringing website creation to a new and exciting breed of Internet users.

Top 100 Companies: Europe

siOPTICA

Slashe

Smartpipe Solutions

www.sioptica.com

www.slashe.fr

smartpipesolutions.com

Dr. Markus Klippstein

Lenka Galinié

Tanya Field

Hardware

Entertainment & Media

Telecommunications

Jena, Germany

Paris, France

London, United Kingdom

» siOPTICA offers passive privacy filters for LCD displays which are used particularly in ATM machines or touch based transaction screens. It is much brighter than conventional systems and have additional innovative features.

Particularly, the privacy effect can be switched off just by software. Even the calibration of the viewable angle in the privacy mode is possible. The filter is completely passive and needs no energy.

In principle, the technology offers great advantages for any application which requires the input or the display of sensitive data such as PINs, passwords etc. in order to screen such data from unauthorized viewing. The company has started to cooperate with ATM and payment terminal makers to incorporate its technologies into their products.

Leadership: Dr. Markus Klippstein is a serial entrepreneur. Klippstein has been working in the field of glasses-free 3D business and optical components since 1999. He is one of the pioneers in 3D representation and co-founder of 3D International Europe (formerly VisuMotion GmbH). Klippstein is inventor or co-inventor in more than 195 patents and patent applications worldwide and brings a comprehensive client and contact network in various countries to the table. He is fluent in German and English.

Klippstein holds a diploma in Physics and wrote his doctoral thesis for “doctor ingenieur” in the field of glasses-free 3D representation. He was involved in two trade sales already that were successful for the VC investors.

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» Slashe is a B2B agency that provides interactive solutions for video content.

Slashe’s mission is to enrich video content by providing additional interactive content such as geolocation data, editorial information and E-commerce pushes. The company provides viewers an innovative and engaging experience placing them at the center of the content they are watching.

Slashe works in France as well as abroad.

Slashe has taken interactivity to the next level by creating Shazam for all video content including TV, movies, VOD and videos. The white label app, which works with audio recognition technology, can be used with iOS or Android, smartphones and tablets. It identifies and enhances the video content and displays pushes instantly, which appear with geolocation information, editorial comments and e-commerce contents. Slashe offers an exciting new real-time viewing experience.

It pushes everything that happens on the screen to your smartphone or tablet and is now available to all professionals.

Leadership: Lenka Galinié studied journalism. Having worked with broadcast channels and advertisers for many years, Galinie decided to create her own interactive agency. She started Slashe in 2013.

» Smartpipe was formed in 2014 and is privately owned. The company’s headoffice is in London and it has a specialist technology center in Cwmbran, Wales, which opened in January 2015.

Smartpipe provides Mobile Network Operators (MNO) and WiFi providers with a data broker solution for the delivery of permissioned real-time dynamic customer profiles into the Advertising eco-system. Smartpipe’s clients are Mobile Network Operators and Ad Networks, Ad Exchanges, SSPs, DSPs and RTB platforms to whom Smartpipe provides a single source of deep, rich and quantified deterministic MNO customer data that facilitates delivery of real-time targeting and improves ROI for Brands, Advertisers and Publishers.

Smartpipe’s solution can also be used for internal CRM platforms and content personalization of MNOs products and services. Smartpipe’s solution is built on proprietary and patented technology and certified by IBM as a Telco industry solution provider.

Leadership: Tanya Field was formerly the Global Director of the Mobile Data Group at Telefonica Digital and ran the global content and mobile marketing businesses.

Previously she was the SVP of International Media for Discovery and the Managing Director of Sky Gaming at BSkyB. Field was a lead advisor to Telefonica Ventures and sat on the board of Amobee and the MMA. Before becoming the CEO of Smartpipe, Field was leading Vodafone’s redefinition of how MNOs should strategically manage customer data.

Top 100 Companies: Europe

SoAmpli www.soampli.com Maz Nadjm Internet/Online London, United Kingdom » SoAmpli is a desktop and mobile platform that allows companies to nurture and encourage employees to share approved content on their social media.

It’s a benchmark venture that combines brand new aspects of the business world to deliver lasting benefits to clients. For founders Karel Leeflang and Max Nadjm, it was the perfect evolution of their careers in the tech world.

Leeflang and Nadjm both have long and illustrious careers in digital strategy, online platforms and customer centricity.

Leeflang, from Geneva, has worked for SoMazi, Organizational Capital Partners and others, while Londoner Nadjm is a longtime influencer, TEDx speaker and one of Forbes and the Sunday Times’ Top 50 Global Media Influencers.

In 2014 the two entrepreneurs came together to work on SoAmpli, with which companies could get full value from their employees’ social media presences.

SoAmpli turns employees into brand advocates, facilitated by technology, the founding pair tell Red Herring.

“We are driven by creating tangible, authentic and lasting benefits from social media both for companies and employees based on value exchange,” Leeflang says.

“This means that companies expand their reach very significantly, digitize their staff, involve and empower their employees to drive more customer value and grow their business. Employees build confidence and expand their technology capability, strengthen their networks and skills sets and are recognized for what they do and can do.”

The platform has already won hundreds of great reviews from clients. “SoAmpli is an intuitive tool that made social sharing easier for everyone at Comparis, whatever their confidence or experience with social media,” Dominique Candike, of Comparis. ch, said. “It provides a quick and efficient way to boost the reach of the numerous pieces of valuable content we create.”

Little wonder, therefore, that SoAmpli has managed to raise $600,000, and is growing at around 20% per month. “Our aim is to get to $80-100,000 MRR in 18 months,” adds Leeflang. “This would mean we have about 50 large enterprises covering 2025,000 employees.”

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

SoAmpli’s market is still very new, and growing in traction. But, adds Nadjm, “considering that there are 280 million employees working for thousands of large enterprises in Europe and North American, and millions of larger SMBs, there is more growth potential that players.”

The two founders estimate the employee advocacy market to be around $4 billion, growing up to 50% annually, with a variety of new conferences confirming the sector’s status as a rising force in the business world. It is perhaps because of this huge potential that SoAmpli is determined to cement its position in Europe and North America, before looking further afield.

It is therefore balance, Leeflang says, that is key in the next year: “We are actually growing faster than we anticipated in enterprise sales. While this is good news, we are constantly needing to adjust our BD plans to ensure we have enough capital available to afford the growth. Fund raising is a key and necessary activity but also quite distracting so finding the balance is the major challenge.”

Soil Scout www.soilscout.com Jonathan Skelly Clean Tech Helsinki, Finland » Understanding what’s happening below the soil surface is critical for many industries. Current solutions for measuring environmental data are based on wired technology, which is impractical or inefficient in many environments; or require expensive and labor-intensive core sampling.

Soil Scout provides critical insight into data from deep below the surface – wirelessly.

Through the creation of two patentpending inventions (related to power management and antenna design), the company’s small buried sensor platform can transmit a variety of information in real-time from up to 4 meters below the surface, for up to 20 years - maintenance free.

Leadership: Originally from NZ, Jonathan Skelly has spent the last 20+ in a variety of Business Development, Product + Technology Marketing, and Go to Market roles within the telecommunications industry. Recognized for his diverse competencies, getting things done and his customer-centric approach, he has enjoyed extensive international multi-cultural experience and success.

Skelly has a strong background successfully building and growing new technology and solution sales business internationally with multiple customer channels: both personally, and as a leader of teams. After 15 years with Nokia based in multiple countries, Skelly joined the Soil Scout team in November 2014 to take their solution and team to market.

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Top 100 Companies: Europe

SP Nano www.fulcrumnano.com Eyal Shphilberg Life Sciences/Biotech Yavne, Israel » SP Nano will reach its tenth birthday next year. From a lab project in Jerusalem to one of the most exciting companies in Israel, the company will have achieved a lot by the time those candles are blown out.

Founded in 2007 at the city’s Hebrew University, the SP Nano project examined the mechanisms involved in the stability of poplar trees. The team extracted and purified a heat-stable protein from the aspen tree. After a period of genetic modification, SP1 was created.

“SP1 can bind with carbon nanoparticles and strengthen the adhesion between fabric layers in the construction of composite materials, meaning that fewer layers are required to produce a highly durable part,” CEO Eyal Shpilberg told Red Herring. “Since fewer layers are used, the part is lighter with improved strength and performance compared to a similarly constructed product with more layers.”

SP1 has a wealth of implications for the automotive, aeronautic and marine industries. Parts made with SP1-infused composite materials are stronger, lighter and perform better with lower levels of fuel consumption - and gas emissions.

Vehicle frames made with SP1 can be up to 20% lighter. “For an airplane made with carbon parts, such as the Boeing Dreamliner, the SP1-treated fibers would reduce the plane’s weight by 20% and save $20 million in annual fuel costs,” said Shpilberg.

“SP1’s protein-based formula is also non-toxic replacement for harmful

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substances, such as formaldehyde, which are commonly used in the making of rubber tires, belts and hoses,” he added.

“By using SP1 manufacturers of tires, belts and rubber hoses can minimize their workers’ exposure to dangerous substances, minimize toxins released into the environment and simplify the manufacturing process.”

All major composite materials companies worldwide are committed to developing lighter, better performing products. But tooled with SP1 and six families of patents, Shpilberg is confident SP Nano has what it takes to conquer an addressable market he estimates at $10 billion. That is divided into three main components: composite material; adhesives and resins and mechanical rubber goods.

The company is still at its initial revenue stage, and expects to be operationally break-even next year. It has thus far received a shade under $8 million from a raft of funding rounds led by renowned VCs such as iVentures Asia, Heliant Ventures and Consolidated Investment Group.

SP Nano is now seeking its fourth investment round of up to $6 million. aimed at increasing sales and business development activity, and establishing manufacturing capabilities, scaling up production and implementing current and future agreements with strategic partners.

The company will aim its next step at increasing sales and business development activity, “and establishing manufacturing capabilities, scale up production and implementation of current and future agreements with strategic partners,” says Shpilberg.

“SP Nano will continue to build strategic global relationships with leading multinationals which will provide direct access to its key market sectors in composite materials, adhesives and resins and mechanical rubber goods,” he adds.

“Development of a non-toxic replacement of formaldehyde for rubber reinforcement is a major target for rubber companies.

As far as we know, there is no other environmentally-friendly and safe solution.”

Stands4 www.stands4.com Yigal Ben Efraim Internet/Online Kfar Neter, Israel » Stands4 began life 15 years ago when Israeli entrepreneur Yigal Ben Efraim decided to start a search engine for acronyms and abbreviations. Soon it was a 15-website network, all of which were held under premium domain identities.

It’s not an easy space to compete in, even given Stands4’s long, successful record: legacy players are huge, and very, very strong. Wikipedia and Dictionary.com are just two cited by Efraim when he spoke to Red Herring recently. Genius and Siri are providing next-generation competition too.

But Efraim and his team, headquartered in the city of Kafr Neter, have stolen a fair march on the field: as far back as 2005 Stands4 won Writer’s Digest’s ‘Best Websites’ award, while the American Library Association recognized its efforts with one of its highest accolades, ‘Best Free Reference Web Sites’, in 2010.

And that is par for the course, for a “a leading provider of free online reference and educational resources, serving millions of unique visitors worldwide with genuine content through its globally collaborative network of reference websites and content partners,” Efraim says.

Top 100 Companies: Europe

Stands4 has been recognized by some of the world’s leading media outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today. Its huge banks of information can be used for a wide variety of industries and pursuits, such as law enforcement; education; business and even plane spotting.

But keeping ahead of its own industry is a constant battle, admits Efraim, who as well as with the traditional players also calls out “niche” sites such as Brainy Quotes and Urban Dictionary as competition.

“We’re working hard to make sure we keep growing year over year on high percentage,” he says. “We are making sure we’re not missing out on the growing mobile arena. We’re also planning on larger acquisitions of related websites to grow our network even further. We’re planning on reaching the 10 million monthly unique visitors month, launch our new Scripts. com website, and make 2 more acquisitions of competing websites.”

With that much ambition, the company, which has never used outside investment, is looking for a cash injection to complete a couple of key acquisitions. With that, Efraim notes, Stands4 can continue its almost 50% year-on-year growth, and expand to offer content in new regions.

“We’re already operating in foreign countries like Indonesia with our Kamus. net dictionary, and also providing multilingual dictionaries to customers worldwide through our Microsoft Office apps,” he adds.

And that is helping Stands4 work on a market opportunity its founder says is “very big! The internet was created first and foremost for providing people with information, and that’s what STANDS4 is about.

“We’re currently covering most of the reference fields and in a very good position to dominate the majority of them.”

SysMech www.sysmech.co.uk

in a number of roles prior to starting the SysMech business. Green now leads the business as the managing director.

Rob Green Software

TA Telecom

Kent, England

www.tatelecom.com

» SysMech operates within the telecommunications industry, providing a novel software solution, Zen, to communication service providers (CSP’S) such as Vodafone and Turkcell. Zen is a unified service assurance solution which continuously collects, analyzes and visualizes vast amounts of network data, providing a real-time, end to end view of the network.

Zen uniquely encompasses performance management, fault management and service assurance into one single platform.

Traditionally the telecommunications industry has taken a siloed approached to these functions, however, with increasing customer demands for improved call quality, internet speeds and streaming capabilities, it is now essential for CSP’s to have a better view of their entire network.

Zen is used on a daily basis to visualize the performance of the network, and to identify and quickly rectify any faults or performance issues. This ensures consistently good mobile coverage for their end users, and brings customer experience to the forefront across the complete business. SysMech is a privately owned company, based in the U.K. The management team is highly focused and well structured, consisting of the three business founders plus an injection of new commercial talent.

Leadership: Rob Green is one of the three co-founders of SysMech, playing a leading role within the business direction and management. He has an extensive background in engineering after graduating from Nottingham university in the U.K. Since then Green has built on his expertise

Amr Shady Software Cairo, Egypt » TA Telecom harnesses the power of big data to build mobile content platforms, apps and analytic tools that drive revenue in the Middle East and Africa.

The company is also active in other markets, but concentrates mainly in the countries surrounding Egypt, where it is headquartered.

The company started in mobile advertising in 2000, and was previously known as 3alSMS. In 2001, the firm secured a partnership with Vodafone, and never looked back. 3alSMS sponsored an American University in Cairo carnival to build a database of mobile numbers for advertising clients.

At the AUC carnival, Vodafone’s marketing director approached TA Telecom’s cofounders to explore future partnership opportunities with the mobile operator.

The entrepreneurs grabbed this opportunity, pitching an idea for a valueadded service (VAS) for soccer fans in a trivia game, which turned out to be a success. The Egypt-headquartered startup that kicked off with mobile advertising, expanded over a span of 16 years from VAS to building mobile content platforms, mobile donations, mobile applications and analytic tools to stakeholders in more than 10 countries.

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is tough to list companies in countries like Tanzania, for example, and can be challenging to acquire a license in the telecoms space there. TA Telecom also faces the challenge of staying ahead of user behavior changes. New technology adoption results in drastic user behavior changes and keeps TA Telecom on its toes, making sure it is constantly innovating to stay ahead.

Despite the challenges, the market is a rewarding one. “The mobile market opportunity is great, especially in Africa, which has the fastest mobile subscriber growth in the world, approaching around 1 billion mobile subscriptions,” a company spokesperson tells Red Herring. “The mobile market has the largest impact on African life and business. Mobile services are more affordable and available than many of the basic services in Africa. There are lots of opportunities to create value for the African population because of the dependency on mobile infrastructure.”

For the next 18 months, and beyond, the future looks bright for TA Telecom. “The African telecom industry is expected to grow at unprecedented rates. Market saturation is unlikely in the near future with more investments flooding into the continent to fulfill its growing appetite to communicate via mobile,” the company concludes.

TagCommander www.tagcommander.com Michael Froment Cloud Computing Paris, France » Founded in 2010, TagCommander is a European pioneer and leader in the growing market for Enterprise Tag Management Systems. The TagCommander online platform allows marketers to manage the digital tags of 400 marketing solution providers with point-and-click simplicity.

Leveraging the insight they gain from exploring customer data captured by all their digital tags, marketers are empowered to direct real-time data streams from the TagCommander platform into each of their point marketing solutions, enabling one-to-one engagement across the full customer journey to become ever more targeted, relevant, and personalized.

In sixteen countries, over 250 customers including Axa, Cdiscount, Air FranceKLM, PMU, Europcar, Groupalia, Intimissimi, and the Canadian Yellow Pages trust the company to manage their digital tags; and get their point marketing solutions to market more effectively on their own as well as market better together.

Leadership: Michael Froment is responsible for TagCommander’s dayto-day-operations, as well as leading the company’s sales, marketing and product strategy. Prior to joining TagCommander he was the Head of Sales at XiTi/AT Internet, a web analytics leader. In that capacity he led AT Internet’s international sales efforts and contributed to AT Internet achieving a leadership position globally.

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Froment led large web analytics projects for e-commerce leaders including Rue du Commerce, PriceMinister, Pixmania, as well as classified ad leader Le Bon Coin and large enterprises including Total, Solocal Group, Saint Gobain, AccorHotels Group, Schibsted Group and Gucci Group.

Froment holds a bachelor’s degree in Modern Literature and a master’s degree in Econometrics from Université Lumière (Lyon II). He also holds a master’s degree in Marketing from Université Paris – Valde-Marne (Paris XII).

Talent Swarm www.talentswarm.com Jim Novack Cloud Computing LMadrid, Spain » Talent Swarm proposes a Collaborative Work Environment (CWE) that combines engineering design software with a super realistic 3D gaming-like environment, allowing the use of a global talent pool and an integrated catalog of parts, from design to facilities management for the petrochemical, industrial, aeronautical industries and large building construction.

Leadership: Jim Novack is the CEO/Owner of Dynatec, engineering services company in Madrid, Spain with 200 employees, a social entrepreneur and the founder of Talent Swarm.

Novack is driven to create and implement disruptive projects that solve real needs and improve people´s lives using technology, applied in a robust, powerful and easy-

Top 100 Companies: Europe

to-use way. He has a passion to observe, catalog and imagine new applications, products and services based on technology trends, social commerce, the massively open and online publishing of unlimited free knowledge (MOOC), Crowdsourcing, the Internet of Things (IoT), soon to be the Internet of Everything..

Talk360 www.talk360.com Hans Osnabrugge Telecommunications Enschede, Netherlands » Talk360 was born out of frustration with the limited possibilities and absence of solutions offered to make both low cost and high quality international calls using a smartphone or tablet.

“Talk360 challenges the current power of existing providers and to date is the only ‘truly global telecom company’ with millions of customers in more than 180 countries, eclipsing the likes of telecom giants Vodafone and AT&T,” a company spokesperson told Red Herring.

The company is led by CEO Hans Osnabrugge, an Amsterdam-based entrepreneur, a pioneer in VoIP solutions and partner at Brooklyn Ventures.

“There has to be a cheaper way,” Osnabrugge said to his co-founder and CMO Wouter van den Berg in 2009. By 2013 the company, then known as Ringcredible, was founded, referring to itself as a ‘Telco 3.0’ brand.

Ringcredible was rebranded Talk360 late last year to focus on international calls.

Using the app people can stay in touch with friends and family, keep costs low on their travels or use it as a backup for when their contract minutes run out. Unlike other apps the person a Talk360 user calls does not need to have the app installed or

be online, allowing the freedom to call any landline or cell number in the world.

The numbers speak for themselves. Over four million people are Talk360 users, enjoying prices that are up to 90% lower than major telecommunications providers.

Quality, too, is dependent only on the connection of the caller and not the receiver - and, claims the company, it’s much better than the competition.

That competition is many, and well-known.

Of course there are the more traditional telco companies - MTN, Vodafone, T-Mobile etc - but there are also a large number of free, peer-to-peer platforms, the most famed of which include Skype, WhatsApp, Tango and Vonage.

But with its aforementioned advantages, Osnabrugge and van den Berg have managed to build Talk360 into one of the Netherlands’, and Europe’s, most promising startups. VCs, too, have been impressed: $3.7 million has been raised thus far from angel investors and a European fund.

They realize that the market opportunity is huge. After all, there are over 1.3 billion smartphone users worldwide, of which 100% make calls. “We have the best offering in the market,” says the spokesperson. “Already we have customers in 180 countries and a physical presence in Europe, Africa and Latin America.”

Talk360 is currently working on an Asia office opening, which it says will happen soon.

“The quality and ease of use of Talk360 is amazing. I just called from Paris to the U.S. for 30 minutes for 35c, and it was crystal clear. This must be the Uber for Telcos.”

Talk360 is currently looking for the funding it needs to speed up its aggressive growth even further, expanding global partnerships and focusing on developing markets like Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. “We make our product affordable and accessible for all, also by adding local offline and online payment methods so everyone is capable of buying airtime and make affordable phone calls,” said the company.

Add to that a Red Herring Top 100 Europe award and it’s no surprise the CEO is bullish about his company’s fortunes, heading into its third year of service: “Within Europe, Talk360 is seen as a role model for promising start-up companies: a combination of technology and userfriendliness enabling an app that is attractive and accessible to the general public.

“With Talk360 you’ll notice the difference immediately as you’ll save money with every call. The more you use Talk360, the more you save.”

TBlox www.tblox.com Vilayat William Internet/Online Rotterdam, Netherlands » In the past 10 years TBlox has created an online ERP system with its clients.

The company has successfully replaced traditional ERP systems like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics to prove the quality of the software. However, the goal is not to provide an alternative to these applications, but to make ERP software available for free (as a commodity) to any organization in the world (including SME and developing countries).

Leadership: Vilayat William is the CEO of TBlox. Driven by loads of positive energy he leads the company to become the new standard in business software globally. As a Dutch CPA with almost 20 years of experience, William really understands the needs of management of large and medium-sized companies.

He worked for organizations like KPMG, Arthur Andersen and Galapagos and was the CBO for the past years at TBlox. “By smart innovation in products and business development we continuously try to exceed our clients’ expectations.” www.REDHERRING.com

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Telavox www.telavox.se Viktor Karlsson Telecommunications Malmo, Sweden » Most 18-year-olds are concerned far more with exams and fraternizing than entrepreneurship. That’s not to say these were things Viktor Karlsson didn’t do.

It’s just that aged 18, in the year 2000, Karlsson was also busy founding his first tech company.

Now 33, Karlsson has overseen Telavox’ rise from part-time hobby to international brand, employing dozens of people in his Swedish hometown of Malmö and reaching over 250,000 users in more than a dozen countries.

During Karlsson’s studies he started up Telavox in the beginning of 2000 with an idea that telecom and cloud services should not be difficult nor expensive.

Telavox’ product, Flow, uses traditional telecom and private branch exchange (PBX) services, adds a modern UX design and makes it available through easy and free sign-up. In the company’s 16th year it is still committed to high-level growth, having recently opened offices in Norway and Finland, and starting digital sales in ten countries across Europe.

“Modern business users demands complete 24-hour self-sufficiency, cloud and platform independence, all the way from ordering and number porting to SIMhandling, MDM and IVR configuration,” the company said. “By standing on more than ten years of experience in cloud development, fixed and mobile telephony and user experience, Telavox converges it all into Flow and lets users sign up for free and start using chat, soft-phones, teleconferencing and loads of other features from day one.

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“Fully network integrated mobiles and fixed traffic can easily be added through a simple user license model that provides a fantastic user experience.”

Telavox’ market is huge but it is also extremely competitive, with large operators such as Telia, Telenor and Tele2 and 3 pushing prices and marketing their products aggressively. Even so, Telavox has cornered a decent section of the market, bagging revenues upwards of $40 million annually.

“At Telavox we’re passionate about revolutionizing the way businesses communicate,” the company mission reads. “We are a super productive bunch of people, performance driven and dedicated to unleashing wonder. Our mission is to challenge, create and have fun.

“We come to work every day to develop communication solutions and we’re doing it with technology that is inventive, dependable and easy to use. We thrive to offer both world-class user experiences and seamlessly integrated mobile services.

We’re creating a world-leading Swedish IT company.”

Long since having shed its student project status, Telavox has become one of Malmö’s most important startups. And with a rapid expansion plan in place, Karlsson is keen to push his product into ever increasing territories. “As we go global,” the company said, “the market opportunity will be huge.”

Terria Mobile www.terria.com Robin Wirz Mobile Basel, Switzerland » Basel software developer Terria Mobile has been on a sharp upward incline since its foundation in 2011. Its pedigree cannot be denied. “After having successfully built up a company in the web content management space, with an $120 million IPO and a later $240 million sale to Adobe Systems, we have early anticipated a need for similar systems in the mobile space, to run and manage a portfolio of corporate mobile apps,” CEO Robin Wirz told Red Herring.

“This led us to found Terria Mobile in order to repeat history,” he added. Wirz knows what he’s talking about: before joining Terria he ran product marketing at Day Software and other companies.

His COO, Didier Wetzel, brings in a wealth of operations and implementation experience, having also been at Day but also having founded his own IT and project management company, focusing on global enterprise.

“With our experienced founding and management team - having successfully built a similar company, in the web space but for the same type of customers, before - we truly understand the customers’ needs of today and tomorrow, have the skills to cater to them as well as the experience and skills to grow and scale our business,” Wirz said.

“Our mobile experience platform ‘LaunchBase’ offers the best and most comprehensive solution to create winning mobile experiences, and to run and manage a full portfolio of enterprise apps - internal and external - based on the number one success factor: the mobile experience.”

Top 100 Companies: Europe

In the five years it has been operational, Terria has grown quickly to become one of Basel’s, and Switzerland’s, most promising tech startups. The market for mobile applications is a dense and closely contested one. But with Terria’s DNO Wirz is sure his charges can make a big splash. “Our solution is unique and complementary,” he said.

The next 18 months, he added, will be spent increasing sales and marketing, expediting international growth and setting up more indirect sales channels. “So far we have achieved all our milestones bootstrapped,” Wirz said, “but are now in a financing round and hence looking for investors.”

That task has been made easier through partnerships such that with Alteon Capital Partners, which Terria won this month to engage U.S. strategic partners and “deploy new international market channels.”

Federico Arcelli, a partner at Alteon, has also joined the Terria board of directors, adding yet more experience to the Basel boardroom. The company is already profitable, and is eyeing a 40-fold increase in revenues leading up to 2019.

That may seem a big task, but it comes with the caveat that Terria Mobile’s total addressable market is valued at $100 billion by 2020. Add to that some gushing client reviews and it’s clear that Wirz and Wetzel will have a busy next few years at Terria’s helm.

“There is a healthy competition but we are certain that with our experience and expertise, we are in a great position to succeed,” said Wirz.

Texxi Global www.texxi.com Eric Masaba Clean Tech Liverpool, United Kingdom » The idea of ride sharing is well established now, and some of the major players in the field are among the most valuable startups in the world. But there was one company determined to make ridesharing work way before anyone else.

Eric Masaba came up with the idea in November 2003, while working at a hedge fund in Greenwich, Conneticut. He was trying to design a system for finding credit default candidates amongst the Russell 3000, when, as Masaba describes “the penny dropped” and his company Texxi Global was born.

“It was a strange set of circumstances that led to this particular odyssey since I had been a casualty of the TMT (dotcom) bust of 2001-2002 and had got a job in a hedge fund to make ends meet. It then turned out that all my experiences were leading me to this one epiphany - how to solve the dynamic, large-scale ridesharing problem that had been a conundrum in the transport community for 40 odd years,” says Masaba.

“My realization was that a method from applied mathematics called a genetic algorithm could be used in conjunction with a representation of customer demand in a futures exchange to solve the real-time dynamic ridesharing problem,” he adds.

Texxi Global is a B2B solution, that occupies the space between ride requests and trip dispatch packaging, optimizing the process of ride matching. “The key innovation has been a combination of ideas and methods from a myriad of disciplines to permit groups of people to be packaged into a vehicle and the aggregate demand to be traded in real-time,” explains Masaba.

“The goal is to ensure that customers can get a ride in a vehicle (dedicated primarily to shared rides), in which the seats are individually priced (allowing one user to purchase all of the seats if they really feel they must have a vehicle alone).”

The market, unsurprisingly, is competitive, but a large opportunity. “Transport & Logistics is one of the world’s largest markets, underpinning everything from personal transport to food and materials delivery. The competition wrought by the new paradigm is upturning both the entire auto mobile industry, the design of new cities and the adaptation of old ones.

Things will never be the same again,” says Masaba.

In the future Masaba has big plans for the U.K., where the company is based, and abroad. He plans to expand Texxi’s services in England, and scope out operations in Asia and Australia.

Tipa-Corp www.ipa-corp.com Daphna Nissenbaum Clean Tech Hod Hasharon, Israel » Tipa is the first company to offer a viable alternative to flexible packaging for food and beverages: its packaging is bio-based, 100% compostable and has the same mechanical properties as ordinary plastic and no adverse impact on product shelf life. The vision behind Tipa is to design bio-based packaging while keeping in mind two important factors: delivering the same properties as plastic-based packaging and ensuring the product’s end of life will be fully compostable, just like an orange peel, so nature won’t even notice we’re here.

The company’s products are based on deep technology innovation and multiple patents, solving a complex multitude of www.REDHERRING.com

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challenges: from flexibility, sealing strength, manufacturing challenges, adaptability to current packaging and production practices, shelf life requirements and more.

It sells a product range from simple one ply films to a complex multi-layer products.

Tipa creates packages that on the one hand have conventional plastic properties but on the other hand degrade biologically.

Having received $10 million in its latest funding round, led by Li Ka-Ching’s Horizons Ventures, Tipa has begun market entry.

Leadership: Prior to founding TIPA in 2010, Daphna Nissenbaum served as the CEO of the Caesarea Center for Capital Markets and Risk Management at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya, Israel’s first private University. Prior to that she held various management positions at SPL Worldgroup Ltd, a software company, and prior to that she was a project manager at Whelty Lager Ltd., Boston MA, USA. Nissenbaum holds an MBA (with honors) in Marketing and Entrepreneurship from IDC Herzliya and a BA in Economics and Software Engineering from the Bar Ilan University.

Todacell www.todacell.com Amir Goldstein Mobile Raanana, Israel » Todacell was a best-in-class technologycentered mobile advertising network catering to mobile advertisers and publishers around the world.

The company’s unique ground breaking technological backbone was complemented by a team of mobile advertising experts that provided its customers with trustworthy 66

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consultation and best practices to expand their business. Todacell had offices in New York, London, Berlin and Tel Aviv.

Leadership: Amir Goldstein is a senior veteran in the Israeli Hi-Tech industry with over 30 years of experience. Goldstein held a variety of executive positions at Amdocs in Israel, US and New Zealand.

After Amdocs Goldstein also served as EVP CIO of Cellcom - Israel’s largest cellular company, and later as CEO of Botticelli Venture Funds. Alongside his position as CEO of Todacell, Goldstein served on the board of directors of several companies as well as voluntary activities for the community. Goldstein holds a BA in Economics, Tel-Aviv University, Israel.

TokenID www.tokenid.com Mark Gerban Security Haifa, Isreal » TokenID is a patent-pending tokenization software that issues a onetime use payment credential, allowing the facilitation of secure monetary transactions between any type of payment system.

Its technology can eliminate credit card breaches at the point-of-sale, allow payment systems such as Google Wallet and PayPal to work with all merchants (both online and offline) without any merchant integration, and has higher security standards than current credit card EMV Chip and PIN systems.

Leadership: Mark Gerban, co-founder of TokenID, is a recognized international authority in the payment and security industries. An EU board member of the Merchant Risk Council, he is a regular

speaker at international events such as the Merchant Risk Council and Merchant Payment Ecosystem.

TradAir www.tradair.com Illit Geller Fintech Tel Aviv, Israel » TradAir is a leading provider of front office optimization solutions designed to offer financial institutions the ability to enhance existing revenue streams, create new revenue layers and reduce costs, while creating new client relationships. TradAir provides a comprehensive suite of products utilizing the latest technology.

TradAir offers an end-to-end trading infrastructure from liquidity aggregation, price creation and dynamic distribution to trade optimization solutions. The TradAir centralized solution is modular and seamlessly integrates to existing components, providing highest level of flexibility and fastest time to market.

TradAir has offices in London, New York and Tel Aviv. TradAir technology is based on HTML5 newest standards, providing fast, secure and personalized applications.

TradAir is delivered as a SAAS model, working together with a client’s IT department to provide a customized solution to fit their needs. This allow customers to maintain direct relationships with liquidity providers without conflict, in a clear and transparent fashion.

TradAir comprehensive solution is easily integrating into workflows and existing technology.

Leadership: Prior to founding TradAir, Illit Geller led the business development team at post-trade service provider Traiana.

Her responsibilities included its flagship

Top 100 Companies: Europe

product, the Harmony network, and relationships with tier one banks and major market platforms. Geller was instrumental in the sale of Traiana to ICAP plc in 2008 for $251 million.

Geller began her career at PwC/FMR Consulting where she led the financial risk management team in the U.S. and EMEA. She has a degree in Business & Finance from Boston University.

innovative and creative approach intersects 3 major industries: life sciences, IT and web technology which Trialbee believes is the future of the industry.

Ubimo

Software Malmö, Sweden » Trialbee is a software company that develops and sells products and services that simplify and improve planning and execution of clinical trials. The core product has been developed in close collaboration with pharmaceutical and CRO companies as well as best practice experience from the telecoms and IT industries.

The company’s vision is to develop a platform for facilitating exchange of information between stakeholders involved in conducting clinical trials.

Ultimately the firm connects patients, investigators, researchers and sponsors allowing faster and more precise execution of clinical trials. Trialbee focuses on providing software tools and services to operate recruitment campaigns based on its software to provide its customers with an end-to-end e-recruitment service.

Leadership: With a background in telecommunications, Tobias Folkesson along with co-founder, Jonas Billing, identified a key bottleneck in patient recruitment in clinical trials for the pharmaceutical industry. Trialbee was founded in 2010 to address these key issues and with the patients in mind. This

Internet/Online Airport City, Israel

www.ubimo.com

Marketing/Advertising Tel Aviv, Israel

www.trialbee.com Tobias Folkesson

www.videodubber.com Boaz Rossano

Ran Ben-Yair

Trialbee

VideoDubber

» Ubimo is a real-time contextually aware mobile marketing platform. With Ubimo, advertisers can leverage real world context together with the latest programmatic media buying technologies to accurately reach their target audience.

Ubimo’s platform goes beyond location, transforming latitude and longitude, first party data, live weather and local events into greater context and awareness of the audience’s current state of mind. Ubimo provides a full stack marketing solution that covers all aspect of the campaign life cycle. Automating media buying and delivery process with real-time analysis of the user context and online engagement optimization, enabling dynamic and relevant messaging tailored to the user’s experience.

Leadership: Ran Ben-Yair oversees the company’s product direction, strategic development and execution. Prior to Ubimo Ben-Yair co-founded LabPixies Ltd (acquired by Google in 2010), a leading web and mobile app development company, bootstrapping the company and growing the business to reach tens of millions of users in four years. At Google Ben-Yair continued as a Product Manager in search where he led and launched large scale products. Ben-Yair holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

» Some startups’ names are enigmatic, ephemeral. Not VideoDubber. The Israeli company, founded in 2013 by entrepreneur Boaz Rossano, does exactly what you’d expect: it dubs videos. But the firm, based in Tel Aviv’s Airport City, has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. Indeed, it is the first online service that dubs movies automatically into any one of 40 languages.

“Our vision is to create a world in which video content will no longer have language barriers,” Roassano tells Red Herring. “Everyone would be able to watch any video, in any language, without limitations or delays.”

The company’s first mission was to help bridge the video spoken language gap in an efficient and automated way. VideoDubber does this via a cloud platform that uses computer-generated text-to-speech (TTS) voices, using the voice signature of professional dubbing talents. The resultant audio sounds like natural speech, without any background noise.

VideoDubber helps broadcasters and content publishers to add automated voice-over and dubbing audio tracks using that technology platform. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rossano is no stranger to hyperbole when describing his company, comparing it to the father of widespread literacy.

“When Gütenberg invented his print press, he didn’t just enable a low cost and quick printing of pages - he expanded the human knowledge, by making the storage vehicle of human thoughts, accessible to everyone,” he said.

“By minimizing the costly barriers of video localization, we believe we’ll make www.REDHERRING.com

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any video, accessible to anyone - even those who do not speak that language, or even those who cannot read subtitles.”

VideoDubber already has one patent secured and another 24 pending, with competition in the field reduced to those local dubbing studios and voice-over marketplaces - like fiver.com - that provide a very different service. It’s a market that, according to Rossano, is worth $6 billion annually: the estimated size of the global localization industry for media and television. That’s before adding new markets, “like e-commerce and e-learning.”

The company has already raised $260,000 in seed funding, and is looking to add another $3 million with which it can launch a bigger assault on the market. Rossano is looking at China in particular, as a potential for e-learning growth for VideoDubber, which is still running in Beta.

The next 18 months, he added, will be spent “raising the next round and introducing additional unique technologies like manual intonation and synthetic emotions to digitized voices.” With more languages planned and a rapid expansion slated when the latest funding round arrives, it’s no surprise that Rossano is ebullient about his unique product’s future.

So are its clients. “Videodubber has everything I look for in any external application I use: it is very helpful, solves problems, inexpensive and easy to use,” Raúl Garcia, of Barcelona’s TriggerFish Media, said.

Neither is it a shock that VideoDubber has come out of Israel, where most Hebrewspeaking locals must watch films and television in English, most people’s second language. Non-automatic dubbing can cost $1,000 an hour or more, but Rossano can do it for $5-10 per minute. VideoDubber can even include whether an actor is happy or sad in the dub.

With a Red Herring Top 100 Europe award under his belt, it’s easy to tell which emotion Rossano is feeling with VideoDubber.

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VirtaMed www.virtamed.com Stefan Tuchschmid

other true entrepreneur, Tuchschmid is passionate about bringing ideas to life and products to market. Tuchschmid lives in Zurich, Switzerland, is married and fully relies on the smiles of his baby son to bring things into perspective.

Medtech Schlieren, Switzerland

Vocalzoom

» VirtaMed is a Swiss company founded in 2007 with an interdisciplinary background in medicine and engineering. The company’s mission is to develop stateof-the-art training tools for endoscopic surgery of highest possible realism, all with the ultimate goal to improve the quality of patient care.

www.vocalzoom.com

VirtaMed’s virtual reality simulators provide instructional teaching and training of different diagnostic and therapeutic endoscopic interventions.

The simulator family includes HystSim for hysteroscopic interventions, UroSim for prostate resection and bladder tumors, ArthroS for knee and shoulder arthroscopy and PelvicSim for IUD insertion and hysteroscopy. In all of VirtaMed’s simulators, surgeons can use original instruments to train in a safe environment before performing surgeries on patients.

» VocalZoom was founded with the mission to enable speech recognition and voice communications in virtually any environment. Its unique SEEON technology reduces strong and transient noises, enabling high and reliable speech recognition rates and clear communications under almost any noisy conditions.

Leadership: Stefan Tuchschmid received a Master’s degree in electrical engineering from the ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 2005.

To finance his undergraduate studies, Tuchschmid founded his first and stillexisting company netpictures.ch in 2001 when he was 22. In parallel to his PhD thesis “High-fidelity surgical simulator for hysteroscopy” at ETH Zurich, he launched VirtaMed in 2007 to create the most realistic simulators possible. Since then, he built up a dedicated team and shaped VirtaMed to become the technology leader in surgical training.

Tuchschmid is winner of the MICCAI Young Scientist Award 2007 and the Swiss Economic Award 2013 in Hightech/Biotech as well as serial-winner of most business plan competitions in Switzerland. As any

Tal Bakish Consumer Electronics Yokneam, Israel

VocalZoom’s technology is applicable to a wide variety of applications, including mobile computing (smart phones, wearable, headset) and automotive. The VocalZoom sensor SEEON is a laser microphone which sense speech from facial skin vibration from distances of up to 1 meter.

Leadership: Tal Bakish is the founder of VocalZoom. Bakish is a passionate entrepreneur, experienced in executive management and leading multi-national teams in technology companies. Prior to VocalZoom Bakish worked for Cisco, IBM, ModuMobile and other companies leading engineering teams and as a consultant.

Top 100 Companies: Europe

Wadaro www.wadaro.com Robert Wakeling Telecommunications Daresbury, United Kingdom » Wadaro’s Robert Wakeling has a long history in telecommunications. Previous to his Manchester startup’s inception, in 2005, he had spent over two decades in the industry at brands such as Magic4, Telemac Services and Geoworks.

Being an engineer and subject to variable quality of experience of his mobile network, Robert studied how operators measure their performance, and what actions they took to improve services based on those measurements.

Believing that there was a better source of information about network performance and specifically subscriber experience available from within mobile phones, Wakeling founded Wadaro to develop and market ‘TAP Essential’, a quality of experience measurement solution that crowdsources KPI from within retail consumer and M2M/IoT SIM cards,” he tells Red Herring, following the company’s victory in Amsterdam.

Wadaro, based in the Daresbury Innovation Centre, is a software company specializing in the development and deployment of SIM, and device-based quality of experience (QoE) monitoring solutions.

It is the first firm to measure QoE from SIM cards, and is currently, according to Wakeling, “the only company anywhere in the world that can demonstrate successful large-scale deployment to mobile network operators.”

“Wadaro products are complementary to traditional solutions already in use in mobile network operators so we do not compete with vendors of those products,” he adds. “In some cases we partner with

them. Currently, competition is scarce but we are seeing vendors of traditional test and measurement solutions looking to develop products similar to ours.” Of those in Wadaro’s space, Wakeling counts Gemalto and Oberthur as competition.

The company has been bootstrapped by its CEO and bolstered by VC cash, to which Wakeling is not looking to add in the near future. Revenues have, he says, been “modest until recently…However, our industry has become more invested in subscriber QoE and the number of inquiries we receive is rising. Given our current order book combined with qualified prospects, we should see a threefold improvement on 2015 in our next accounts.”

That is no shock given that there are currently around a thousand core mobile network operators, plus another thousand mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). Revenue opportunities usually start somewhere around $200,000 for small operators, with bigger fish operating at $5 million.

Supporting channel partners, says Wakeling, is Wadaro’s biggest challenge.

“We achieve global presence through a strategic partnership with Morpho, a Safran company, and Morpho has hundreds of business development staff around the world,” he adds. “We also have two distributors in Africa and agents in the Middle East. All place a significant demand on our time to support their engagement with new and existing operator customers.”

It is to those developing regions - and Latin America - that Wakeling, and Wadaro, are looking in 2016. “Wadaro has committed investment to the development of very much sought after product capabilities,” he says. “One development in particular will be extremely disruptive as it will completely change a business unit and process that has been relied upon by MNOs for over 25 years.

WebProof www.webproof.com Jan Adeltoft Internet/Online Copenhagen, Denmark » WebProof is an elegant online proofing platform, which reduces production time.

It is an alternative to traditional proofing, where users attach a document to an email and send it back and forth between all stakeholders.

With 24/7/365 access, everybody can anytime, anywhere check their documents and they can forget about searching for info in emails. WebProof is not just for Wiki documents, Google docs, Microsoft Share-Point or any other file- sharing software. WebProof is especially popular in companies working in graphic production.

Setting up a new license is automatic.

Several forms of security are established both for users and at the WebProof cloud server park, including online backup.

WebProof guarantees 99.9% uptime, which on average is less than 5 minutes’ downtime/day.

Leadership: Jan Adeltoft is a business founder with a technical background. He has a Bachelor of Science degree. He started his career in the graphic industry, where he got first-hand experience with the pitfalls of traditional document proofing. It was apparent to him that dealing with so many emails was ineffective, making it difficult to assign responsibilities and measure progress. He also saw how difficult it was to meet deadlines. This knowledge helped him see the potential in WebProof and moved him to invest in the company and become its CEO.

“We continuously seek new channel partners and our efforts last year in this regard should start to show returns as our business development heads further east towards China.” www.REDHERRING.com

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Windward www.windward.eu Ami Daniel Clean Tech Tel Aviv, Israel » Windward is a specialized data company, analyzing and organizing the world’s maritime data. Today, ships transport over 90% of global trade, impacting each one of us and all industries worldwide.

But despite the huge stakes at sea, the data on ship activity is largely inaccessible and unusable: it is massive, fragmented and often intentionally manipulated.

Windward is bridging the information gap: The company has created a firstof-its-kind data platform for maritime information. This is a single place, and the only place, where all the information about what’s happening in the oceans worldwide, 24/7 is aggregated, vetted and analyzed.

Through a powerful marriage of data sciences and shipping expertise, Windward makes the data relevant and actionable to customers across the ecosystem.

Intelligence agencies, coast guards and navies worldwide are using Windward’s platform to identify suspicious ships out of a literal ocean of vessels. The Windward data is also being used in the oil and gas sector. The company is now scaling the data platform to additional verticals, with finance as the next step.

Leadership: Ami Daniel is the co-Founder and CEO of Windward, a specialized data company analyzing and organizing the world’s maritime data. Daniel and co-Founder Matan Peled, both former

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naval officers, launched the company in 2010, having recognized the immense challenges and opportunities presented by the intersection of technology and the maritime domain.

An entrepreneur with a lifelong interest in large-scale social and technological change, Daniel is the recipient of the Israeli President’s Award for Social Activism and The Ilan Ramon Award for Leadership and Excellence. In 2013, Daniel was included in a distinguished group of the ‘40 most promising managers under 40’ published

by The Marker Magazine, and was named a Tel Aviv leader by Leaders Magazine, a U.S.-based publication focused on leadership issues. Daniel holds a law degree from the University of Tel Aviv.

Winnow www.winnowsolutions.com Marc Zornes Clean Tech London, United Kingdom » In an age of increased environmental awareness, food waste has become a global crisis. The global volume of food wastage is estimated at 1.3 billion edible tonnes.

The total volume of water used to produce a year’s wasted food is equivalent to three times the volume of Switzerland’s Lake Geneva - and a massive 1.4 billion hectares of land, or 28% of the world’s agricultural area, is used to produce lost or wasted food.

While at his previous company McKinsey Marc Zornes co-penned a significant

research paper on resource productivity.

From that report three things became clear: Too much food is wasted in the world. It’s tough to pin down the exact numbers but its somewhere close to a third of all food grown ends up not being eaten. Solving it is one of the biggest resource productivity opportunities we face today; as that third of food wasted is worth $750 billion annually.

And finally, not nearly enough attention is focused on solving this issue.

It was then that Zornes and Kevin Duffy decided to found Winnow. In 2013 the company was born, with the mission to lead a food waste revolution. Winnow, based in London, is focused on the U.K. hospitality sector, where around $3.6 billion worth of food is wasted annually. The modern commercial kitchen, the company claims, is effectively “an inefficient factory which can waste as much as it generates in profit.”

“Winnow’s workflow is optimized for the professional kitchen and more user friendly than the competition’s system,” Zornes tells Red Herring. “It assures accurate data for chefs and operation managers to see the exact cost of food waste and give them the possibility to see what they need to change within their operations to be more efficient.

“It saves staff time compared to recording waste manually or with an app which are both time consuming and prone to inaccuracies,” he adds. “The real time feedback to communicate the true cost of waste to staff raises awareness and helps changing behavior.”

Over the course of its existence Winnow has helped over 200 kitchens measure and manage food waste, using its U.S. provisionally-patented platform. Zornes

Top 100 Companies: Europe

claims his company lifts food gross margins by 2-6%. It only has one key competitor across the Atlantic Ocean, LeanPath, which hints at a bright future for Winnow.

“We came across the same misconceptions about waste over and over again: ‘We don’t have food waste’ and ‘Food waste is unavoidable,’” said Zornes. “The reality is that food waste is an issue that affects all kitchens who don’t accurately measure what gets put in the bin. In a busy environment, chefs cannot be blamed for not taking the time to manually write down everything which gets thrown away, and without this information it is impossible clearly see what is being wasted and change operations to minimize waste.”

The company, which is backed by two funding rounds worth a combined $4.2 million, is already looking further afield.

Winnow recently opened an office in Singapore to service Asia-Pacific. It has already begun working with large hotels across the region.

Closer to home, it has won praise from a large number of hospitality professionals - including renowned chefs like Britain’s Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall. “Winnow’s smart meter has helped us measure where food is wasted in our restaurant, and quickly points us to areas we can make changes,” he said. “It’s clear that many others in our sector could benefit from using Winnow to reduce their waste and costs. It’s a real nobrainer for the hospitality industry.”

Considering there are over 45,000 hotels in the U.K. alone, and around 56,000 restaurants, the total addressable market is huge. So is the problem. Zornes and co are committed to ensuring one of the world’s biggest potential human and environmental disasters does not go unchecked.

“We believe that the Winnow system can help solving the problem of food waste on a global scale,” he said. “We are planning to expand into new markets globally while continuing to grow in existing markets. We are aiming to move forward a seven-figure turnover.”

Wirepas

Wordbee

www.wirepas.com

www.wordbee.com

Teppo Hemiä

José Vega

Telecommunications

Cloud computing

Tampere, Finland

Soleuvre, Luxembourg

» Wirepas is a pioneer of Internet of Things-enabling world’s largest single mesh networks. Embedded in devices from smart meters and environmental wireless sensors to home and building automation, clean tech, health care and lighting, its unique, disruptive software solution Pino allows millions of devices to independently connect to each other to form a fully autonomous and infallible network. It connects to the internet without any configuration, independently of any third party network manager, and brings remarkable lifetime savings to the service provider.

Leadership: Teppo Hemiä is an experienced technology and business leader with 20 years of experience in creating, defining, developing and delivering innovative global mobile technology products and solutions in international companies including Nokia, STMicroelectronics and ST-Ericsson. Hemiä has lead several successful technology and business model creations and turnarounds from early requirements to delivery, from zero to half a billion top line with PnL responsibility.

Hands-on leader, high attention to execution, product definition and even architecture choices, his management style encourages open dialog and teamwork, both vertical and transversal. He has always worked in multi-cultural environments, and run integration of different working cultures and organisations. Leadership from startup to a 1000-person division.

» Wordbee develops cloud-based solutions to streamline translation processes.

The company’s market is medium to large corporations and language service providers, which it aids in making content multilingual. The company is not providing language services per se but the infrastructure to make it happen. Thousands of users work with its solutions, users from companies like Nikon, Interpublic Group, World Vision, Microsoft or Hogarth. Wordbee is unique among competition in combining enterprise level translation management and computer assisted translation into one cloud product. These two components are typically dissociated and supplied by distinct vendors.

Wordbee was founded in 2008 in Luxembourg. A key stone of the company’s vision is moving translation closer to the end customer - move where the content is authored or produced. The recently launched Beebox links content sources like Sharepoint, Adobe CQ5, SiteCore, Mangento, Drupal or Wordpress into our translation infrastructure.

Leadership: José Vega is the co-founder of Wordbee, a Luxembourg based company.

He has 30 years of experience in linguistic engineering and consulting having occupied upper management positions in France and Luxembourg. He was involved in the creation of several language technology companies. During his career, Vega participated in and managed several projects in the framework of national and European R&D programs as well as in projects for international private companies.

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Top 100 Companies: Europe

WordDive www.worddive.com Timo-Pekka Leinonen Internet/Online Tampere, Finland » Learning a foreign language is one of the most valuable and rewarding skills a person can undertake. WordDive is one of language education’s biggest advances.

The development started in 1987 while creator and CEO Timo-Pekka Leinonen was studying software engineering.

Finn Leinonen kept developing it over the years and got significant contribution of know-how from his mother, who had a long career as a language teacher. After a period of development and research and several prototypes, WordDive was finally released in 2010.

The startup had a very personal raison d’être. Leinonen had struggled with language studies at school, and found even simple things like buying a train ticket in English really tough. At the same time, he was studying judo, and wanted to learn Japanese. It was 1987. Speed, for Leinonen, was key. But nothing appeared efficient enough. That’s when the idea for WordDive emerged.

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Leinonen was studying software engineering at the time, and combined it with his love, and experience, of learning languages to finally release WordDive in 2010, a method which uses multiple senses, optimized for each individual user.

The latter aspect has a patent pending. The results of the method speak for themselves.

“The students who take our prep course have a 75% higher probability to get a top score in the high school final exam, and 98% of the students would recommend the course to other students,” Leinonen tells Red Herring.

“The language learning market is very competitive and a transition towards eLearning and mLearning has clearly started,” he added. “The prep course market, on the other hand, is a new area and the competition is formed by private teachers, books and less advanced eLearning material.”

Big international companies such as Busuu, Duolingo and RosettaStone comprise the biggest challenges to WordDive’s market dominance. Private teachers still take home a large section of the market, but Leinonen added that they are “not necessarily direct competitors.”

Thus far his work has been largely confined to Europe. But with $1.7 million raised

from four angel investors, WordDive’s next 18 months will also be focused on China, where a commercial launch is slated for 2017.

“Currently we are looking for a go-tomarket partner who could help us to reach the potential customers in China,” said Leinonen. “In China alone, billions of dollars are used annually to prepare for the high school final exam. Even with 1% market share the market opportunity is substantial. There are 9.4 million people taking the high school final exam in China annually.”

WordDive is also looking to the German prep course market, another highly lucrative sector that would represent a big push beyond the company’s already positive user figures. It currently has over 190,000 users in 150 countries, and a 200% CAGR. With membership available at just $11 per month, it is unsurprising that Leinonen, after almost 30 years of work, is beginning to reap serious rewards with WordDive.

Top 100 Companies: Europe

the detection of dialogue patterns, Workstreampeople instance communication bottlenecks or compliance workstreampeople.com

violations.

Gijs Geurts

Leadership: Gijs Geurts is a skillful and experienced entrepreneur, Managing

Software Rotterdam, Netherlands » Workstreampeople has developed the Anywhere365 Universal Contact Center platform for Microsoft Lync with a unique philosophy in mind. Everything is focused on enabling efficient and productive dialogues to take place between people, its clients and customers and groups of people, while at the same time providing powerful, actionable business intelligence capabilities to extract previously hidden dialogue patterns.

Workstreampeople has taken a unique approach with respect to the development of its Anywhere365 Dialogue Management.

Instead of using legacy systems or improving on an existing code base, Anywhere365 was developed from the ground up, using all the advanced capabilities that Microsoft Lync had to offer. Apart from being fully native to the Lync environment, the company took special care to integrate the product suite within the whole enterprise software ecosystem of Microsoft. Seamless interaction with Exchange and easy trigger definitions using SharePoint are just two simple examples where Anywhere365 shines.

Apart from being a fully-fledged UCC based on the latest technology, Anywhere365 takes it another step further by providing an advanced means to track, manage and monitor all the dialogue events within a firm. Sophisticated data mining and pattern tracking solutions are easily implemented, which allow for

Director and manager.

Business

Development

Geurts implements technology and workstreams to fullfill the vision that Today’s Worker (employee) must have the right information at the right moment, on any location, everywhere, to be successful in his/her work always and every day.

wywy www.wywy.com Munich, Germany Tobias Schmidt Marketing/Advertising » wywy helps advertisers extend their TV advertising campaigns across screens and analyze the online impact of their TV buy.

The company offers synchronization of TV and online advertising to reach viewers on their second screen devices and increase ad awareness. With its real-time ad tracking tools, advertisers can compare what TV creative execution, network and day part work best to optimize their media plan accordingly.

fingerprints against the database of TV commercials. Whenever there is match, it triggers one of the company’s solutions.

On the advertising side, wywy is integrated as a real-time data provider with real-time advertising platforms such as Appnexus and Doubleclick by Google. This enables the company to start online campaigns milli-seconds after the detection of the TV ad. On the analytics side, wywy is integrated into the major analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, AT Internet, Webtrekk, eTracker) via a plugin, allowing TV advertisers to receive real-time TV airing data with one additional line of code on their website.

Leadership: Tobias Schmidt leads general strategy, sales and finance at wywy, with more than a decade of experience in starting and growing organizations. Schmidt knows what it takes to build an organization from scratch to sustainable profitability and exit.

A father of three, Schmidt has learned that startups are not the only species of babies he truly enjoys to see growing up.

Prior to co-founding wywy, Schmidt was founder and CEO of MineWolf Systems, a global leader in humanitarian landmine clearance. He spent his early career in venture capital and investment banking at Atlas Venture and Goldman Sachs.

Schmidt holds a master’s degree in business studies from WHU, Otto Beisheim School of Management and a bachelor‘s degree in business from EM Lyon.

The company’s proprietary ACR (automated content recognition) serves as the backbone of its offering: It monitor hundreds of TV channels in real-time, creating audio fingerprints of the linear TV signals and then comparing these

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Infinite Convergence – Three Years On From Top 100 Award Red Herring caught up with Infinite Convergence CEO Anurag Lal to get an update on the company, which won a Red Herring Top 100 award three years ago.

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Red Herring: It has been three years since your Red Herring award - what has changed with the company?

Anurag Lal: Since 2013, we’ve greatly strengthened our portfolio of products, including launching our secure internal messaging service NetSfere. NetSfere is a cloud-based enterprise messaging service that boasts device-to-device encryption and offers a secure platform for internal communication and collaboration, giving IT departments control over employee messaging across devices. We also built out our Enterprise Messaging Service (EMS) portfolio to now offer EMS Plus, EMS Flex and EMS API. We’ve added onto our roster of tier-1 mobile operators and large enterprises across the globe that we are deploying our next-generations wireless and messaging services with.

RH: How has the messaging industry changed over that time?

AL: Messaging apps are even more popular now. Consumers are using apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat and more not only for their personal communication, but also when communicating in the workplace. We’ve conducted studies that have found 44 percent of employees regularly use mobile messaging throughout the work day, but only 17 percent are using a secure, internal, company-created mobile app.

Companies across industries are allowing employees to use consumer applications for mobile messaging despite their inherent risks. Enterprises are feeling the pressure as their employees are communicating sensitive and private information over platforms that do not have the proper security protocols in place. Aside from being a concern for enterprises, mobile operators are also now tasked with rethinking their strategies and coming up with an alternative to gain back revenue.

RH: What challenges have you faced?

AL: We are continuously challenged to ensure that we have the means to attract

the right talent to the company. As Infinite Convergence grows, it’s important for us to scale our talent pool, as well. We’re looking to enhance our positioning with the right set of compensation, benefit options and other opportunities for talented individuals to come and contribute toward the success of our company.

RH: What are the major lessons you have learned that you would pass on to a CEO of a new startup?

AL: The biggest lessons CEOs need to know as they look to start an organization and scale is to have a plan in regards to where they’re headed, remain focused on that plan, communicate the plan effectively to the team, so everyone understands it, and stay close to the market and the customer, so they can understand the requirements coming directly from those segments and adjust their businesses’ capabilities to be more valuable to the end user.

RH: How is mobility in the workplace evolving?

AL: It’s evolving – fast. Despite the growth of smartphone penetration and the mobile app space, many companies have failed to come up with a comprehensive mobile strategy. Our studies have found that 46 percent of employees are within arm’s reach of their mobile phone for seven to eight hours within an eight-hour work day.

However, now we’re seeing many realize that they need an official mobile strategy with guidelines and security protocols in place. We’re no longer on the cusp of BYOD – employees are bringing their own devices to work every single day and using them for workplace communication. It’s now a matter of securing these devices and putting the right infrastructure in place to ensure that communication is secure.

RH: What trends do you think are influencing the industry most right now?

AL: The trends that I think are influencing the industry the most right now include: 5G – Consumers are increasingly reliant on a strong network to connect them to each other and their devices. The mobile industry is tasked with finding new ways to develop an advanced network that can provide the necessary suppot.5G is the next evolutionary step as operators look to meet demand for not only high-speed, but also high-quality networking. 5G connectivity will grow the connected lifestyle and enhance user experience through increased network capacity, enhanced network speed and better utilization of spectrum.

Connected lifestyle and IoT – With the prevalence of smart phones, smart connected technology is becoming mainstream. New smart devices are emerging, which means the mobile industry needs to find new ways to enable these segments. By 2020, it’s anticipated that there will be 34 billion internetconnected devices, nearly tripling the number of devices from 2015. However, this technology is very fragmented. The next step is bringing the connected lifestyle together.

Enterprise mobility and security – enterprises are increasingly focused on how they can secure their communication. This is an important consideration for many industries, but particularly in regulated industries, like healthcare and finance, where HIPAA and SOX compliances are present.

RH: What are the company’s plans for the next 3 years?

AL: We’re working on expanding our portfolio of services and offerings to make our mobile messaging platforms even stronger and more compelling for carriers and enterprises. While we add additional products and capabilities, we are also viscerally focused on making sure we establish ourselves as the leading organization delivering enterprise and carrier messaging.

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Centric Software’s

I

Cutting-Edge PLM is Tailored for the Clothing Industry

n 2004, Centric Software, founded in 1989 as Coryphaeus Software by former NASA employee Steve Lakowske, acquired Burlington, MAbased Framework Technologies. It would prove a key moment for the product lifecycle management (PLM) company, which has since become one of the sector’s most important players.

That year Centric approached the venture capital community with the idea to build a third-generation solution completely focused on the needs of retailers and brands that would cover a number of big pain points, CEO Chris Groves told Red Herring.

Centric would, he says, “embed best practices that are accessed with the click of a button; enable easy deployment and transformation of business processes; and end user self-service personalization built from scratch on cutting-edge mobile and cloud technologies.”

The same year the company won a $33 million Series A funding round led by investment heavyweights such as Bank of America; Boston Capital Ventures; Masthead Venture Partners and Oak Investment Partners. It was added to two other rounds that brought Centric up to over $80 million of funding.

Today the company has secured another five rounds, bringing the total amount of cash injected up to just under $150 million. Clearly some of the world’s top venture capitalists have seen the potential in Centric, that dozens of clients have been enjoying for years.

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The company, which is headquartered in the Californian city of San Jose, has spent the past two years expanding a footprint beyond the U.S. In 2014 it established itself in Shanghai, and this year a whopping 70% growth per annum, which Groves credits to “best product offering; unique product enablement of best practices; strongest customer references; and the strongest innovation track record,” has allowed Centric to open offices in Scandinavia, Mexico and Japan.

Times, for Centric, are changing for the better. Considering its technology and model, that should be no surprise.

PLM is the process of managing the entire life of a product, from its very inception until sale, service and disposal.

The concept, developed in 1985 by the American Motors Corporation, applies to just about every industry. For Centric, the goal has always been to develop an effective PLM platform for the retail clothing sector, which is valued, conservatively, at around $3 trillion.

Centric’s own total addressable market within that is $15-20 billion, Groves claimed. Understandably Centric has its competitors: Lectra, Infor and DeSL are just a few. However, he added, “the market is divided between multi-industry platform competitors whose offering is a poor fit for this industry: niche, under-capitalized apparel-only category competitors.”

Centric’s third-generation offering, Centric 8, with its cloud and mobile capacities, is, he said, perfectly tailored.

“There has been a widespread push to adopt best practices for revenue enablement and competitive advantage for the use of technology to make that transformation,” Groves added. Mobile and cloud is the winning combination. Centric was the first company to market the AFA (apparel, footwear, accessories) PLM space with mobile. “Today we have thousands of users around the world on 12 apps.”

Centric added a cloud-based SaaS solution for small businesses last September. In that field, the CEO explained, “we really have no competitors. In addition, we can now host large-scale cloud projects.”

In fact, things are going so well that Groves said Centric’s biggest current challenge is to manage its own growth. With the recent office openings, that should be doable. The firm is also “very strong in footwear and outdoor, and we’re moving into consumer goods, such as consumer packaged goods,” he added.

With all this in mind, Groves is targeting yet another year of phenomenal growth and profit for Centric Software. There are, he said, many changes afoot: “Connecting and synchronizing a wider range of departments to ensure revenue achievement, and compress the time to trend. Also, time to market is critical.

Without it, retailers lose sales, resort to promotions and risk ending up with large amounts of inventory on their hands.”

Groves, and Centric, will continue to innovate in 2016 and beyond, to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Feature Story

In Albania,Tech Attempts to DE-BALKANZIE THE BALKANS

O

n a balmy, spring evening in Tirana, around three dozen Albanian entrepreneurs are sat in a room of the same building where secretaries once committed communist government files to software.

The presentation they’re about to see might just be their best-ever chance at funding.

The visitor:South Central Ventures, a recently-assembled fund that’s based in Belgrade, Skopje and Zagreb. €40 million of public and private money is on offer for early-stage injections, managing partner Tatjana Zabasu tells the audience. It’s a chance to bring Balkan tech together.

Few in the room, part of the public/private Protik ICT Resource Center, are under any illusions: these are early – very early – days for the tech community in Albania. Indeed as more than one entrepreneur will tell me that evening, the whole crowd is barely three years old. But some success stories are beginning to appear in the small country.

And, perhaps more excitingly, they could be a chance to cross borders that, for decades, were shut tighter than any others on Earth.

Albania is a small, kidney-shaped country at the foot of the Balkans, located in Southeastern Europe. It has a population of just under three million, and a GDP per capita barely prodding at $5,000, aligning it with similarly developing neighbors like Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo.

But while those countries became part of Yugoslavia in the aftermath of World War Two, Albania fell into a deep isolation, at the behest of its Marxist-Leninist dictator Enver Hoxha. His regime banned religion, beards and almost all foreign travel. So afraid of ‘revisionist’ outside influences was Hoxha, that he had 750,000 machine-gun pillboxes erected all round Albania.

While people across the rest of the Balkans received traditionally high technical

training under Yugoslav, or Soviet, rule, Albania remained an educational backwater. Early human rights successes, like gender equality and healthcare, were squandered from the 1960s on as Hoxha severed ties with all of his communist allies.

By the time his Party of Labour fell, in 1992, Albania was Europe’s poorest nation.

Almost a quarter of a century on, and the legacies of isolationist rule are still evident, despite stabler politics in recent years. In fewer places is it felt more acutely as in SME development, which requires not only an injection of cash and tax breaks, but a complete cultural shift.

“We have this way of learning where students are passive – there are no labs,” Vasken Spiru, a local ecosystem facilitator, tells me. “With coding, it’s like trying to write Java on a blackboard.”

“It comes out of a society where the majority of young people still wants to go and work for the state,” Jakob Modeér, a Swedishborn but longtime Balkan-based expert, tells me. “If you come from Britain or the U.S. it’s almost amusing. It’s clearly in the mind of people and their parents that state employment offers you stability.”

Modeér is Spiru’s colleague at swisscontact, whose SECO Entrepreneurship Program is trying to raise interest in startups and entrepreneurialism across the region. That we meet at a trendy café in The Block, a district of Tirana famed for its past as

the hermetically-sealed neighborhood of Hoxha and his closest confidantes, is poignant. Today The Block is a vibrant, variegated humdrum of bars, restaurants and hotels. If The Block can change so quickly, Modeér asks, why can’t Albania?

“If you’re not a critical person, you don’t see problems. If you don’t see problems, that’s what a startup is all about,” he adds. “These are things that don’t come easily in such a hierarchical society. We need to break it down a bit. You do that with smaller groups – there’s no big bang.”

Neither is there a problem with space.

Whole swathes of central Tirana, including some of its most famous communist-era buildings, lay eerily empty today. Even the Protik building, with its vast history and modern tenants, lays half-bare, its top floor empty aside from a blackboard, on which tech buzzwords are scrawled.

Success stories are what Modeér, and Albania craves. Recently it got a few. 123. al is a discounts site founded by Laidi Ferruni, who recently launched Irelandincorporated Quibli, an events marketplace.

Shpi.al, a real estate portal, was founded by young entrepreneur Tomi Kallanxhi, with just $400.

Beyond Albania’s borders, in ethnicAlbanian Kosovo, Gjirafa (‘Giraffe’) recently became the first Albanianlanguage search engine. Altogether it has raised $2.5 million, including sums from

Albania is a small, kidney-shaped country at the foot of the Balkans, located in Southeastern Europe.

It has a population of just under three million, and a GDP per capita barely prodding at $5,000, aligning it with similarly developing neighbors like Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo. www.REDHERRING.com

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Prague-based Rockaway Capital and serial investor Esther Dyson. Founder Megrim Cahani, who spent 12 years in in New York City, tells me that finding a viable model was a conundrum.

“It was very difficult because there are two really big problems in the region – first is the region in terms of macroeconomic indicators – GDP overall is very low compared to developed markets,” he says.

“Then there’s the population. It’s a very small market with tiny purchasing power. Plus the economy of Internet is not very developed.”

Web penetration in both countries is pretty good, however, with Kosovo at 88% and Albania around 75%. “We recognize that the market is small,” adds Cahani. “It’s small if you want to grow the product horizontally.

But if you’re doing a few basically and you grow vertically, the market is big enough. We want to be the leader in news, advertising and e-commerce. We don’t have to be topof-the-line Amazon to cut it.”

In total there are 12 million Albanian speakers in the Balkans and diaspora populations in North America and western Europe – not including millions of undocumented speakers in Turkey. Gjirafa recently hired ten more staff to add to its team of 22. An upcoming office in Tirana will accommodate ten more. “Gjirafa can give Albanians services that are so basic elsewhere but not here. A lot of ten-year-old services still aren’t here yet.”

At the presentation in Tirana, Zabasu has turned her focus on the audience: what are the advantages of the Albanian scene, she asks. Developers’ wages can run very low, Ferruni says: “An average one could be just €200-300. Advertising is really, really cheap here too, so it’s easy to get to market and gain customers very fast. Ad cost-per-click, up to a dollar in Macedonia, is just $0.0203 in Albania. Facebook penetration is also high at 1.3 million users.

The aforementioned lack of technicallyskilled personnel is a problem, Modeér admits. But that drawback might actually be a chance to do things better, cooperatively: 78

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“If you’re set on the global market you will need resources. So here, you have to ask: which countries have coders and programmers? Some have more coders than marketers. Albania is very strong on marketing but it has no coders. We should think as a region.”

And that, it seems, is precisely what many in the local ecosystem are doing. SCV is looking at investing in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia and Albania. And EU money from Bulgaria and Slovenia is beginning to sniff out talent in the region, too. Tirana itself boast several startup resources committed to looking beyond the country’s borders, such as Startup Grind; Oficina; GARAZH (‘Garage’); Talent Garden and Protik.

Balkan adroitness at second languages could provide another key opportunity for collaboration. Most Albanians speak excellent Italian (from Durrës it takes a night-ferry to get to Bari), while Kosovars, thanks to old family links, tend to speak good German. Other areas promote English, Russian and more.

“I think collaboration is key between Albania and the other nations in the region as we grow as a cluster together,” Erkens Gjini, Oficina’s business development manager, tells me. “If we can identify our advantages and symbiotically use them, then we can challenge other nations and become a global factor.”

Neither Gjini nor any of the entrepreneurs I spoke to voiced concerns about dealing with Serbians, Macedonians, or any of the region’s other nationalities, whose dividing conflicts and enmities have coined the very term ‘Balkanism’ to mean the cleaving of deep ethnic, religious and political lines.

Tempers often flare on a governmental level even now. But, adds Gjini, that is not replicated in the boardroom: “All this political propaganda is used to secure those votes from the ultra-nationalist, which do not represent the voice of the nation.”

After the event I speak to Bashkim Sykja, Albanian director of entrepreneurship policy at the Ministry of Economy.

He stresses Tirana’s encouragement of entrepreneurialism, and its opportunity to bridge old divides. “If we want local companies to become competitive in this global market, we must make sure ICT is considered one of the key sectors.”

That will help enthuse state institutions and banks to invest in startups, something Spiru admits is sorely lacking right now.

“It’s a chicken-and-egg situation,” he says ruefully. “Why should the government invest when there are only a few startups here?” More money would spur investment in online payments, he adds, which would inspire a wave of e-commerce firms to set up shop – usually the first line in ecosystem development.

Working across borders will, above all, adjust local entrepreneurs to the global market and its requirements, adds Modeér. He tells me about an accelerator which brought Kosovars from Skopje to Serbia without a hitch, before adding, “We can bring the Balkans together, but through the startup community. The real mindset change will come when you start working for a German customer. Not your cousin down the street, who will make concessions on timescales and quality. A German will never do that.

Quality, price, delivery time. Reality.”

The people of the Balkans share a huge amount of their customs and culture. Many national dishes, for example, share an Ottoman heritage, while similar adherences to Sunni Islam and Orthodox Christianity have swept up from empires from the south, west and east for centuries.

A modern, post-communist Balkans may have endured a litany of wars, genocides and political repressions. But finally, it appears a new regional generation is ready to band together, pick up the rock of industry together and hurl it as a globalized market.

“Everybody here has their competitive advantage,” Modeér adds. “This is grassroots, so it will win. It has to be from the bottom up, not from the top down. The only stability you will find is in the private sector.”

Feature Story

Tech Sector Has Long Way to Go in Sexual Minority Rights

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n April, hundreds of people met in Berlin for #unit Festival, the ‘world’s first queer tech conference’. The event, run by local group Unicorns in Tech, will welcomed over 70 speakers to Germany’s first tech community for “gays, lesbians, straight people, or however you may identify.” #unit joined dozens of other groups, shows and workshops that are promoting sexual minority rights in the technology industry.

But further afield, the picture for LGBTQI rights in tech is muddy at best.

LGBTQI rights have been high on the tech agenda this year, thanks to PayPal’s decision to pull out of a $3.6 million, 400-job plan in North Carolina, in response to a recently-

passed law targeting sexual minorities.

“The new law perpetuates discrimination and it violates the values and principles that are at the core of PayPal’s mission and structure,” the company’s CEO Dan Schulman said in a statement.

Deutsche Bank soon followed suit, freezing job expansion plans in the state. This prompted governor Pat McCrory to climb down some of the law’s most controversial tenets. But he maintained that North Carolina will prevent transgender people from using bathrooms other than those assigned their birth gender. Former U.S. presidential hopeful Ted Cruz has thrown his weight behind North Carolina’s bill, telling MSNBC “the political correctness we have embraced. Enough already.”

Despite PayPal and Deutsche Bank’s moves, #unit Festival founder Stuart Cameron still believes that for most big tech corporations, LGBTQI rights are overrated. “Most companies do not care about diversity right now…they think that they are open and proud already. ‘We don’t have a problem with…’ is a very common answer and a sign of superficial reflection.”

Cameron points to tech’s yawning gender gap, something on which Red Herring has repeatedly reported, as a key battleground in the wider fight for diversity. “If you are working for a company with less than 20% women in their tech department, you should know there is something going wrong,” he says.

Mal Kumar, a global development professional and author of The Points of Marriage, agrees. “There are countless studies and reports showing misogyny in tech companies, and that also includes within the gay male community,” she says. “The tech industry is very maledominated, and so the misogyny against women in general and more specifically of lesbians needs to be separated from how gay men are treated. Each community has its own issues and challenges to overcome.”

This March, big data specialist Vivienne Ming released a report calculating the cost of being a woman or gay man, as

Stuart Cameron, #unit Festival founder, believes most big tech corporations, have work to do in LGBTQI Rights.

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Big data specialist Dr. Vivienne Ming found that women in tech in the U.S. pay a ‘tax’ of between $100,000 and $300,000 during their lifetimes. opposed to a straight man - a “tax on being different,” as she put it. Ming found that women in U.S. tech pay a ’tax’ of between $100,000 and $300,000 in their lifetimes, while women in Singapore pay $800,000$1.5 million. It also costs $54,000 to be a gay man in the U.K., reported Ming, who is herself transgender.

“LGBTQIA people of color, queer women, and transgender people might not “see” themselves in Tim Cook in the same way that another gay, white, cisgender man would,” says Abigail Parsons, director of the LGBTQIA (the ‘A’ stands for ‘asexual’) Resource Center at Georgia Institute of Technology.

That doesn’t mean, however, that progress has remained idle. An increasing number of apps and programs have catered to the LGBTQI community in recent years. ‘Inclusion technology’ creator Glassbreakers recently raised $1.98 million for its platform, geared towards companies of 10,000 employees, that consults firms on diversity, and mentors women.

“So while the Tim Cooks of the industry play an important role in jumpstarting a conversation about LGBTQIA people in tech, it would be naïve and premature to draw the conclusion that discrimination isn’t a concern for others who still face additional layers of discrimination in the workplace.

Ten years ago, says Kumar, “the general environment towards gay people in America was very different to what it is now. Bush made a social platform on bashing gay people. The attitudes across the board, including within tech companies in the U.S. and Europe have changed a huge amount in the last ten years. It’s not to say that everything is perfect now, but being openly gay is now much easier than back then.” Google in particular, she adds, has been very supportive of openly-gay staff.

“Our LGBTQIA students at Georgia Tech still come to me with concerns about how to navigate the job market, particularly if they’re worried that their appearance or the experiences listed on their resume might out them,” adds Parsons. “They’re constantly trying to strike a balance between being seen as employable - which to them means not looking too queer - and not having to compromise their identity.”

But that is reserved for tech employees in the U.S. - and, to a greater extent, western Europe. Another cost of gender and sexuality inequality is that it prevents LGBTQI staff from working abroad, in places where persecution of gay, lesbian and transgender people is commonplace, and often state-sponsored. Kumar points out that she, as a gay woman, finds it difficult working in sub-Saharan Africa.

Parsons urges corporations to think carefully about what they mean by the term ‘professional’ in the workplace. Often, she says, it is used to describe employees who conform to certain heteronormative, cisnormative, or masculine norms.

“There are realities that come with being a certain race and/or gender,” she says. “There are social licenses that go with gender and race, and that’s part of the LGBT issue.”

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an industry watchdog, has seen a rise in corporate gender and sexual equality since 2002. Then, only 13 Fortune 500 companies scored 100% on a test measuring inclusivity.

Now that figure is 407. In 2002 only 3% had gender identity safeguards in place, whereas now three quarters do.

Groups such as New York’s Out in Tech, and InterTech LGBT of London, are increasing the visibility of the problem and sexual minority voices in the industry.

The most visible LGBTQI community member in tech is, of course, Apple CEO Tim Cook, who came out publicly as gay in October 2014. But despite the headway that announcement may have made, it is important for the industry not to selfcongratulate - or to think huge progress has been made.

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“For women who might take time out to raise families or provide elder care and for LGBTQIA people who might present in ways that are gender non-conforming

at work (or who are in transition), this nebulous and problematic standard of ‘professionalism’ becomes an often unachievable goal,” she adds.

It seems that, as far as gender and sexual minority rights in the technology industry go, there is plenty of work to be done.

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Numerix

he financial crisis of 2008 caused devastation to many businesses, to both their bottom line and their reputations.

One of the worst hit sectors was finance, unsurprisingly, where only bail outs could save some of the largest financial institutions in the world, while others, like Lehman Brothers, disappeared entirely. In the aftermath of the crash, most banks were faced with more regulations and pitfalls than ever.

For over two decades banks has engaged in selling new instruments that the man in the street could barely understand. Derivatives, synthetic options and other products created secondary markets among banks without the traditional safety nets put in place by the 1933 Banking Act. In fact, regulators’ permissive approach until 2008 led to trillions of dollars of non collateralized derivatives in Europe and America. The biggest challenge of some of these institutions was seeing the whole picture. Bloated organizations lacked the technology or the insight to truly appreciate what kind of mess they were in, and to protect themselves against the risks the future would hold.

Regulators were caught off guard despite the warnings with a problem of escalating magnitude.

Fortunately for the finance world, companies like Numerix had built the software to anticipate and monitor banks’ trading, pricing and valuation. From the onset a handful of researchers perfected Stochastic models and adapted them to Wall Street banks. Today, Numerix offers risk analytics software for the pricing, structuring, modeling and valuation of any derivative instrument or portfolio.

Numeric is born from a cadre of outstanding entrepreneurs and researchers. Its founder, Michael Gorkin teamed up with Mitchell Feigenbaum, an award winner Physicist and mathematician to apply the Monte Carlo theory to financial products. Five years later, they attracted Greg Whitten to bankroll the company. He poured $32M and acquired all assets, and gradually took over.

Written, employee number 11 at Microsoft, now Executive Chairman at Numerix, adds to the company’s unique pedigree.

A Harvard PhD and applied mathematics

buff, he spent twenty one years at Microsoft and built the company’s Basic compiler, named after him. Three years after leaving Microsoft, he realized how the intersection of Physics and Mathematics could create invaluable modeling opportunities for the financial markets. “The company has always managed to create a rare intellectual contribution’ he says and even the best banks it would be difficult to replicate our software foundations”.

The road to success, as often meant trials and errors. In 2003, Whitten started taking a more active role in the company and names Steve O’Hanlon President in 2004. “Everyone told me he was the best person around” he explains. O’Hanlon became CEO four years later. But the product portfolio was bloated.

Numerix eradicated 17 products and boiled the company down to one core offering.

“We shut down 17 products, we advanced with three products that could be merged into our pricing platform that can sit in Excel,” says O’Hanlon.

above 25% per annum and expanding thanks to a 25 partners network and an increased market footprint.

Rumar has it that Numerix is seeking new acquisitions, mainly premier products aligned with the company’s software approach. Both Whitten and O’Hanlon assess that it is a natural step for a company which has grown organically to exceed $56M in revenues in 2016. We think we can pick up gap fillers that will become integral to the platform,” says O’Hanlon.

The company also continues to release new products for its core platform, and as recently as the end of November unveiled a solution that helps banks meet the challenges of the Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB). The FRTB is set to be introduced in 2020 and will change the way that banks are required to calculate risk. As ever, Numerix is well ahead of the game in introducing a solution based on its advanced mathematics DNA.

Today, Numerix offers risk analytics software for the pricing, structuring, modeling and valuation of any derivative instrument or portfolio.

Then the crisis hit, leaving the banks with sanguine memories.“We’ve emerged as a true fintech company. We’re on a different journey now. We are becoming the company that helps banks transform their business and solve their most challenging problems,” he adds.

Eight years on from the crisis, and the situation is not a great deal easier for the finance sector. Regulations such as Basel 2 or Basel 3 are arcane and often updated to most banks’ dismay. “It’s such a changing landscape in the financial world. Banks have been worried. Regulations are forcing them to change their businesses and cut costs,” says O’Hanlon.

The company has enjoyed some big successes in recent times, not least a five year agreement with Bloomberg that is currently in its third year. It is now present on five continents in 16 offices with over 700 clients. It is growing fast,

“The world is changing rapidly and Numerix is already positioned for that. Therefore for us the next 18 months are crucial. Banks must be able to determine the health of all their business units at once. They need to know what to shut down and what to bet their future on. We’re in a perfect position to solve their problems and become their key partner for the future,” O’Hanlon says.

Numerix’ success has been long in the making. Its culture based on far reaching mathematics, is prevalent and recognized by its competitors and their customer-base.

The brand is catching momentum. Its offices, on Park Avenue, in the midst of the action leaves no doubt about their achievements . The challenge now will be to keep up that pace and deal with the issues success brings. Numerix looks to be in good hands as it handles that enviable problem. “We’re a force to be reckoned with but we want to go further,” concludes the CEO. www.REDHERRING.com

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Top 100 Companies: North America

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Top 100 Companies: North America

TOP 100 WINNERS:

NORTH AMERICA

Celebrating Innovation and Excellence

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or U.S. startups, 2016 wasn’t the best. The amount of money flowing in from VCs took an expected downturn, as investors held off on their at-any-cost unicorn hunts. Meanwhile, the tech IPO market was weak throughout the year, which undermined exit prospects for startups.

At the end of the year, the election of Donald Trump brought more gloom to the country’s economic prospects, and the tech sector in particular. While some easing of regulations may help Silicon Valley in the short term, the new regime’s stance on immigration is sure to harm the industry greatly as access to muchneeded talent is limited.

But there are reasons to be cheerful. The IPO market is expected to pick up this year, buoyed by the recent listing of Snap. The stock market is booming, and the Dow Jones is hitting new levels consistently.

Meanwhile, VC firms are flush with cash, raising $41.6 billion in 2016, according to research firm PitchBook Data and the National Venture Capital Association.

That cash is going to be spent somewhere this year, and the U.S. continues to be the greatest tech market in the world.

The following startups are living proof of that sentiment.

As exits pick up, especially as non-tech companies look to buy tech startups, expect to be hearing a lot more about the following 100 companies in the future.

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TOP Technology Companies

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America: A-Z

ActivEngage, Inc. AlphaSense, Inc. Altiscale, Inc. Appboy AutoGrid Systems Inc. Avangate Aventura Avi Networks AvidXchange, Inc. Axtria, Inc. BacterioScan Bill.com Biocatch BizSlate Inc. Blue Pillar Bluebox Security Bluenose Analytics BlueTalon Breathe Technologies ChartWise Medical Systems Clarity Software Solutions Clear Demand CloudAccess CloudBolt Software, Inc. CloudLock CloudOne CODA Energy ComputeNext Corduro, Inc. Coupa Software, Inc. CrowdStrike Inc. CustomerMatrix Cylance, Inc. Damballa Decisive DemoChimp DH2i Digital Air Strike e-Builder, Inc. Evolve IP Exadel Express KCS Inc eZanga.com FinalCode, Inc. Flipps ForSight VISION5, Inc. Freewavz Ground 2 Table Guardant Health Hyginex iboss inc iCharts, Inc. IdealSpot IneoQuest Technologies Instart Logic InVisage Technologies, Inc. iovation Inc. Krux LoopUp

MagnaCom MediaAlpha MenoGeniX, Inc. Message Systems, Inc. Movius Corporation nCino, Inc. Netsertive Numecent Numerify OtoSense, Inc Percona Phunware Pivotal Systems Predixion Software Prevoty Prolifiq Software Quisk, Inc. Ravello Systems RedSeal, Inc. Refractive Dialer Reltio, Inc. Revolar RiskMatch Roadie Salesify, Inc. Satisfi, Inc. Scalus ScientiaMobile Seal Software Secure Islands Seismic SkyKick Smart Utility Systems SoftNAS SpendHQ StartApp SteadyServ Technologies Symphony Commerce TalentWise, Inc. TEEMA Solutions Group ThreatConnect TowerSec Transactis Trifacta USEReady VeloCloud Networks Veniam Works Vysk Communications WhoKnows Wiser Work Market Xceedium, Inc. Xirrus Inc. YuppTV Inc Zadara Storage Zephyr ZestFinance Ziften ZoomInfo

Top 100 Companies: North America

ActivEngage www.activengage.com Todd Smith Marketing Orlando, Florida » Not many people buy their cars without first speaking to a salesperson. But car dealership’s websites have until recently been oddly lacking a human element as they look to sell cars to consumers.

In 2007, Ted Rubin and Todd Smith seized on this opportunity, and launched ActivEngage, which has been changing auto dealers’ websites for the better ever since.

“We saw an opportunity, both Ted and myself, to help dealers generate more opportunities from their existing website.

The average auto dealer spends an enormous amount of money marketing cars. With the internet as a very powerful tool, we felt websites were limited, that they were more of a static billboard than an interactive medium,” says Smith, CEO of ActivEngage.

“So we looked at different ways we could connect with more shoppers. I was previously a Chevrolet dealer, and one of the things I used in my store was live chat.

So after the store was sold I collaborated with Ted and we sat down and said this would be a great service for dealers. We created ActivEngage as a tool to actively engage the dealers’ website visitors, and help shoppers through the steps and hurdles to potentially coming to the store and purchasing a car.”

it really be? Cars don’t sell themselves, it takes someone to communicate, nudge people, help them make good decisions, and what we’ve done is applied that to the website,” adds Smith.

The ActivEngage platform makes a considerable difference to auto dealers, and gives consumers the chance to get human advice round the clock. Todd Caputo, owner of Sun Chevrolet, has been an ActivEngage customer for almost six years.

“Chat allows shoppers to research and get answers about a car anytime, anywhere.

Shoppers can chat at 11 PM, or while they are at work on Monday morning and don’t want their boss to see they are researching a vehicle. That’s the main reason they use chat -- they can talk to someone instantaneously without actually having to speak to them in person. They just type, and if they don’t feel comfortable talking anymore, they just close out of the chat.

And if they do feel comfortable, they often come in and buy the car.”

“We are so successful with live chat because ActivEngage’s representatives do such a good job getting basic qualifying information from customers. They’re really good at getting first and last names, email addresses, answering basic questions, and setting appointments. The quality of their conversations is very, very good.”

There are over 150,000 car dealerships worldwide, of which around 20,000 are in North America. The company is currently international but plans to expand its presence as its current clients move to utilize its services in other locations.

ActivEngage has taken no traditional investment from VC’s, and has a small contingent of friends and family that make up its limited investment base.

The company is not just looking at expanding internationally, and has already made moves into other verticals outside of the auto industry. “We focused on the auto industry, because Ted and I’s background is in the auto industry,” says Smith. “We do stuff outside the auto industry, we power Orlando Magic, so yes we have stuff outside the auto industry, but our core is the auto industry, where we have deep roots.”

The ActivEngage technology works just as much for consumers as the auto dealers themselves. “Our live chat allows the consumer to remain anonymous until the point where the consumer feels comfortable to open up and give us their information.

And for us we’re able to do that at over 80% conversion rate, meaning over 80% of consumers that engage in chat we turn into an opportunity for our clients,” says Smith.

For the next 18 months, the company’s main target is to continue the growth it has enjoyed so far in the automotive industry, and grab a larger portion of the market share in the process. ActivEngage will also be releasing new products to its current customers, and is hoping to increase revenue per customer.

Smith and Rubin have pounced on an opportunity to make the lives of auto dealerships easier and more profitable, while making the process of buying a new car much simpler for consumers.

That combination ensures the company is destined for further impressive growth in the future.

The company’s technology bridges the gap between online consumers and businesses, in order to help sell more products and services and create lasting relationships.

“We take the same philosophy as a showroom in a dealership, if it didn’t have in house sales people, how effective would www.REDHERRING.com

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AlphaSense www.alpha-sense.com

analyst with Morgan Stanley. He holds a Wharton MBA and a MSc. degree in engineering.

Jack Kokko Cloud computing

Altiscale

San Francisco, California

www.altiscale.com

» AlphaSense is a software technology startup serving the global financial services industry. AlphaSense has already been adopted by over 275 investment and banking firms managing over $3 trillion in assets, including many of the largest firms on Wall Street. Major public corporations are also adopting AlphaSense to improve their reporting to the market, as well as their M&A and competitive intelligence.

The AlphaSense platform helps analysts and fund managers efficiently analyze and keep up with the daily “fire hose” of public company information. The proprietary AlphaSense search engine technology was built by the company’s team of linguistic search and machine learning experts.

Together they built the algorithms and taxonomies to enable the system to understand thousands of financial themes like “revenue guidance”, “capex growth” or “improving margins”, capturing the broad variations of language around these themes that the investment industry constantly tracks. This sentence level semantic indexing makes searching on AlphaSense dramatically more productive than the closest alternative.

Leadership: Jack Kokko is a visionary entrepreneur with a background in global financial services and a track record of delivering enabling technologies to demanding markets. Previously, he was the founding CEO of Silecs and a senior

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Raymie Stata Cloud computing Palo Alto, California »Altiscale provides Hadoop as a service in the cloud, with the highest performance and reliability, fastest time to production, and lowest cost. The Altiscale Data Cloud is an independent, purpose-built Hadoop cloud that is architected from the ground up for Hadoop optimization. The Altiscale Data Cloud delivers superior performance not only versus on-premises solutions, but also against Amazon or any other generalpurpose cloud service provider.

With its optimized, comprehensive Hadoop operations, the Altiscale Data Cloud delivers 4-10X faster job performance and provides a robust Hadoop ecosystem to customers in days instead of months – all at the lowest TCO. Altiscale has proven its value at organizations like iHeart Radio, the Motley Fool, Open Table, and the GOP Data Trust, enabling them to meet their Big Data business goals faster by liberating them from the burdens of Hadoop management and operations.

Altiscale is led by a proven management and engineering team that holds some of the broadest and deepest enterpriseclass Hadoop experience. The executive team includes Raymie Stata, former CTO

of Yahoo!, David Chaiken, former Chief Architect at Yahoo!, and Charles Wimmer, former Yahoo! SRE. Leadership: Stata came to Altiscale from Yahoo!, where he was Chief Technical Officer. At Yahoo! he played an instrumental role in algorithmic search, display advertising, and cloud computing.

He also helped set Yahoo!’s open-source strategy and initiated its participation in the Apache Hadoop project.

Prior to joining Yahoo! Stata founded Stata Laboratories, maker of the Bloomba search-based e-mail client, which Yahoo! acquired in 2004. He has also worked for Digital Equipment’s Systems Research Center, where he contributed to the AltaVista search engine. Stata received his PhD in computer science from MIT in 1996.

Top 100 Companies: North America

Appboy www.appboy.com

AutoGrid Systems

Mark Ghermezian

www.auto-grid.com

Mobile

Dr. Amit Narayan

New York

Clean tech Redwood Shores, California

» Appboy is the global leader in Marketing Automation for Apps. The company’s suite of services empowers mobile brands to solve app abandonment and manage the customer life cycle beyond the download.

Employing rich customer segmentation, multi-channel messaging (push notifications, in-app messages, email, News Feed) and multivariate testing, brands can effectively cultivate relationships with their user base. Clients like Urban Outfitters, PicsArt, Epix, Samsung, Microsoft, Shutterfly and Anthropologie use Appboy to increase engagement, reduce churn and build mobile ROI. Appboy is venture backed with headquarters in New York City and offices in San Francisco.

Leadership: Born into a family of entrepreneurs, Mark Ghermezian has been interested in keeping the family tradition alive from a young age – at 13 he started his first company, followed by creating an indoor advertising business called Flush Media in high school. By senior year of college, Ghermezian was rapidly growing his first mobile company (XE Mobile). He later began investing in SAAS and CRM solutions like Rockbot, Swarm Mobile and Piqora, cementing Ghermezian as a passionate, committed marketing pioneer in the mobile industry. At a time when most people were narrowly concentrating on acquiring users and installs, he had the foresight to create Appboy, a company focused on sustaining and growing audience engagement through marketing automation, segmentation and multichannel messaging (expanding beyond the ubiquitous push notification with email and in-app solutions).

» AutoGrid turns Big Data into the cleanest, cheapest source of power. Our Energy Data Platform (EDP) applies Big Data technologies and predictive algorithms to help utilities, grid operators, and end-users leverage the data being generated by smart meters, building energy management systems and other devices to reduce power consumption, emissions and costs. EDP holds the world record of performing one million forecasts every ten minutes.

With these forecasts, utilities or endusers can take actions such as lowering air conditioning levels or lights to trim peak power, balance power production from solar and wind farms or identify hidden sources of losses.

The company’s first application, DROMS, is a highly scalable and secure software application that reduces the cost of implementing a wide range of demand response and dynamic pricing programs.

DROMS gives utilities a way to engage their customers in power saving programs.

The cloud-based software can be deployed in weeks, and provides the lowest cost, lowest risk option for utilities and electricity service providers to offer flexible demand management programs to their customers. Based on open protocols such as OpenADR, the industry-wide standard for automated demand response, DROMS supports programs for all sizes and types of customers, serving not only large utilities or industrial facilities, but expanding the market with an economical solution for municipal utilities and residential consumers.

Leadership: Dr. Amit Narayan is the Founder and CEO of AutoGrid, Inc. From 2010 to 2012, he was the Director of Smart Grid Research in Modeling & Simulation at Stanford University, where he continues led an interdisciplinary project related to modeling, optimization and control of the electricity grid and associated electricity markets. Prior to founding AutoGrid, Dr. Narayan was the Vice President of Products at the publicly traded company Magma Design Automation, Inc. (Nasdaq: LAVA), where he led the product development and product management teams responsible for Magma’s flagship product in the design implementation area. Over one third of all semiconductor chips used in consumer electronic devices — such as smart phones, blue-ray players and video games — were designed using products developed by Dr. Narayan’s team at Magma.

Prior to joining Magma, Dr. Narayan founded Berkeley Design Automation, Inc. (BDA), a venture-backed company in analog and radio-frequency semiconductor design software and served as its founding CEO and later Vice President of Engineering, responsible for all research and product development activities, as well as customer engagements.

Under Dr. Narayan’s leadership, BDA saw its products adopted by over 100 semiconductor companies in the world (including 20 out of the top 25). For his work at BDA, Dr. Narayan’s received the EDN’s “Innovation for the Year” award in 2006. Dr. Narayan received his B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur and Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley. He has published over 25 papers about design automation, holds seven U.S. patents and is an active advisor to several startup companies in the Bay Area.

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Avangate www.avangate.com Alex Hart

Hart also held a variety of sales, marketing, and product management positions at Microsoft, CheckFree, and NationsBank, now Bank of America.

Hart graduated from Harvard University.

Cloud computing Redwood City, CA » Avangate is a leading digital commerce provider, enabling software, SaaS, and online services companies to service their customers across all touchpoints, simplify and scale their subscription business, and enable smarter payments to profitably grow and disrupt new markets worldwide.

Specifically designed for the services economy, Avangate’s scalable and comprehensive solutions include a modular and secure eCommerce platform, a flexible subscription billing engine, a channel partner order and revenue management solution, integrated global payments, as well as a constantly expanding worldwide digital affiliate network.

Leadership: Alex Hart has more than 25 years of experience and an extensive record of success in leading payment services and software businesses. He was the President & CEO of Official Payments, from 2010 until its sale to ACI Worldwide in 2013, and most recently assisted ACIW in both corporate development and product strategy.

Prior to Official Payments, Hart was the president of Fuelman, the private-labeled fleet card business of FleetCor. Hart was also the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Electronic Banking Services for CheckFree, the leading banking and bill payment software and services company now owned by Fiserv.

Hart joined CheckFree as a result of its 2007 acquisition of Corillian, the online banking and bill payment software company that he led through an extensive transformation as president and CEO between 2002 and 2007. Prior to Corillian, 88

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Aventura www.aventurahq.com John Gobron Healthcare technology Denver, Colorado » Denver-based Aventura was incorporated six years ago and has received close to $40 million in financing. Aventura is built on a broad vision that has taken years to bring to fruition.

Investors, from angels to large healthcare companies and venture, have all supported the long-term goal of what they consider game-changing technology. Over the past years, Aventura has met that goal and grown into a true enterprise solution that brings high-availability and extreme stability required at the point of care.

Aventura’s “tap and go” awareness computing solution is transcending single sign on, providing roaming clinicians instant access to electronic patient records throughout the hospital. Its cloud-based platform helps providers overcome workflow challenges by streamlining how users interact with their devices.

It addresses security and fast access while taking advantage of desktop virtualization and centralized data storage.

The technology represents a complete rethinking of the computer’s role.

With Aventura, clinicians simply “tap in” the device with their proximity badge. It recognizes the user, role and location and instantly displays their native applications.

The fast login to any terminal or tablet empowers the clinician to access or enter information immediately. The entered data in real time increases thoroughness and accuracy of details, eliminates wasteful clicks and keystrokes, and minimizes errors caused by reliance on handwritten notes or memory.

Leadership: John Gobron’s expertise stems from 22 years of experience leading HCIT organizations in healthcare in the U.S. and in Europe. Gobron joined Aventura from Symantec, where he led the company’s Americas Healthcare Vertical. Prior to that, Gobron led Microsoft’s Health Solutions business in England. Before that, he was the EMEA General Manager at Sentillion, a healthcare-specific identity and access management company. During his nine years at Sentillion, he held various sales and executive roles including leading the company’s expansion into Europe and helping to manage its acquisition by Microsoft in 2009. Gobron also served as CEO of USTeleHealth, a leading telephone nurse triage services company, and led the company from startup to successful acquisition.

Avi Networks www.avinetworks.com Amit Pandey Software Sunnyvale Calif. » Avi Networks is the Cloud Application Delivery Company, founded to help organizations extending workloads to the cloud address the challenges of managing enterprise applications and ensuring consistent application performance.

The Avi Networks Cloud Application Delivery Platform (CADP) brings the benefits of hyperscale application delivery to enterprises at any scale. With a unique analytics-driven and distributed

Top 100 Companies: North America

application delivery architecture called HYDRA™ (Hyperscale Distributed Resources Architecture), the Avi Networks solution guarantees end-user application experience for on premise and cloud-based applications. The company’s founding team has previously delivered products that today run in more than 80 percent of the world’s data centers. Avi Networks is venture backed by Greylock Partners, Lightspeed and Menlo Ventures – tier 1 VC firms that built F5, Nicira, Palo Alto Networks and Riverbed.

Leadership: Amit Pandey is a seasoned executive and entrepreneur with a proven track record of leading high-growth and highly innovative organizations.

Before joining Avi Networks, he was the CEO of Zenprise which emerged as a market leader in the Enterprise Mobility Management Market and was acquired by Citrix. Prior to Zenprise, Pandey served as CEO at TerraCotta, Inc. and helped establish it as the dominant player in the distributed caching space. Terracotta was acquired by the European software giant, Software AG. Before TerraCotta, Pandey spent nearly a decade at NetApp in a wide range of executive positions. Pandey also worked at McKinsey & Company, focusing on strategy development for high-tech companies.

Pandey holds Master of Business Administration and Master of Science degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Bachelor of Science degree from Brown University.

AvidXchange www.avidxchange.com Michael Praeger Payments Charlotte, North Carolina » Great things can happen over a cup of coffee. In early 2000, Mike Praeger and David Miller, future co-founders of AvidXchange, met for a coffee to share war stories and talk about business. During the conversation, they had a revelation that would help them take advantage of the opportunity they identified – providing marketplace services to the real estate industry.

Two years later however, customers didn’t seem too interested in the product they were providing. But in June 2002 a sales call with Richard Ross of Branch Properties in Atlanta changed everything. Ross told the AvidXchange team that he had no interest in the purchasing the product they were offering, but he loved the invoice presentment module, and would buy it if it were sold independently.

Now AvidXchange offers solutions revolutionizing the way companies pay their bills, by streamlining the entire accounts payable process. All of the company’s offerings are software-as-aservice based.

The payment solutions market is fairly competitive. “There aren’t a lot of players, but the ones that are playing are evolving quickly to capture the market opportunity.

It is a race toward innovation. We are continuing to invest and meet the needs of our customer base by expanding our offerings. While there are major competitors in terms of the software experience that we provide, we think that

truly sets us apart and minimizes the competition are the people behind our software,” explains Michael Praeger, CEO & Co-Founder of AvidXchange.

“We are one of the only companies that has developed our own end-to-end procurement-to-payment solution that is supported by so many great service teams. We have a team of implementation specialists, an in-house support team, dedicated account managers, and service teams that manage the supplier experience.

These teams result in best-in-class metrics: 45 day implementations, 98% customer retention, and an average 45% conversion to electronic payments, and 15-minute support response time,” he adds.

AvidXchange has certainly ensured it stands out from the competition, but that’s not to say the company doesn’t experience any challenges. One of the biggest issues, as is common with most growing businesses, is finding the right talent. “We will add 300 additional employees by the end of this year, bringing our total headcount to more than 800 employees. The market is competitive for tech professionals, but we continue to make investments in things like our new corporate campus to provide employees an experience that is unique and a place that they are happy to stay,” says Praeger.

The company, which has come a long way since the conversation the two founders had over coffee back in 2000, now has big plans for the future. “Growth is a word that we use a lot, but it sums up our plans for the next 18 months. We will have added over 300 employees by that time, moved into our new corporate campus, and continued to maintain more than 60% YOY revenue growth. We are investing heavily in our current solutions and innovation for what’s next. We have some exciting things to unveil in the months ahead that will continue to revolutionize the way companies pay their bills,” concludes Praeger.

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Axtria www.axtria.com Jaswinder Chadha Data analytics Berkeley Heights, New Jersey » The volume of data in the world is increasingly at an exponential rate.

However, the number of analysts and datadrive decision makers is not, meaning there’s a gap between the amount of data and the ability to use it effectively. In our connected world, leaders must make crucial decisions faster, using all of the information available to them. Axtria is one company trying to plug that gap, and give its clients a competitive advantage through data management and analytics.

Axtria’s founders approached the issue from a position of knowledge and experience.

The company’s founders had previously founded the industry-leading analytics provider for life sciences, MarketRx (which was acquired by Cognizant) - and so they had a keen instinct on unsolved problems and how new technologies such as Mobile, Cloud and SaaS had changed the landscape. “Axtria is leveraging modern technologies to help our customers make better commercial decisions, and is focused on solving the problem with the “last mile” in analytics through delivery of Insight as a Service,” says Jassi Chadha, CEO and founder.

The company uses a combination of analytics, business consulting and technology to help companies make better sales and marketing decisions. Axtria helps its clients ask three fundamental

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questions: How much should we spend?

How do we allocate that spend? How do we get it done?

There are many competitors in this space, doing bits and pieces of the problem that Axtria solves, but the company maintains it is the only solution provider that brings deep analytics, cloud platforms for sales and marketing operations, and managed services as a turnkey solution. Axtria has been taking market share from each of its competitors over the past six years.

Chadha sees three main differentiators keeping Axtria ahead of its rivals. “First, we have built Sales IQ - the industry leading cloud based, force.com platform for Sales Optimization. Seamlessly integrated with Veeva, Salesforce and other force.com solutions. This platform ensures deep analytics and insights are available to the executives, at the point of decision making, wherever that may be,” Chadha explains.

“Second - we believe that technology has to be augmented with significant domain expertise, in order to actually deliver those insights. We have deep domain expertise in Commercial Operations in Life Sciences; Risk Management in Financial Services; and in POS analytics for Retail / CPG. This deep focus has resulted in our customer base including 8 of the top 10; and 15 of the top 20 Life Sciences companies and many of the top financial institutions,” he adds. “Third, we deliver these insights as a managed service. Leading companies depend on Axtria to optimize their commercial models.”

Axtria has raised $43 million to date in investment, and reported $29.6 million in revenues in 2015. The company continues to grow at a “blistering pace,” according to Chadha. The company believes there is a $1 billion market opportunity for each of the verticals it serves.

The biggest challenge for Axtria is getting the word out to customers. “The major challenge is that Axtria is the industry’s best kept secret. Once customers hear of us, and understand the deep domain expertise, the analytical expertise, and the technology platform / managed service, we typically start doing business with our customers and deliver tangible business value and customer satisfaction,” says Chadha.

Axtria now has big plans for the future.

“We plan to continue our growth trajectory, and deliver ingenious insights to our customers. We will broaden the verticals we serve in the next 18 months.

We will also expand internationally in the near future,” Chadha concludes.

BacterioScan breathetechnologies.com Dana Marshall Biotech St. Louis, Missouri » Urinary Tract Infection (UTI) is the most common bacterial infection in humans, so new ways to diagnose it are extremely sought after. BacterioScan, a Saint Louis, Missouri-based company, has introduced its first diagnostic instrument for the condition.

The company has also developed an advanced platform for rapid automated microbiology, and its second product, a rapid phenotypic antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) platform, is being introduced to researchers this year.

BacterioScan uses revolutionary laser sensor technology which was developed by a physicist working on Israel’s “Iron Dome” anti-missile system.

Top 100 Companies: North America

BacterioScan’s diagnostics are much faster than existing standards of care, reducing the time to test results for UTI by 95% for the vast majority of patients,” says Dana Marshall, Founder and CEO. “The instruments have been engineered to be compact, reliable, and affordable for even small hospitals and clinics. Although the technology is revolutionary, the specific medical applications have short and clear paths to regulatory clearance, and cost reimbursements are in place.”

The market for these types of diagnostic solutions is huge. The clinical diagnostics market is about $55 billion today, and BacterioScan’s target markets for UTI and AST are projected to be more than $7 billion by 2020. Although there are ongoing innovations, the dominant legacy products owned by the top market players in the microbiology sector are based on technology which has been relatively unchanged for forty years. The main competitors in the industry are the primary producers of microbiology diagnostics for UTI and AST, Becton Dickinson, bioMerieux, Danaher, and Roche Diagnostics.

BacterioScan has raised around $9 million in equity financing since its founding in 2010, primarily from angel investors and speciality regional funds. The company is working towards an institutional capital round this year, targeting $20 million in Series B preferred financing to accelerate the completion of its antibiotic testing (AST)product. The Series B financing is not the only plan the company has for the near future.

“The UTI product will transition from a small regional launch to national sales during 2016, during which time we plan to transition to contract manufacturing, and position for export launches in Europe, Asia and S. America,” says Marshall. “Our AST platform (Research Use Only) is being deployed with a dozen research hospitals during 2016, and we will complete the engineering development and initial production of the AST medical diagnostic version of the instrument, and complete

development and regulatory testing for our initial syndromic antibiotic panels during 2017.”

BacterioScan’s instruments have been used by over a dozen marquee research hospitals and universities, including St Jude’s Research Hospital for Children, UCLA Medical Center, and the Army’s labs at Ft Diedrick Maryland. Published results from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed a “75% reduction in time to result” for AST testing of anthrax and other biothreat pathogens.

With those kinds of endorsements, it’s easy to see why the company is looking forward to a bright year ahead.

Bill.com www.bill.com René Lacerte Cloud computing Palo Alto, California » Bill.com is the leading digital business payments company creating magically simple A/P and A/R solutions. We are uniquely positioned at the center of business payments, uniting banks and businesses on the fastest growing payments network. Bill.com helps over 600,000 network members process over $19 billion in payments per year and saves companies up to 50 percent of the time typically spent on financial back-office operations by securely automating their end-to-end processes. Three of the top ten U.S. banks and 35 percent of the top 100 accounting firms rely on Bill.com as their primary payments solution.

developed the concept for Bill.com based on personal experience growing up in multiple businesses as a kid and then co-founding his first company, PayCycle, in 1999. As the CEO of PayCycle, he recognized the need to improve the lives of business owners by simplifying the doing in business. Bill.com simplifies, consolidates and automates all the critical data and transaction capability into a personalized cloud dashboard that works for all businesses.

Lacerte and the Bill.com team have taken the traditional Excel spreadsheet used to track cash flow and replaced it with a robust tool accessible from any device anywhere. Each transaction is now webenabled to take action backed up with the insight needed to instantly make the right decision for your business. This b2b payments platform has been optimized for the cloud and is available from any mobile device.

Prior to Bill.com, Lacerte co-founded America’s #1 online payroll service PayCycle in 1999, which was acquired by Intuit in 2009. PayCycle received numerous 5-star awards from PC Magazine and accounting trade publications. At PayCycle, Lacerte developed an industry leading customer service organization that provided an unparalleled customer experience.

Lacerte spent five years at Intuit, creating and managing the company’s bill presentment team and growing its bill payment and credit card businesses into multi-million dollar business. He also launched Intuit’s first connected payroll product, growing the team from two employees to 300 in 18 months.

Lacerte received a Masters of Science degree in Industrial Engineering and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Quantitative Economics from Stanford University.

Leadership: René Lacerte founded Bill.com in August 2006, bringing with him more than 20 years of experience in the finance, software and payments industries. As a fourth generation entrepreneur, Lacerte

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BizSlate www.bizslate.com Marc Kalman Software New York » BizSlate is an omni-channel Softwareas-a-Service (SaaS) that is revolutionizing how small and medium sized distribution businesses (SMBs) manage their customers, vendors, orders, inventory, logistics, and their overall supply chain. With a focus on helping small manufacturing and distribution businesses solve real problems they face on a daily basis throughout their supply chain, BizSlate ERP is developed collaboratively between BizSlate and its customers comprised of small apparel, footwear, housewares, and consumer goods businesses. In a relatively short period of time, BizSlate has established a disruptive reputation with press and analysts, and is expected to have a significant impact on an outdated legacy industry.

A recent study by Aberdeen Group found that small businesses with an ERP system were more successful than those without.

Benefits noted include cost reductions by 5% to 20% and improvements to customer shipments by 5% to 17%. An additional Aberdeen report shows that SMBs with an ERP significantly reduce days sales outstanding (“DSO”), increase collaboration, and improve decision making for today as well as forecasting for the future.

While BizSlate is a global solution, the company’s addressable target market just in the United States is $8 billion. Nearly 40% of small distribution businesses in

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this country up to $50 million in revenue continuing to use QuickBooks even though they’ve clearly outgrown it and need something more.

Leadership: Marc Kalman is an experienced business leader and enterprise supply chain software expert. Prior to founding BizSlate, Kalman was co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of eZCom Software Inc., a highly successful SaaS Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) provider that he led for 10 years. Under his leadership and with little outside capital, eZCom grew from a startup into a well-respected, highly competitive company. While helping thousands of small businesses with EDIbased logistics, Kalman recognized that these same companies were dealing with increasingly complex supply chain pains that ranged well beyond EDI, and that no provider was solving.

With the objective of addressing those critical business needs, Kalman left eZCom to start BizSlate. His goal was to have a significant impact on an underserved segment of the market, and capitalize on a large and growing opportunity. Kalman’s industry experience includes serving as a supply chain specialist for Coach Leatherware and Director of IT for a nine-division accessories manufacturing business. He has been consistently recognized as a leading authority in the supply chain space, and is honored to have been named as one of the top supply chain professionals in the country by Supply and Demand Chain Executive for the past seven years.

Blue Pillar www.bluepillar.com Tom Willie Software Indianapolis, IN » Blue Pillar is a leading provider of facility Internet of Things (IoT) and energy management solutions for complex single site and centralized multisite facilities allowing them to improve energy resiliency, efficiency and overall facility operations.

The Aurora platform is an equipmentagnostic Internet of Things platform that allows facilities to connect to existing local equipment, and collect and control data.

Avise Insite is Blue Pillar’s local facility management software and allows facilities the ability to visualize and analyze data in order to optimize energy efficiency and resiliency.

Avise Foresite is Blue Pillar’s centralized facility management software that enables facilities to aggregate data from multisite facilities or geographically dispersed locations, centralize the information and refine their energy management programs based on the data collected. Today, over 255 of the most critical, complex and geographically dispersed facilities—across healthcare, government, higher education, and other industries—use Blue Pillar to manage their energy and power systems.

Leadership: Tom Willie, CEO of Blue Pillar, brings over 15 years of visionary leadership, entrepreneurial success, and product innovation to Blue Pillar and is an avid evangelist and active change agent for the transformation of the global energy ecosystem from the utility down to the consumer. As CEO of Blue Pillar, he is leading the company’s efforts to bring disruptive change by using energy network of things solutions to make the

Top 100 Companies: North America

world’s facilities and critical infrastructure more energy efficient, resilient, and selfsufficient.

Bluebox Security

Prior to joining Blue Pillar, Willie was the CEO of CURRENT Group where he was recognized as a visionary in the Smart Grid energy industry. While at CURRENT, he oversaw the successful launch and deployment of numerous product offerings that became de facto standards in smart metering and smart grid communications.

While leading CURRENT, he also served as the Vice President/Vice Chairman of PRIME Alliance AISBL, a nonprofit industry trade group focused on the development of a new open, public and non-proprietary communications solution which is now being used extensively by utilities all over Europe. Willie was recognized as a Top 50 Smart Grid Pioneer in 2013 by Smart Grid Today and CURRENT won numerous industry and product awards before being acquired in 2013.

www.bluebox.com

Earlier, Willie helped lead Efficient Networks, a disruptive start-up, which was instrumental in pioneering the invention and deployment of broadband telecommunications services worldwide.

At Efficient Networks, he oversaw the largest division (>$250M in annual revenue) of the company, a position he maintained after the company was acquired

by Siemens off the public market.

Willie has also held strategic worldwide marketing management positions at Texas Instruments and National Semiconductor and obtained his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.

Caleb Sima Security San Francisco, CA » Bluebox Security (acquired by Lookout) created trust in today’s untrusted mobile environments. Caleb Sima and Adam Ely founded Bluebox Security on the principle that all mobile devices are vulnerable and corporate data on those devices is constantly at risk. The Bluebox solution combined security assurance with simplified mobile app management to safeguard corporate data.

Leadership: Before founding Bluebox Security, CEO Caleb Sima was an EIR at Andreessen Horowitz. Prior to this, Sima was CEO of Armorize Technologies, an internationally acclaimed, SaaS based malware monitoring and code security analysis firm headquartered in San Francisco. Before his tenure at Armorize, Sima served as chief technology officer for HP’s Application Security Center and was responsible for directing the lifecycle of the company’s web application security solutions. Sima joined HP after the company he founded SPI Dynamics was acquired in 2007. Prior to founding SPI Dynamics, Sima worked for Internet Security Systems’ elite X-Force R&D team and as a Security Engineer for S1 Corporation.

Sima has been engaged in the Internet security arena since 1996 and has become widely recognized as a leading expert in web security, penetration testing and the identification of emerging security threats.

His pioneering efforts and expertise in web security have helped define the direction of the web application security industry.

Sima is a member of ISSA and is one of

the founding visionaries of the Application Vulnerability Description Language (AVDL) standard within OASIS, as well as a founding member of the Web Application Security Consortium (WASC). He is also a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in Visual Developer Security, a frequent speaker, press resource and is featured regularly in the Associated Press and global security media.

Bluenose www.bluenose.com Don MacLennan Cloud computing San Francisco, CA » Bluenose is a customer success platform that empowers SaaS businesses to proactively manage customers through complete visibility, a robust early warning system, and built-in playbooks. Bluenose transforms the traditional notion of an account by connecting customers directly with end users like never before.

Leadership: Don MacLennan is passionate about analytics and insights that lead to great products. He has held leadership roles in several subscription-based businesses, where he came to understand the importance of customer engagement and loyalty. He started Bluenose with the desire to help other vendors build great products and delight their customers.

Prior to Bluenose, MacLennan was SVP of Product Management at AVG, and VP Marketing and Product Management at Frictionless Commerce/SAP.

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BlueTalon www.bluetalon.com Eric W. Tilenius Big data Redwood City, California » Businesses across all industries are collecting more data than ever. But one of the major challenges associated with that is deciding which users should have access to which data. If users are given access to too much data, the company can find itself exposed to risks. BlueTalon’s data control technology looks to keep companies firmly in control.

BlueTalon provides data-centric security for Hadoop, SQL and big data environments. The BlueTalon Policy Engine enables precise, consistent and dynamic user access policies across the enterprise, on premises and in the cloud.

The company enables fine grained control at the most granular level – column, row, cell and partial cell, and delivers a security solution addressing even the most stringent of needs for data protection.

The company says it is the only provider of consistent data-centric controls and auditing across a wide range of depositories, and this is why it is being used by leading Fortune 500 companies including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Service.

Gartner projects that the world will spend $101 billion on information security in 2018, and security solutions which focus on big data and the cloud are on the of the fastest growing segments. As more and more corporations around the world use more data to improve the competitiveness and efficiency of their businesses, the growth of the data security market will accelerate with it.

BlueTalon has raised $10 million in investment to date, from DCVC, Divergent, 94

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Signia, StarX, Bloomberg Beta and Biosys.

The company has big plans for the next 18 months as well. BlueTalon wants to expand its solution in two directions. The first is the types of repositories that the solution protects – database, file systems, and IaaS platforms. The second is the depth of security functionality and protection. The company also aims to seed the market for data-centric security and secure marquee customers and early adopters of datacentric security in multiple industries.

BlueTalon is also expanding its reach internationally, as large corporation seek to solve the challenge of privacy regulations in various countries around the world.

Business with international presence already deploy BlueTalon to ensure that employees get access to local and global enterprise data that they are allowed to, according to local regulations.

The company goes up against three types of competitors; open source tools tied to one Hadoop distribution, RDBMS vendors that have deployed protections of their own system, or traditional solutions whose approach does not scale to today’s volume of data.

BlueTalon is perfectly poised in an industry expanding very rapidly. The use of data is only going to increase, and as more companies use an increasing amount of data, more will realize just how much they need solutions like BlueTalon’s to control that data.

Breathe Technologies breathetechnologies.com Larry Mastrovich Biotech Irvine, California » Chronic respiratory diseases (CRDs) are among the most common, and deadly, of all medical conditions worldwide. According to the World Health Organization over three million people die yearly from the most frequent form of CRD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), accounting for an estimated 6% of deaths globally. Almost a quarter of a billion people suffer from asthma.

As pain points go, for California medtech firm Breathe Technologies, it’s a pretty huge one. Add to that the fact that most ventilators cannot be used while on the move - which presents its own problem.

“Current clinical evidence demonstrates that sedentary behavior worsens the conditions of patients with chronic respiratory disease,” Breathe Technologies president and CEO Lawrence A. Mastrovich told Red Herring. “Although exercise has shown to significantly improve outcomes in these individuals, many patients require positive pressure ventilation in order to maintain mobility and traditional ventilators were too heavy and cumbersome to be used while ambulatory.

“Breathe Technologies saw the potential to develop highly portable ventilators that could help address this unmet need,” added Mastrovich, whose 25-year career has also seen him helm Apria Healthcare, the U.S.’ largest home care provider of respiratory and home medical equipment.”

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Top 100 Companies: North America

easy integration into patients’ lives while remaining highly intuitive and portable.

“Our wearable ventilator systems enable mobility and support a greater quality of life while offering a more convenient option compared to larger and more cumbersome ventilators,” said Mastrovich.

“Compared to other ventilators, our technology offers a significant weight reduction,” he added. “In patient populations with breathing difficulties, heavy equipment can contribute to sedentary behavior. Our wearable system offsets the work of breathing and can be used during physical therapy, occupational therapy, respiratory therapy, and other types of rehabilitation, in both home and institutional settings.

“Several clinical studies have shown the effectiveness of positive pressure ventilation in increasing oxygenation, enhancing exercise endurance, and unloading respiratory muscle activity. This has been shown to lead to reduced exacerbations and healthcare costs.”

Recent healthcare reforms have accelerated the need for cost-effective solutions that provide demonstrated benefits. $38 million worth of funding across its eleven-year operation prove that investors see the vast benefits of Breathe Technologies’ products, which will soon be added to.

“Our largest projected milestone over the next 18 months is the national launch the Life2000 Continuous Ventilation System,” said Mastrovich. “Life2000 is Breathe’s first FDA-cleared critical care - life support device and is indicated for adult patients who require positive pressure ventilation delivered invasively or non-invasively.

The ventilator is suitable for use in home and institutional settings and is intended to be administered by qualified, trained personnel under the direction of a physician.

“Additionally, we plan to initiate additional clinical studies to further evaluate how

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portable ventilators improve healthcare outcomes while decreasing healthcare delivery costs,” he added.

It will be a busy year indeed for Mastrovich and his team, which includes vast medtech and medical experience. There are thus far no plans for European expansion.

But with Life2000’s launch, and further funding rounds, behind the firm, growth should not be a problem for this California company.

ChartWise Medical Systems www.chartwisemed.com Dr. Jonathan Elion Healthcare technology Wakefield, RI » ChartWise clinical documentation improvement software translates clinical terminology used by physicians into accurate diagnostic language required for documentation and medical reimbursement. Exceptional documentation tools and resources (including help with missing information, increased compliance and dual CDI for a smooth ICD-10 transition) deliver easier, better documentation, boost productivity and provide a fast ROI. Real-time reporting and alerts deliver the data needed to improve your patient outcomes.

Renowned physician, Jonathan Elion founded ChartWise in 2009, when changes in Medicare coding requirements caused hospitals to suffer from lost revenues, penalties and forfeiture of reimbursements due to inadequate documentation. Dr.

Elion, who also created the highly successful Heartlab imaging software, tackled this problem with an expert medical software team.

The groundbreaking first-to-market CACDI software is designed to improve precision in quality clinical documentation to support revenue assurance. Easy for medical professionals to understand and use, has a light IT footprint, and offers hospitals a way to mitigate risk, maximize reimbursement, and gain insight into their medical documentation improvement efforts. Offering support for health information management, RAC audit preparedness, DRG coding and DRG reimbursements, no other program on the market is as robust, or addresses the clinical documentation challenges, the way ChartWise does.

Leadership: With over 40 years of experience in computing and more than 25 years of experience in medical computing and information standards, Dr. Elion has committed his career to innovations in high value services and healthcare delivery to maximize efficiency and cost effectiveness.

Dr. Elion is a practicing board-certified cardiologist in Providence, RI and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University. He has served on the Finance Committee and Board of Trustees of one of the Brown affiliated hospitals, and is well versed in hospital finances. His experience provides him with the unique combination of in-depth medical and technology knowledge with a proven track record of entrepreneurship and business development.

In 1994, Dr. Elion founded Heartlab, Inc., the world’s leading designer and supplier of digital image and information networks for cardiology. The company grew successfully to over 200 people and was sold to Agfa Healthcare in 2005.

Top 100 Companies: North America

Clarity Software Solutions www.clarityssi.com Sean Rotermund Software Madison, CT » Clarity Software Solutions, Inc. assists clients with optimizing customer relationships by enhancing flexibility and control over their document management and communications delivery. Clarity is headquartered in Madison, CT and serves health insurance providers across the country. Clarity’s custom solutions are built within secure web-based technology, are easy-to-use and allow a single communication to be published to any form of media–print, web or email.

Leadership: Sean Rotermund is the founder of Clarity, and has piloted the company’s emergence from a startup to a market leader in the healthcare communications space within five years, earning a rank in Inc. Magazine’s annual Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in the country for three consecutive years. In its short life, the company has also seen explosive year over year growth in revenue, client base and staffing.

Rotermund relies on nearly 20 years of healthcare experience to drive Clarity’s rapid growth while maintaining the core values upon which the company was founded. Those core values, centered on a passion to exceed customer expectations all the time, have resulted in tremendous loyalty and referral growth. While focusing on the business, he never loses sight of

Clarity’s social responsibility. Clarity for Charity, developed to help the company assist organizations along the Connecticut shoreline, has supported dozens of causes since its inception in 2011.

On a day-to-day basis, Rotermund is responsible for directing business development efforts through management of the executive team including sales, marketing, operations, client relations and information technology. His success in new business generation is grounded in his past experiences in marketing and in strategic, new product, and technology applications development.

Rotermund holds a Bachelor of Sciences from Bentley University.

ClearDemand www.cleardemand.com James Sills Pricing solutions Scottsdale, Arizona » It’s not an uncommon occurrence to reach for a product on a store shelf, only to see that a larger version of the exact same product is the same price or cheaper.

As you pay for your bargain, you may feel a slight pang of superiority, having shrewdly cut your costs. But for retailers, this scenario can be a nightmare. And for stores with thousands of products and no pricing system, it happens all too often.

ClearDemand’s solution works to avoid these occurrences and many more, and helps retailers compete more effectively.

The company was founded by Brent Lippman, former CEO of Khimetrics, one of the pioneering companies in the pricing solutions space, James Sills, also formerly of Khimetrics and Revionics as well, and Adam Rosenberg. The three founders came up with a list of problems in the pricing solutions market, and then solved them.

“What came out of this is a solution that works not just for brick and mortar retailers, but for online retailers and allows them to identify the strategy that is most appropriate for a category, allows them to manage that strategy configuring rules and objectives for profit revenue in a way that is very easy,” explains Sills, President and CEO of ClearDemand.

The ClearDemand platform allows retailers to manage their prices, assortments and promotions effectively, and can handle any attribute – for example organic vs non-organic. In short, ClearDemand does the work a human is incapable of doing, because of the sheer size of the task. The platform also employs machine learning to help automate the pricing system further.

“One of the things that we’ve introduced with this technology is a lot of artificial intelligence. If a merchant is managing the high revenue items within their categories and they’re very good at managing the high revenue, but they don’t get to the lower revenue items, they don’t have time.

We look at the decisions they are making on the high revenue items and then project them down onto the low revenue items.

That type of automation, using artificial intelligence is what the industry needs to be effective, because a person just simply can’t keep up with all this data. It creates real value for the retailers, it’s money that they’re taking right to their bottom line,” says Sills.

The company was founded in 2012 and has a been growing steadily ever since.

ClearDemand hasn’t taken any outside investment. “We were very fortunate to have worked with retailers who appreciate and understand innovation and were www.REDHERRING.com

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looking for solutions that are easy to use and really work for their business. And understood what some of the challenges were in the early generations and recognized the advantages we’re offering,” comments Sills.

Fortunately for ClearDemand, retail is an area that embraces innovation.

Retailers are constantly looking for new ways to differentiate themselves from the competition and improve their margins. Pricing solution platforms like ClearDemand’s do exactly that. The only challenges ClearDemand faces now is its growth. The company is based in Scotsdale, Arizona, and has a good pool of retail and engineering talent, but recruiting quality talent is always an issue for startups, no matter the industry. ClearDemand has the advantage of boasting an innovative product, something which helps when attracting top talent.

Partnerships are very important to ClearDemand, and the company looks to work with other players in the retail industry. “There’s a lot of infrastructure already been built around channels, and there’s no reason for us to duplicate that, we can focus on what we’re great at. It’s the natural course that you’d expect from a company like u that you’d expect at this stage,” explains Sills.

The company, ever growing, has big plans for the future. “We will continue to expand through the partnerships in terms of customers using our products, not just in the U.S. but Europe and Asia. We’re gearing up for that. We’re expanding our product imprint into other areas. We’ve got a lot of R&D going on,” says Sills.

Technology has transformed the retail industry, making it easier than ever to sell products all over the world. As selling becomes easier, however, pricing becomes harder. And that’s why ClearDemand is perfectly placed to become a must-have platform for retailers.

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CloudAccess www.cloudaccess.net Jonathan Gafill Web hosting Traverse City, Michigan » Jonathan Gafill became CloudAccess’ CEO in 2014, taking control of a firm that had been the official hosting partner of Joomla! since 2010. Since then it has been honing its holistic solution to include a variety of security features, including SIEM; log management; identity management; access management and REACT (pattern recognition for behavioral analytics and real-time response).

“In particular, REACT is a unique offering in the identity analystics and intelligence (IAI) analyzing users, applications and network patterns in real-time and taking action based on the desired enterprise security posture,” Scott Davis, VP of marketing at CloudAccess tells Red Herring.

commend him for that. I was fortunate enough to have the leadership baton passed to me when Gary decided to step away as CEO.” Today the company is truly global, with resellers in India, Brazil and Dubai, and a seven-figure revenue. That is unsurprising when it’s considered $150 billion will be spent on security products in the next three years. “We expect to expand our international presence significantly in 2016,” says Davis.

While IAI, he stressed, is a new concept, “Other products in the suite are offered by other vendors as appliance or expensive onpremise software solution. CloudAccess is one of the few ISVs in the industry that provide this security stack as Securityas-a-Service with 24/7 monitoring and response.”

REACT competitors may include Securonix and Grucul, says Davis, while IAM and SIEM/log competition comprises big brands such as IBM, ca, HP and others.

“But none are integrated, cost-effective, or a SaaS offering.”

CloudAccess began life as a web design and consultant called Michigan Media, but soon rose to become one of the most recognized names in Joomla! hosting.

It was the brainchild of Gary Brooks, a Michigan native and internet engineer who saw the potential in Joomla! early.

Customer reviews have been glowing. ““Before CloudAccess, we used one of the large well known vendors,” one client told Red Herring. “At first, we made the move because CloudAccess offered similar service at a much lower cost. But I was pleasantly surprised that they not only provided additional mission critical services we weren’t getting before, but the quality of the security solutions we received was far outpaced that big vendor and exceeded our expectations. We love the monthly compliance executive summary.

I would recommend their solutions and services to any other credit union; or any other organization serious about security.”

“(Gary) turned a 30 minute demo of Joomla into a 30 day trial with a scaffold of support systems to ensure new users became comfortable with Joomla!,” Davis says. “CloudAccess.net has successfully grown leaps and bounds largely due to Gary’s vision and determination. We all

CloudAccess is currently securing a Series B funding round, with which it will increase its global footprint and release new products which “add significant additional features and functionality.” It seems that 2016 will be a big year for the company as its expansion continues at a furious pace.

“From a business perspective, as a SaaS offering, CloudAccess offers lower cost, faster go-to-market, higher ROI, better security posture, reducing management and deployment requirements and allowing customers to focus on their core competency,” he adds.

Top 100 Companies: North America

CloudBolt www.cloudbolt.io Brian Kelly Cloud computing Washington, D.C. » Some companies have fairly straightforward founding stories. Others have long and complicated tales involving pivots, pitfalls and perseverance. The story behind CloudBolt’s founding is something else altogether.

In 2010, the company’s founders Auggy da Rocha and Bernard Sanders had the same dream on the same night, according to the pair. In this dream, Ada Lovelace, the mathematician and writer who famously worked on Charles Babbage’s early general use computer, expressed her dismay at the state of enterprise IT. Lovelace was particular irked that 152 years after her death, programmers have to wait days and sometimes weeks or months to get the servers they need to do their job.

After that shared dream, da Rocha and Sanders collaborated to design a product that was easy to use and powerful enough to meet the requirements of modern enterprise IT shops. The first version of their product was released in 2011, and since then it has become one of the most critically acclaimed cloud management platforms on the market.

The company has gone through two rounds of private financing, raising a seed round worth $1.5 million in April 2013, and an angel round of $2.1 million in August 2015. Cloudbolt counts three main factors that make it stand out from the competition. CloudBolt deploys a single VM and is typically up and running in less than an hour, and doesn’t require costly professional services agreements.

The platform also boasts an intuitive user interface, and support for brownfield environments: the company’s ability to

discover and manage legacy environments and integrate them with new deployment allows IT operations to unify their management in a single console.

Those advantages are useful in an extremely competitive Cloud Management Platform market. The space is also evolving fast, and older companies such as Enstratius, DynamicOps, ServiceMesh and others are being acquired by the likes of Dell, VMWare and CSC. The market’s changing nature is also the company’s biggest challenge right now.

“Because cloud computing is changing so rapidly, the primary challenge we face is one of timing. Enterprises follow a technology adoption lifecycle, from proof of concept, to test/dev, to production pilot, to full-scale implementation. Knowing where the industry is in this lifecycle is key to success. Cloud management platforms must be able to deliver real, tangible value today while enabling transformational value in the future,” the founders write.

“Another challenge is fitting new technologies into the enterprise annual buying cycle. If a cloud project isn’t budgeted, the value to the business of a CMP must be particularly compelling or it will have to wait.

Finally, the CMP sales process can have a variety of entry points and stakeholders, from IT administrators, to DevOps teams, to CIOs, to line-of-business teams tired of slow fulfillment processes. It’s vital to show value in the right terms for each audience.”

The cloud management platform market is exploding because of huge demand from all over. Often when faced with a choice of platforms, customers will naturally favor the easiest to use, and that’s exactly where CloudBolt has an advantage. The company looks destined for further success, and it’ll be worth watching out for what Ada Lovelace tells the founders to do next.

CloudLock www.cloudlock.com Gil Zimmermann Security Waltham, MA » CloudLock protects data in the cloud, not from it. The company’s risk-appropriate security controls are non-disruptive.

Rather than create unnecessary barriers for users to work around (a problem that results in shadow IT and a potentially harmful loss of control), CloudLock enables companies to enforce higher levels of data security for only the data that requires it.

CloudLock sees itself as enabling business transformations that cloud applications provide in a secure and people-centric way, giving organizations confidence to securely execute business strategies.

CloudLock give organizations control over their data in the public cloud, without requiring invasive in-band technology, complicated overhead or unanswered regulatory risk. Many of the world’s largest companies and institutions trust CloudLock’s approach of directly integrating with their SaaS applications, which makes robust security controls immediately available at a fraction of the cost and complexity of other alternatives.

Leadership: Gil Zimmermann is the CEO and Co-Founder at CloudLock. Under Zimmermann’s leadership, CloudLock has grown into the market leader for cloud cybersecurity with more than 6 million enterprise users secured by CloudLock’s products.

Prior to founding CloudLock, Zimmermann was an EntrepreneurIn-Residence (EIR) at Cedar Fund.

Zimmermann has over 20 years of experience and has held key leadership positions at EMC Corporation and Sun www.REDHERRING.com

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Microsystems.

Zimmermann began his career in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) with several technology leadership positions in the Military Intelligence Elite Computer Projects Unit.

CloudOne / ClearObject

Zimmermann was named 2015 EY Entrepreneur Of The Year New England winner and is a frequent speaker at key cloud cybersecurity and industry events.

He has presented at the Dreamforce Conference, The CFO Technology Conference and the Israeli Cyber Security Showcase. He has been featured in Forbes, Talkin’ Cloud, SecurityWeek, BetaBoston, and more. Zimmermann is the organizer of the Boston branch of TechAviv.com, the world’s largest group of Israel-related entrepreneurs, executives and investors helping advance Israeli startups.

John McDonald

Zimmermann has a High-Tech MBA from Northeastern University, and holds a double major BA in Computer Science and Philosophy from Tel Aviv University, and is a graduate of MAMRAM (Elite software developer program at IDF Computer & Technology Unit).

www.cloudbolt.io

Internet of Things Fishers, Indiana » The Internet of Things, much hyped for many years, is now here - and everyone wants in on it. For most companies, that can be easier said than done, but by employing an Internet of Things Platform, the task can be made much easier, and achievable.

CloudOne provides such a platform, although with noticeable differences from its competitors. “The most notable thing about CloudOne is that unlike other IoT Platforms, we don’t require customers to abandon everything they are already using. We take the software, programs, and practices that our customers are already doing (and have been doing for years) and integrate them all to create their own custom IoT platform turned back to them and then we offer our managed services around that customized IoT Platform,” says John McDonald, CEO of CloudOne. “Most other IoT Platforms have a certain stack of technologies that make up the platform.

A company using certain IoT Platforms would need to abandon the software they’re using already and move EVERYTHING over to that platform which is not optimal or cost effective.”

CloudOne was founded in Chicago in early 2010, but quickly relocated its headquarters to Indianapolis. The company became the first to offer software-as-a-service and virtual private cloud deliver of IBM software products. Up to this point the main competition has come from internal IT teams who believe they don’t need a

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specialized cloud serve provider. However, the competition is now changing as the Internet of Things accelerates, and large systems integrators and custom app developers come into play.

As the technology and size of the market expands and advances quickly, CloudOne will have to ensure it stays ahead of the game. Fortunately, the company has big plans for the near future. “In the next 18 months, CloudOne will continue to assemble, deploy, manage and advance our customer’s ideal IoT solution platforms, as well as increase our services offerings around a number of existing and new software applications,” says McDonald.

“The next notable announcement will be IBM BlueMix Local on CloudOne. This offering brings the power and agility of the Bluemix cloud-based platform to your virtual private cloud bringing your highest performance and most secure cloud infrastructure available, as a whiteglove service supported and managed by CloudOne.” CloudOne has raised four rounds of funding since it was founded in January 2010. The company has raised $10.9 million to date. One of the investors, Plymouth Ventures, is effusive in its praise of CloudOne. “CloudOne’s momentum and proven success accelerating innovation with Fortune 500 companies makes it a perfect addition to Plymouth Ventures portfolio. Together, we have an incredible opportunity to scale the company and provide customers the next generation of solutions they need to make software and products in a world dominated by the Internet of Things,” says Jeff Barry, partner at Plymouth Ventures.

In February last year, CloudOne announced expansion into Europe, specifically the U.K. and Germany. The company plans to expand into China this year and other locations in the future.

Experience is Everything Today’s video viewers expect a high-quality experience on every device they use, anywhere they choose to use it – no matter how it gets delivered. That’s why the world’s leading content providers choose IneoQuest for their video quality assurance solutions.

Only IneoQuest can monitor, detect, and help quickly pinpoint quality issues across the entire video distribution chain - from source content to viewer’s device - and everywhere in between.

Viewer satisfaction matters, and no one has your viewers’ experience covered like IneoQuest.

www.ineoquest.com

Top 100 Companies: North America

CODA Energy www.codaenergy.com COO & CTO: Peter Nortman Clean Tech Location: Monrovia, CA » CODA Energy is a leading provider of scalable energy storage systems that enable customers to be energy resilient in an increasingly volatile and technology dependent world. With the most trusted, safe and dependable storage and battery management system available in the market today, CODA Core™ helps commercial and industrial facilities reduce costs, control consumption and manage risk associated with energy use, while optimizing energy operations for increased scalability, reliability and security.

Due to the variety of product applications, CODA Energy focuses on four target markets: commercial and industrial businesses seeking peak shaving, renewable microgrids and islands, electric vehicle charging stations, and frequency regulation projects.

Designed with over 10 years expertise and manufactured in California, the CODA Core combines advanced lithium-ion cells with proven battery and temperature management systems and an integrated operating system. With the industry’s only UL listed and ISO Certified (14001:2004 and 9001:2008) technology, CODA Energy is committed to meet its customers growing energy needs that include peak shaving, renewable energy integration, frequency trading, islanding and more.

With many systems in-the-ground and running for multiple applications, and

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many more in the pipeline, CODA Energy is leading the way for a future of energy resilience for businesses, communities, cities and society as whole.

Leadership: Peter Nortman has a distinguished 30+ year career track record of delivering pioneering solutions for energy storage, transportation and renewable generation markets. In his role of CTO/COO, Nortman provides technical, business and strategic leadership for the company.

Nortman is a recognized leader in the development of vehicle systems, engineering design, battery-traction system integration and renewable energy systems. His focus areas include CODA Energy’s battery management system (BMS), battery cell and pack development, and all high voltage software and hardware.

Nortman also oversees research and development for all energy storage related engineering. Previously, Nortman was the President and CEO of EnergyCS, a leading BMS company acquired by CODA Energy in 2011. Prior to EnergyCS, Nortman held senior positions at AeroVironment, US Electricar and DEMI. Nortman holds several patents in battery management systems and his electric vehicle (EV) battery system engineering prowess led to a 1st place finish in a selfengineered PHEV Prius at the Tour del Sol and set the EV land speed record with the Energy Storage Team at AeroVironment.

The winner of the Advancement of Air Pollution Technology award presented by SCAQMD, Nortman was recognized for his EV work and reducing fuel consumption and emissions by over 70%. He holds a MS in Electrical Engineering and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo.

ComputeNext www.computenext.com Sundar Kannan Cloud computing Bellevue, Washington » ComputeNext is a Bellevue, WA based cloud-technology company pioneering how organizations search, discover, procure, and provision cloud infrastructure with a unique multi-cloud marketplace. As a leader in cloud service brokerage, ComputeNext enables end-toend transactions across platform agnostic infrastructure.

ComputeNext has brought two unique solutions to the market - an IaaS Global Cloud Marketplace as well as a Marketplaceas-a-Service Platform. The Global Cloud Marketplace is ComputeNext’s IaaS aggregation Platform, which has been called an “Expedia for cloud services” an intuitive e-commerce platform that enables convenient procurement and utilization of cloud infrastructure services, as well as a growing range of software services. 40+ cloud providers have already been integrated and onboarded to this marketplace with thousands of service offerings currently available.

Leadership: Sundar Kannan, has had sales and management responsibilities in HP, Oracle and IBM. Most recently he was the Director of Business Development for Windows Azure in Microsoft. He has been working in the IT industry for the past 16 years in various capacities mainly in roles focusing around client success. His career has taken him from IBM/Lotus in Asia to HP and Oracle in Canada before

Top 100 Companies: North America

moving to Microsoft in 2004. He has held many regional and global roles, with an extensive background in Enterprise, Hosting and Telco sales. In 2006, he won the top sales award for the Communication Sector in Microsoft for closing a significant multiyear deal with a leading Telco in Canada. Kannan also served 3 years in the Singapore Navy as a Naval Gunner. He finished his degree from York University, Canada in Computer Science.

Consensus www.goconsensus.com Garin Hess Marketing American Fork, Utah » Garin Hess is a serial SaaS entrepreneur who over almost two decades has seen and done it all. At his previous company, Rapid Intake, the Utah expert began to see a trend: sales representatives were spending too much time doing the “same, repetitive demos” to prospects that might not even close.

Rapid Intake was sold to Collides Software in 2011. But for Hess, the journey was just beginning. Just 18 months later he had founded DemoChimp, now rebranded Consensus, based in the city of American Fork, to intelligently automate product demos and accelerate sales. “It was over a year later that we came to realize we were solving an even bigger problem in B2B sales - helping drive consensus among stakeholders in prospect buying groups,” he tells Red Herring.

“The fact is that we’re solving the biggest problem in B2B sales right now: driving consensus among the stakeholders in prospect buying groups, in a personalized yet automated way,” he added.

Consensus, has been a runaway sales success: Clients have cut their sales cycles by 68% and jumped close rates by 44%. The company, which last year grew 265% with three patents pending, has perfected its interactive demo platform to personalize video and documents “so each prospect automatically learns about your solution in the most relevant way.”

The firm’s Demolytics dashboard also helps clients “discover and engage the entire buying committee by gathering analytics

and tracking who’s involved, what’s important to them, what they watched, and who they shared it with,” according to company material.

Consensus’ competition is difficult to gauge, says Hess: “Sometimes we’re lumped in the sales and marketing automation categories which are very crowded, but for demo automation and especially for driving consensus, we are unique…we’ve no direct competitors, but we sometimes run into other vendors in a few narrow use cases.”

The company is backed to the tune of $7.1 million seed funding from a combination of institutional venture capital and angel investment, having recently closed a successful series A round. That came after the rebranding, which Hess had to do on “limited resources.”

The next step is twofold. Consensus must “execute our rebrand, and help our clients to implement Consensus as a lifecycle client education tool rather than simple demo automation,” says Hess.

International expansion is “down the road,” as the company already has international customers.

Those customers are very happy indeed.

“DemoChimp demo sent from marketing 12 days ago to prospect,” Don Cash, global head of inside sales at BMC Software said. “Prospect sent it to others within the prospect’s company immediately. We engaged and scheduled calls. $70k deal closed today. The best part is this was a new logo and they were weeks into discussions with our competition. Boom!”

All of which adds up to a mouthwatering prospect for Hess and co, who will no doubt be using their Red Herring triumph as a springboard to bigger and better times ahead. “We’re at the nexus of the marketing automation and sales acceleration markets,” he says, “both of which number in the tens of billions of dollars.”

www.REDHERRING.com

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Corduro www.corduro.com Robert Ziegler

The payment solutions market is fairly crowded right now, but the rewards of success in the space are huge. Corduro must hope its solution is unique and innovative enough to stand out from the crowd.

Payments Dallas, Texas » Mobile payment systems have opened up whole new revenue sources for companies.

Businesses no longer have to invest in expensive equipment to move away from cash payments, and consumers no longer have to worry where their mobile payments are accepted.

The market has spawned a number of mobile payment solutions, one of which is Corduro, a Southlake, Texas-based company trying to make waves in the payments as a service space. Corduro claims to have combined the mobile device and cardcase capabilities of Square with the reach of social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The company’s platform provides a complete payment-as-a-service framework, supporting mobile, online and point of sale terminals.

Corduro’s product uses members’ social networks to provide retailers and organizations with a larger reach, providing significant big data and social media capabilities to go with its simpler payment processing.

Corduro is not just a new way to accept credit card payments. The system capabilities include PCI and HIPAA compliant transactional support as well as least cost transactional routing.

But the company still faces challenges, chief among which is developing brand and marketing awareness with limited capital.

Corduro has already secured a Series A round of investment but is looking for an investor to lead its Series B. The company then plans to launch a specialty vertical for retail and an engagement or rewards network to spur consumer adoption.

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Coupa Software www.coupa.com Rob Bernshteyn Software San Mateo, CA » Change usually starts by asking a few good questions. Back in 2006 the enterprise software space was suffering from a real lack of innovation. It was expensive, difficult to install, required extensive training and people hated using it. The founders of Coupa saw that people were already easily shopping online from home, but at work they were saddled with systems they hated. So they asked themselves, “Why should the way we buy at work be any different from how we buy at home? And better still… “Shouldn’t software work the way people do, and not the other way around?”

And that was the start of Coupa, procurement software made with one focus - the end user. Coupa was founded on the premise that it should be easy for people to help save their company money. It was a radical idea, but the truth is, it doesn’t matter how good your procurement software is, if people don’t use it, you won’t save a dime.

Today Coupa is still all about the end user and giving people innovative solutions to help them contribute to the company savings. Coupa works on mobile, in the cloud and the interface is convenient and familiar. Most people say it feels just like

shopping from home. In fact, people like it so much that most companies see a user adoption rate of almost 100%!

Coupa helps companies create an environment of responsible spending, and by doing that they save money. After all, software doesn’t spend money, people do.

Leadership: Rob Bernshteyn is the Chief Executive Officer and President of Coupa, and drives the company’s strategy and execution. Rob has over two decades’ experience in the business software industry. He came to Coupa from SuccessFactors, where he ran Global Product Marketing & Management, as a member of the executive management team; as the company scaled from an early start up to a successful public company.

Prior to that, Bernshteyn directed Product Management at Siebel Systems, where he helped build Siebel ERM into one of the company’s fastest growing product lines.

Bernshteyn also did a stint in management consulting at McKinsey & Company, and spent four years at Accenture, where he focused on global SAP systems implementations.

Bernshteyn is a guest lecturer at Harvard and Stanford business schools, and a frequent contributor to Forbes and Fortune magazines. He can often be heard providing commentary on major news programs including Bloomberg’s Money Moves and NPR Morning Edition.

Bernshteyn holds a BS in Information Systems from the State University of New York at Albany and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Top 100 Companies: North America

CrowdStrike www.crowdstrike.com George Kurtz Security Orange County, California » Prior to starting CrowdStrike in 2011, co-founders George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, both veterans of the security industry, spent a year traveling the globe, visiting some of the world’s largest organizations and listening to their security challenges. Even before they embarked on that journey, they were aware that existing security solutions were unable to stop increasingly sophisticated breaches.

Today, Crowdstrike provides three crucial elements of protection: next generation anti-virus, endpoint detection and response (EDR), and a 24/7 managed hunting service, all delivered via the cloud in a single integrated solution.

“CrowdStrike’s next-generation endpoint protection platform, Falcon, uses the patented CrowdStrike Threat Graph to analyze and correlate billions of events in real time, providing complete protection and 5-second visibility across all endpoints,” says George Kurtz, CEO and co-founder.

Crowdstrike has attracted significant investment over the years. The company secured a $26 million Series A led by Warburg Pincus, and followed that up with a Series B round led by Accel Partners and worth $30 million. Last year Crowdstrike raised $100 million from Google Capital, Rackspace, Accel Partners and Warburg Pincus in a Series C round.

“Rackspace was an early adopter of the CrowdStrike Falcon platform and we have seen first-hand the decisive advantage that CrowdStrike offers to proactively detect and prevent sophisticated attacks,” said Brian Kelly, chief security officer at

Rackspace said at the time of the Series C funding announcement. “Unlike other endpoint security tools, CrowdStrike’s scalable cloud-based architecture provides unrivaled visibility and enables significantly faster response time to cyber threats. CrowdStrike also will be a key component of an upcoming line of security offerings being launched at Rackspace this year.”

The security industry is a competitive and crowded one, and CrowdStrike will need to ensure it keeps ahead of the curve if it is to succeed in the future.

CustomerMatrix www.customermatrix.com Guy Mounier Software Location: New York

international company has a growing list of clients including some of the world’s most distinguished brands across consumer, financial and technology industries. Its executives are founding members of the Cognitive Computing Consortium.

Leadership: Guy Mounier is responsible for the strategic direction of the company and is currently focusing on growing the company’s business globally. Prior to founding CustomerMatrix, Mounier cofounded and ran BA Insight, a company that is the leader in Agile Information Integration and can count 10% of the Fortune 500 companies as customers.

Prior to that, Mounier was CTO of Suez, a Global 100 energy management company, where he led multi-million dollar software deployment initiatives worldwide.

Mounier has extensive experience in executive IT leadership and management consulting. He holds a master’s degree in mathematics from Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, and a master’s degree in computer science from Ecole Centrale in Paris, France.

» What if your CRM could think?

CustomerMatrix brings the power of cognitive computing to your CRM and its technology serves on the front line of sales and customer service excellence.

CustomerMatrix platform amplifies the value of existing IT investments by converging all of the data and knowledge around an organization into CRM systems and processes, applying cognitive intelligence to empower users with recommendations for actions that have the highest revenue impact. ActionRank™, a proprietary scoring system that maximizes revenue growth with real-time comparisons to past outcomes, ensures these recommendations are ultra-relevant and contextual.

As an official partner of leading CRM vendors, CustomerMatrix is ideal for converting upselling/cross selling and churn risk reduction opportunities in fiercely competitive markets. The

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Top 100 Companies: North America

Cylance www.cylance.com Stuart McClure Security

CTO and General Manager at McAfee/ Intel. McClure is the creator and leadauthor of the most successful security book of all time, Hacking Exposed. He is widely recognized for his extensive and in-depth knowledge of security, and is one of the industry’s leading authorities on information security.

Irvine, California » Cylance is the first company to apply artificial intelligence, algorithmic science and machine learning to cyber security. By coupling sophisticated math and machine learning with a unique understanding of a hacker’s mentality, Cylance is truly predictive and preventive against advanced threats. All other comparable vendors focus on detection and response, a reactive, operationally expensive model.

Being predictive and preventive reduces the total attack surface as well as the resources for monitoring, maintaining and recovering.

CylancePROTECT, the cornerstone product, replaces or augments existing endpoint protection products. Network and Forensics Analysts use CylanceV as an analytics tool for malware detection used in compromise assessments, forensic analysis and to augment network security and situational awareness tools.

The Cylance services team has deep expertise in incident response, compromise assessments, penetration testing, and securing industrial control systems (ICS) and critical infrastructure and key resources (CIKR).

Leadership: Stuart McClure leads Cylance as its CEO and visionary for the first math based approach to threat detection, protection and response. Prior to Cylance, McClure was EVP, Global

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Damballa www.damballa.com David Scholtz Security Atlanta, GA » As the experts in advanced threat protection and containment, Damballa discovers active threats that bypass all security prevention layers. Damballa identifies evidence of malicious network traffic in real time, rapidly pinpointing the compromised devices that represent the highest risk to a business.

The company’s patented solutions leverage Big Data from the industry’s broadest data set of consumer and enterprise network traffic (Damballa has daily visibility into over 55% of North American Internet traffic and one-third of mobile data traffic), and combine that with machine learning to automatically discover and terminate criminal activity, stopping data theft, minimizing business disruption, and reducing the time to response and remediation. Damballa protects any device or OS including PCs, Macs, Unix, iOS, Android, and embedded systems and safeguards more than 400 million endpoints globally at enterprises in every

major market and for the world’s largest ISP and telecommunications providers.

The company’s flagship product, Damballa Failsafe is an automatic breach defense system that detects successful infections with certainty, terminates their activity and gives responders the ammunition needed to rapidly prevent loss. It delivers actionable information about known and unknown threats regardless of the infection’s source, entry vector or OS of the device, arming responders with definitive evidence so they can rapidly prevent loss on high-risk devices while blocking activity on the rest.

Leadership: David Scholtz has 25 years of technology industry experience and a track record of success implementing leveraged go-to-market strategies. Over the past 10 years, Scholtz was a member of global leadership teams at McAfee, HP and Mercury. McAfee and Mercury achieved nearly $2 billion in cumulative revenue growth and were acquired for a collective $12.3 billion. As SVP, Global Alliances at McAfee, Scholtz’s organization was responsible for the alliances, joint go-tomarket offerings, technology integrations, and embedded/OEM sales with McAfee’s strategic partners worldwide.

Before joining McAfee, Scholtz was VP, Worldwide Alliances & Channel Programs at HP Software, which had acquired Mercury Interactive, where Scholtz was VP, Americas Alliances and Channels.

Prior to Mercury, Scholtz started his career at Accenture (then Andersen Consulting), later sold enterprise software and was a founder of two technology startups. Scholtz graduated with a degree in International Relations from Stanford University.

Top 100 Companies: North America

Decisive

DH2i

www.decisive.is

www.dh2i.com

David Dundas

Don Boxley

Marketing/Advertising/SOE

Big data

New York

Fort Collins, Colorado

» Decisive allows advertisers to access many different advertising networks such as Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, Millenial Media and many others all in one place.

The company’s real-time analytics show the advertiser every detail that contributes to the success or failure of campaigns. Decisive also provides a campaign optimization algorithm tool called SmartCPM that benchmarks their campaigns against others on the platform and automatically optimizes for the advertisers.

Leadership: David Dundas has deep expertise in growing businesses on mobile platforms. Dundas is currently founder and CEO of mobile advertising Decisive, a mobile advertising platform that allows brands to run pinpoint targeted display advertising campaigns across mobile apps and websites.

» Don Boxley and OJ Ngo already had an illustrious history of building applications that optimized the deployment of Microsoft SQL Server when, in 2010, they founded DH2i. Now, years later and with an industryrenowned product to hand, the Fort Collins, Colorado-based company is poised for significant growth.

“DH2i’s founding vision was based around the question, ‘How can we help folks to do a better job of managing their applications in the Windows space?’”, a company spokesperson told Red Herring recently.

“As Don Boxley and OJ Ngo looked around at IT professionals, they saw that they were struggling with their enterprise Windows applications, which were very expensive to buy and support – especially SQL Server.

Since 2003, Dundas has been in the Mobile Content space. Dundas served as Director Business Development with Thumbplay, Inc. - the leading, mobile content subscription service. As Thumbplay’s first hire, he directly contributed to the company’s growth from $0 in revenues in November of 2004 to a $80 million monthly operation in under three years.

“They wanted to make it easier for them, as well as dramatically less expensive,” the spokesperson added. “It was really rather straightforward - Windows Server/SQL Server management professionals needed to be able to move an enterprise app or workload from one host to another host, anywhere in their environment, at any time, within seconds. They had this concept, if you will, of ‘jail-breaking’ these applications. To do that today, DH2i is focused on containers.”

Prior to Thumbplay, Dundas worked for mobile startup Flycell – one of the very first mobile content providers in the U.S. There he helped managed web programming while heading up content acquisition negotiating and executing some of the industry’s first ringtone licensing deals with all of the major record labels.

DxEnterprise delivers application portability, near-zero downtime, and ease of management, while lowering associated costs by 30-60%. It is a first-of-its-kind container technology that enables workload and data portability - called InstanceMobility by the company - and high availability for Windows Server applications, services and file shares.

Dundas has a BS from the Carroll School of Management at Boston College with majors in Marketing and Computer Science.

“DH2i’s pioneering container technology creates a framework for orchestrating datacenter management, high availability/

disaster tolerance (DR) and policy-based SLA management,” Boxley said. “DxEnterprise is the only Windows container technology that leverages native Windows Server file system (NTFS) and shared or replicated storage technology to coordinate access to a pool of disk resources in the cluster.

“This provides consistent disk presentation no matter which host the container is active on. DxEnterprise can support any current version or edition of SQL Server and OS across any physical, virtual or hybrid infrastructure.”

DH2i holds one patent with two pending, and maintains that it is completely unique in its field: the most common competitor, it says, is the status quo - though Microsoft Enterprise Edition operates in a similar way. There are also, of course, other container vendors like Docker and Oracle. But again, DH2i believes it is sitting on a one-off solution.

Until now it has not raised any outside funds. But February saw the firm join the VMWare Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program, which includes thousands of best-of-breed technology partners, with a “shared commitment to bring the best expertise solutions for each unique customer environment,” according to VMWare.

With that in the bank, DH2i is looking towards expansion in the second half of 2016 and beyond. “We are currently working with strategic partners in the UK with reach across Europe,” Boxley said. “In the coming year, we plan to continue to align ourselves w/strategic channel and technology partners across Europe, as well as South Africa.”

And that will help it compete for a market opportunity worth a reported $7 billion.

Little wonder the team is bullish amid a raft of challenges including continuing to innovate, finding more strategic partners and hiring an ever expanding team of high-tech experts.

“Keep your eyes here,” Boxley said. Where DH2i’s prospects are concerned, if you blink you’ll miss another breakthrough.

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Top 100 Companies: North America

Digital Air Strike www.digitalairstrike.com Alexi Venneri Marketing Scottsdale, Arizona » 2009 was not the easiest year to start a company, while the U.S. was suffering through one of the worst recessions in its history. But the companies that did form, and emerge successfully, from that period, are all the more resilient for it.

Alexi Venneri identified an opportunity in social media marketing in the auto industry at a time when car manufacturers were taking billions of dollars in government bailouts to stay alive. Undeterred by the economic climate, Venneri was determined to make the most of a large gap in a massive market. While President of Auto Media/Blue Flame 6, part of the Van Tuyl Automotive Group, she realized social media solutions were lacking.

“Social networks were growing in importance. It became increasingly apparent to me that we needed to find a solution to help us leverage the social networks. Low and behold I could not find a solution,” says Venneri. “And that’s how the idea started. I had a couple of investors that wanted to back me, and it literally started at my kitchen table with a couple of contractors and looking for ways we could build, borrow or license technology.

Ultimately we built our own technology and it took off pretty quickly. It’s been a very fun ride.”

The company she founded, Digital Air Strike, merged with a Silicon Valley-based, venture capital-backed software company in 2011, and in late 2013 Venneri was promoted to CEO. Digital Air Strike has since reached profitability and boasts an impressive client list.

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The auto industry was fairly slow in realizing the potential of social media marketing, and is still to fully engage with it in some cases, according to Venneri.

“They’re still coming around to it. When I started the company there wasn’t even such a thing as a media buy on social networks.

Today it’s about the social ads and just the fact that you’re claiming and managing all of these sites. We claim and manage 25 major social networks on behalf of the businesses, and keep them active and drive consumers to leave feedback on the site. In a way it’s like we’re managing 25 websites for the dealers and the manufacturers.”

One of the key areas for Digital Air Strike is customer engagement management.

The company is constantly developing technology to stay ahead of the market, and to leverage social networks and digital response technology to help retailers respond faster to consumers and sell more. Digital Air Strike also boasts patentpending technology that turns customer surveys into online reviews with top review sites, such as Google+, Facebook and Yelp.

All this technology makes it not only easier for dealerships and manufacturers to sell cars, but also for consumers to buy them.

“We help consumers have a better experience when they’re buying a car,” says Venneri. “So if they’ve got questions or want information they’re more likely to find it if we’re involved in the mix. And then when we’re getting their feedback, if they’ve got a compliment we’ll make sure the individual person at that dealership knows they are happy or if they’ve got a concern or a suggestion we make sure it gets heard.”

While there were few companies doing what Digital Air Strike does when the company first started, now there is some competition. “The market we are in is very competitive as more and more agencies and vendors have recognized the need for and benefits to their clients of social media marketing, however there are very few companies that do exactly what we do. Many advertising firms are

adding social media marketing to their overall efforts, but can’t devote enough time, talent and technology to manage all social and review sites as effectively as we do. Even our primary competitors in the automotive sector focus on other things with social media, digital engagement and lead response being also ran components of their core business – whereas social IS our core business.”

Customers have been effusive in their praise for Digital Air Strike’s services.

“Norm Reeves Honda has been able to sell and service more cars because of our outstanding online reputation managed

by Digital AirStrike. With their fast and professional responses to customer concerns and alerts to our team, we are able to fix the issues of unhappy customers right away salvaging our reputation and gaining back the customer’s future business. Through prospecting on Twitter, DAS has sent customers who may not have considered Norm Reeves Honda into our showroom and our team has converted them into sales,” said Brad Mugg, GM, Norm Reeves Honda.

Digital Air Strike’s success in the automotive industry has been remarkable, and the company has now sought out other verticals. These include legal, aesthetics, real estate and travel. The company is also aggressively identifying and vetting licensing, channel and reseller partners as part of its growth.

Digital Air Strike also plans to grow internationally as well. “We currently serve just over 1% of the total Canadian automotive market – a market we entered last year, and are expanding into the United Kingdom this year. So, yes, international expansion is not only part of our plan, but we are organizing the business and resources to tap further into those opportunities to broaden our reach. We will also be speaking at this year’s Internet Motors Milan event in Italy.

Future expansion efforts may also include Argentina and other European and South American.”

Top 100 Companies: North America

e-Builder www.e-builder.net Ron Antevy Construction Fort Lauderdale, Florida » By the time Ron Antevy joined e-Builder, in 1998, it had already been in operation for three years as a product of his brother Jon’s Master’s research, which was focused on multimedia and Internet applications for the construction industry.

Within a few years e-Builder, based in Plantation, Florida, began selling its enterprise software directly to facility owners. It is the only tool designed specifically for facility owners that manages scope, schedule, cost and risk through an integrated platform, according to the company. e-Builder’s solution is cloudbased, allowing it to be accessible across multiple devices and enabling facility owners to manage construction projects throughout the entire life cycle, from planning and design all the way through construction and operations. e-Builder Enterprise is the only tool on the market designed specifically for facility owners that manages scope, schedule, cost and risk through an integrated platform.

Enterprise offers mobile capabilities through its application e-Builder Mobile, which gives users the ability to use Enterprise anywhere, anytime.

Its pain point is huge, according to the company: “The software industry as it relates to construction program management is highly competitive, as it is high stakes. Everything is big: the projects, the budgets and the opportunity to improve productivity and efficiency. Studies have shown that on some projects, as much as 30% of every construction dollar is wasted, exceeding 1 trillion dollars annually.”

Despite competition including Microsoft Excel, Oracle Primavera and Meridian Project Systems, e-Builder has carved out an impressive niche for itself. And the successes just keep on coming.

This April e-Builder won the Technology Leaders of the Year Award by the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce. “This recognition strikes close to home for our team,” said CEO Ron Antevy shortly after.

“From the beginning, e-Builder has been focused on helping building owners save time and money on construction projects so they can more quickly complete the facilities that serve their communities from hospitals and schools to government buildings.

“We couldn’t be happier to receive acknowledgement from our local business community for our efforts,” he said.

Add to that the company’s Red Herring Top 100 North America gong, and it’s clear e-Builder is exciting more than just its clients. The following day it also announced a breakfast seminar series on Optimizing Owner Organizations. It is allgo at e-Builder right now.

2016 is expected to be another wildly successful year, as e-Builder celebrates its 20th year of business. It is a market leader in its home region of south Florida, and its software is currently being used to manage over $200 billion in active construction projects worldwide. That will surely expand - not least thanks to an array of market indicators the company believes will supercharge e-Builder’s progress in the coming years.

The market opportunity is certainly substantial. e-Builder claims more than 1 trillion dollars are currently wasted on an annual basis in the construction industry, and it’s a problem which only stands to worsen. That means organizations will need solutions like e-Builder’s.

Antevy, however, tells us his company’s biggest achievement in the last year was its acquisition of Scenario Virtual Project Delivery (VPD), a leader in collaborative building information modeling (BIM) technology for construction. “While the integration of e-Builder Enterprise with BIM technology is a significant development for the company, it is also an example of one of e-Builder’s ongoing struggles: ensuring customers are up-todate on the latest trends and technologies in the construction industry, as they apply to facility owners,” he said.

“With a majority of solutions focusing on the benefits for contractors and architects, e-Builder is working to ensure all owners - whether or not they are customers - are aware of the technologies currently available and how they can best use them to increase efficiencies,” he added.

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Top 100 Companies: North America

Evolve IP www.evolveip.net Thomas Gravina Cloud computing Wayne, Pennsylvania » In 2007 Evolve IP’s founders recognized that a new technology, the ‘cloud’, would become one of the most disruptive forces in the IT industry. Fast forward nine years and it’s clear that a) they certainly weren’t wrong, and b) Evolve IP has grown to become one of the foremost companies in defining, selling and implementing cloud services.

Thomas Gravina, not only co-founded Evolve IP with Michael Peterson, but is the firm’s chairman and CEO. Back in 2007 even he surely cannot have foreseen a future in which the Wayne, Pennsylvaniaheadquartered company would be backed by over $25 million in funding, and has made key acquisitions in the industry.

The most recent of these - Evolve IP’s seventh since its inception - came in December when it bought Allentownbased APT Inc, a software consulting firm, for an undisclosed price. The deal will bring another 80 jobs to Evolve IP, which services more than 1,300 commercial businesses in 14 countries, with over 100,000 corporate users.

It is a strategy Evolve IP plans to continue, as Gravina and co look to a 2016 in which it hopes to acquire additional organizations and technologies across the U.S.; release innovative new cloud services; enhance current services with significant feature releases and hire additional associates.

With access to a $42.2 million senior secured loan facility, that has been made a lot easier.

Evolve IP is the only company that offers an award-winning, unified cloud platform on which to migrate both cloud 110

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computing and cloud communication services, according to the company. Evolve IP’s research indicates that over 50% of IT professionals and executives would prefer to work with a single provider for their cloud services and today, 90% of Evolve IP’s customers have more than one service in Evolve IP’s cloud.

Evolve IP holds exclusive cloud computing contracts and has built relationships with the largest channel partners in the U.S. to resell services. The cloud services market is an increasingly complex one with multiple players competing in each of Evolve IP’s product areas. That does not worry Gravina, however, with his charges achieving 72.5% CAGR since inception, and having been listed on the Inc. 500/5000 three times. A host of other gongs have also gone to the company.

“No other companies we’ve identified provides a unified cloud platform that delivers both cloud computing services - virtual servers, data centers, desktops along with cloud communications services like IP phone systems, UC, and hosted call centers,” Gravina said in an emailed statement.

That unified approach means that Evolve IP’s total addressable market can confidently be estimated at around the $100 billion mark, while its potential customers are any commercial business with 50 or more employees, located anywhere in the world. “Evolve IP services are currently deployed on four continents and in 14 different countries,” adds Gravina.

All of which means that 2016 looks set to continue Evolve IP’s upward trajectory, further into the cloud Gravina and Peterson correctly identified as being home to a pot of gold nine years ago. Evolve IP is one of few tech companies to have fully lived up to its ambitious name.

Exadel www.appery.io Fima Katz Mobile Concord, California » Appery.io, developed by Exadel, is the first mobile platform that offers a cloudbased rapid development environment with integrated backend services and a rich catalog of API plug-ins that dramatically simplify integration with cloud services and enterprise systems. It combines the simplicity of visual development with the power of JavaScript to create crossplatform enterprise apps rapidly. Because the platform is 100% cloud-based, you can focus on creating great applications, while we worry about maintaining the platform.

Appery.io is offered by Exadel, a global software mobile development company that has been trusted by the world’s largest enterprises to deliver mission-critical applications for nearly 15 years.

Leadership: Fima Katz is the President and CEO of Exadel. He founded the company in 1998 with a vision to fundamentally improve the way companies use innovative technology to develop mission-critical business applications. He has succeeded in realizing this vision, growing Exadel’s business by at least 30% year after year.

Through his vision, Exadel is now a leader in the enterprise open source solutions market and a pioneer in utilizing component-based architecture and open source approaches to radically reduce corporate cost and development time as exemplified in Exadel’s strategic partnership with Red Hat/JBoss. Most recently, he has guided Exadel into a leadership position in mobile applications and in reaping the benefits of the Cloud, as exemplified by the pathbreaking cloudbased mobileplatform, Appery.io.

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Top 100 Companies: North America

Katz has over 20 years of experience in the information technology industry. He has held managerial and technical positions with major financial services companies, including Wells Fargo Bank, Concorde Solutions, and Bank of America (where he served as the Chief Architect of Internet Systems). In addition, he has founded three other successful companies. His technical expertise includes the design of complex, mission-critical distributed object systems and the integration of complex legacy enterprise systems into business services.

Katz is a recognized authority and speaker on open source, JAVA, XML and DOA technologies and has co-authored The Essential Guide to Object Monitors (Wiley, 1999).

Express KCS

but at the right price. KCS Express handles hundreds of artworks daily for outputs in print, digital, video, packaging and point of sale.

Central to the company’s success is MediaFerry, an online platform specifically designer for brands and marketers to get their jobs done. MediaFerry give them access to a huge pool of skilled talent, and gives them more capability for less money.

Leadership: Robert Berkeley, together with Tariq Husain, has led Express KCS from the ground up to be the cross-platform creative production powerhouse it is today. He started his career implementing workflow systems at large publishers and was MD of PrintCafe Europe (now EFI) for eight years. He is founder and chairman of Linkz-IM Inc, a reader-response technology company.

www.expresskcs.com Robert Berkeley

eZanga

Marketing/Advertising/SOE

www.ezanga.com

Pittsburgh, PA

Rich Kahn Marketing

» For over 40 years, Express KCS has supported brands to help them grow, it is part of what the company does.

In that time, the brand has become a byword for reliability, creativity, quality and technology. What’s always kept the company ahead is how it has changed and adapted, staying a step ahead delivering what customers need across every media channel. Operating from three ISO 9001 production centers, Express KCS deploys a highly-skilled 450-strong workforce of art workers, digital technologists and production experts.

The company’s ability to deliver at any scale, in any format has earned relationships with global brands in North America, Australia and Europe. Brands that can’t afford anything less than the very best, with deadlines that can’t be compromised,

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Middletown, Delaware » Embarking on a new venture in a fresh market often highlights problems in that space. The smart companies spot those problems early, and work to resolve them.

In May 2003 Rich and Beth Kahn started eZanga as an affiliate network. Rich realized that that something wasn’t right with the traffic they were receiving, and discovered he was a victim of bot traffic. It was at this point he focused less on affiliate networking and more on fraudulent traffic detection.

The company’s Traffic Advisors product was launched in 2005 and used to help eliminate fraudulent traffic. As a result, eZanga started adding advertisers to its

network, which thrived as Traffic Advisors protected those advertisers’ budgets. Now the company has introduced more product offerings, like AdPad, an ad management system for advertisers, and continues to offer Traffic Advisors products.

The online market is extremely crowded, and according to eZanga, not all of the players pay attention to the rules. “Our market is extremely competitive. There are hundreds of companies that sell online marketing and of that, there’s a small percentage of them that do everything above board. eZanga is one of them.

Unfortunately, there are many companies in this space that do not provide traffic the right way and really take care of the client.

Because of that, this space has developed a bad name for itself to an extent,” explains Michelle Brammer Director of Marketing at eZanga. For the handful of us that are doing it right and taking care of the customer the right way, it’s become a very tight-knit, but competitive space.

In order to stand out from the competition, eZanga focuses on helping their clients any way they can. “In our industry, customer service and support are far and few between. Even though we’re a company that works on a CPC (cost per click) model, it’s still very important to us that we meet performance metrics,” says Brammer.

“Typically, organizations leave it to clients to manage their own campaigns and if they’re successful, great. If not, oh well. eZanga isn’t like that. We’re one of the few that has a team of support personnel to help clients manage their campaigns. Their performance metrics are our performance metrics, so we look at their metrics, reports, keyword lists, etc., and make optimizations and recommendations on the clients’ behalf, if they so choose.” eZanga is 100% owned and operated by its founders, Rich and Beth Kahn. The pair say that nobody was willing or interested in investing in the company when it was in its early stages, and now the company is making money and performing well, they’d rather go alone rather than accept funds from the investors who have been in touch.

Top 100 Companies: North America

FinalCode

The company’s clients are certainly happy with the results they’ve achieved by deploying eZanga’s products. RingPartner is a pay-per-call client. “We were pleased to see both our call volume and conversion rate significantly increase when working with the team at eZanga. After the test period we decided to continue with the new approach [to our campaign],” says Mike Williams, VP of Marketing & Operations at RingPartner.

For the next 18 months, eZanga has big plans. “Over the next 18 months, we’ll be focused heavily on our product offerings.

As such, we’re improving and expanding our call network to handle more robust pay per call verticals and requests. Additionally, we’re expanding our I.T. team to add a few new features to our pay per click product line. Lastly, eZanga is working on a new product which we cannot disclose at this time, but will be due out later this year.

It’s going to be an exciting year for eZanga and we’re poised to do very big things,” concludes Brammer.

www.hfinalcode.com/en Gord Boyce Security San Jose, California » Technology has enabled companies to work collaboratively over great distances.

File sharing and collaboration platforms are now common, and used across all industries. Mobile technology also means files are carried around everywhere, and accessible all the time. But the ease of collaboration is offset somewhat by security concerns, as files held in the cloud can be compromised from many different locations. FinalCode eases those fears.

The FinalCode platform and technology was originally developed and sold in Japan by DigitalArts, a public web filtering security software vendor. FinalCode incorporated in the U.S. as an independent entity by DigitalArts in 2014. The company then came out of stealth in March 2015 and has since taken possession of the IP and sales, marketing, development and support.

“FinalCode delivers a persistent file security platform offering the most rapid time-to-value. Easy, flexible and costeffective file-based IRM solution that can be rapidly deployed, as needed, across existing file collaboration mechanisms and with the means to readily incorporate external collaborators,” explains Gord Boyce, CEO of FinalCode. “By separating file security management from storage, distribution and content management, FinalCode can be implemented within existing file management and collaboration environments and workflow.

By enforcing policy at the operating system and application level, FinalCode allows recipients to work in the application they are accustomed to.”

The

overall

information

rights

management (IRM) market is competitive, with the likes of Microsoft, IBM and EMC in the space, but Boyce believes the company has enough to set it apart from its competition. “Conventional approaches rely on internal or cloud repositories and containers, shared passcodes, application-specific connectors, or are for internal use. Most require considerable planning, infrastructure changes and big IT investment. They are difficult to expand within a company, challenging to invite external collaborators, and disrupt workflow,” he says.

Customers and clients certainly seem happy. “Data protection is essential for our company. Since our business relies on the efficient sharing of information, we recognized the potential risk of exposure of sensitive data and shared files. With FinalCode, we now have confidence in our ability to better manage that risk in a costeffective way,” said Sayaka Doi, director of Professional Services at Pasona N A, Inc. “FinalCode delivered on our adoption and management expectations – we found it extremely easy to use, deploy and manage.

The level of file security it provides allows us to alleviate the real data protection concerns of our shareholders, customers and prospects.”

The global data encryption market is set to grow at 14.3% CAGR and reach over $2 billion by 2020, according to Allies Market Research from 2014. This growth is driven by an increasing number of high profile data breaches, stringent data privacy compliance regulations and technology adoption, specifically data protection for cloud and mobility. The enterprise file sync and share market will be worth $1.5 billion by 2018, according to FinalCode.

FinalCode appears to be well placed in that market. “We are in a perfect storm; massive unstructured data and enterprise data leakage risks, tremendous file collaboration growth, rapidly evolving collaboration devices and mechanisms, mounting data privacy compliance and liability pressures, and companies refreshing their enterprise content management systems,” says Boyce. www.REDHERRING.com

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Despite the company’s success, challenges still remain. “There are many file collaboration security vendors and options in the market which can be confusing for the customer. Many may think that we take possession, secure and distribute files when we actually add file security to existing infrastructure. So being new to the market, awareness and recognition are among challenges that we face,” Boyce adds.

FinalCode now looks towards a bright future, where it has additional enterprise feature releases planned for this year, after the recent FinalCode v5 release. The company also plans to expand its sales, marketing and support infrastructure, and develop its channel and technology alliance partners.

File security is already a huge industry, and is only going to grow in the next decade or so. Companies like FinalCode will look to grow with it, and already find themselves with a technological advantage to build on.

over 5,000 manufacturer models requiring no set up, no pairing of devices, no cables, no dongle and no set top box. Additionally, Flipps selected publishers can expand their reach across hundreds of millions of TVs worldwide without the need to develop proprietary apps or specialized software to accommodate thousands of different TV models.

Leadership: Kosta Jordanov has founded and run three software companies, leading to one exit, one IPO and BSE. He previously ran a professional services company, Bianor, delivering software solutions to IBM, Samsung, Procter & Gamble and NATO and was CTO of TTS and a Software Engineer at IBM. He attended Technical University of Sofia (Computer Science) and UNWE (Macroeconomics).

ForSight VISION5 www.forsightvision5.com

Flipps

Andy Corley

www.flipps.com

Pharma

Kosta Jordanov

Location: Menlo Park, CA

Entertainment Location: San Mateo, CA » Flipps is a mobile app for entertainment enthusiasts to easily discover and project unique content onto any connected TV using their smartphone or tablet with no additional hardware or set-up. The Flipps mobile, touch-screen interface enables access to 100+ channels of hit movies, music videos, popular online TV series and more.

The Flipps patented technology immediately works with over 250 million connected TVs and is compatible with

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» ForSight VISION5 is focused on developing non-invasive products that replace eye drops and provide sustained therapy for major eye diseases including glaucoma, dry eye, and allergy. ForSight VISION5’s lead product candidate is the Helios insert, a novel, non-invasive delivery system designed to allow glaucoma and ocular hypertensive patients to continually receive their medication.

Over 2.7 million patients in the USA have open-angle glaucoma and this population is expected to exceed 4 million patients by 2030. In these patients, elevated intraocular pressure leads to gradual and irreversible optic nerve damage, visual field loss, and

ultimately, to blindness. Despite these risks, over half of patients stop taking their prescribed eye drops, putting themselves at higher risk for vision loss. ForSight VISION5’s lead product, the Helios insert, is being developed to ensure that patients consistently receive their medication so that vision is preserved.

The Helios insert is being designed as a non-invasive product that rests on the surface of the eye (under the eyelids). Over a period of six months, it slowly releases medication. The Helios insert is currently in its second multi-center, randomized, active controlled Phase 2.

Additional pipeline projects are also in development in Glaucoma, Dry Eye, and Chronic Allergy.

Leadership: Andy Corley co-founded eyeonics, Inc. in 1998. eyeonics developed and gained approval of a new category of intraocular lenses, the accommodating IOL. eyeonics was sold to Bausch and Lomb in 2008 where Corley served as President of the Surgical Division. Corley was co-founder of Chiron Ophthalmics, where he was General Manager of the Refractive Surgery Division until 1997.

He is past Chairman of Technolas Perfect Vision and NeoVista Inc. He served as Senior Consultant to Bausch and Lomb until its sale to Valeant Pharmaceuticals.

In 2011 Corley formed Yelroc Consulting Inc. He is also Chairman of the Board of eyeBrain Medical, Calhoun Vision and serves on multiple corporate and advisory boards.

Corley is a graduate of Georgia Southern University.

Top 100 Companies: North America

Freewavz

Ground 2 Table

www.freewavz.com

www.ground2table.com

Mike Kahn

Jay Fishman

Consumer Electronics

Internet/Online

Melbourne, FL

Location: San Marcos, CA

» ENT surgeon, Dr. Eric Hensen designed FreeWavz Smart Fitness Earphones using his medical background and frustrations as an athlete with current products on the market. These Bluetooth earphones are 100% wire-free and allow you to perform Bluetooth functions such as make phone calls and perform Siri commands, listen to music, and track heart rate as well as other fitness vitals such as distance, average speed, calories burned, and oxygen saturation. FreeWavz utilize medical grade technology to obtain heart rate and oxygen saturation through a pulse oximeter - the same device used in operating rooms.

FreeWavz are the only fitness wearable using this reliable, absorption technology, to read heart rate. FreeWavz are Doctor Invented - Athlete Approved.

Leadership: Mike Kahn is a 25-year veteran in the consumer electronics space. He is a seasoned industry leader who is an expert on consumer electronics product development as well as sales and marketing.

Kahn joined FreeWavz in December 2014 from Sony Electronics where he served as the Vice President of Partnership Marketing and the General Manager of Mobile Audio, Shelf Audio, Portable Audio, and Alpha Camera Systems. Kahn has also served on many industry boards for the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) in both audio and imaging categories as well as the Past President for the Photo Manufacturers and Distributors Association (PMDA).

» Ground 2 Table is a unique e-commerce start up that leverages technology as well as proprietary organic foods to provide sustainable healthy choices in how we eat. tabletech™ (currently in beta, patent pending) is a Ground 2 Table feature that allows you to easily source recipes and match them with one of our specific spice blends to flavor the entire meal. In tech terms, a proprietary search and match functionality takes recipes and analyzes their ingredients to match one of our perfectly portioned organic spice blends to it.

Leadership: Jay Fishman, is a successful entrepreneur with a 40-year track record in developing and leading successful businesses, mostly in the herb and spice industry.

Fishman’s innate business skills were put to the test much too early. In 1977 Fishman was placed at the helm of his family’s clothing business when his father passed on unexpectedly. Despite the challenging circumstances of Fishman’s leadership, in four years the business’s revenues more than quadrupled. Fishman sold the business and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1984 Fishman married and started his next business venture –Bay Area Herb Sales. Fishman was one of the pioneers in the fresh herb grocery business, seeing Bay Area Herb Sales and its sister company HerbThyme Farms grew into a multi-million-dollar business.

Fishman sold the business in 2001 and sat on the Board of Directors of HerbThyme Farms until the company was resold.

Company and has seen its revenues grow twenty-five fold in 14 years. In 2004 Fishman helped create a co-venture with Great Spice specifically developed to focus on organic branded spice products. This new company, Aromatica Organics, already has a presence in many supermarket stores and Costco Wholesale throughout the world.

In October of 2009 Great Spice merged with its largest competitor, Organic Herb Trade to form High Quality Organics (‘HQO’) – the largest organic spice and food ingredient supplier in the Western Hemisphere. HQO over the last 16 years has assiduously assembled a remarkable group of organic growers worldwide that are on the cutting edge of organic sustainable farming. HQO is the wholesale supplier of choice to Fortune 500 food companies and many successful brand driven independent companies that have organic food lines. Fishman is the Chairman of the Board of High Quality Organics and the President of Aromatica.

He is also an active member of the Organic Trade Association and meets with US Congressmen to promote the organic food and spice industry. HQO is the supplier of Ground 2 Table spices.

Fishman is a fervent advocate of sustainability, which motivated him to create a new and innovative business concept that would promote sustainability in food consumption. His new company, Ground 2 Table (“G2T”) shows consumers that they can enjoy high quality food preparations while adjusting their consumption patterns to fit a world needing sustainable resource allocation. G2T revolutionizes the retail spice marketplace through the Company’s unique business model which simplifies, educates and expands spice usage while bringing the old world joy and flavor of cooking into today’s lifestyle.

In 2001 Fishman joined The Great Spice

www.REDHERRING.com

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Guardant Health www.finalcode.com/en Helmy Eltoukhy Biotech Redwood City, California » When fighting any disease of the human body, the more doctors know, the better the treatment. The technology used to identify diseases such as cancer is improving fast, and one of the more extraordinary advances comes from Guardant Health, which has developed a genomic cancer testing system requiring just a single blood draw.

The company’s co-founders complement each other well. Helmy Eltoukhy, CEO, and AmirAli Talasaz both earned PhDs in electrical engineering from Stanford, and worked in the same lab in the Stanford Genome Technology Center.

Eltoukhy’s research focused on the use of semiconductors in sequencing technology, and AmirAli was researching biomarkers in blood. They both formed separate companies, but years later were working together again, as both of their startups were acquired by Illumina. Over lunch one day, they decided to explore developing a method of non-invasively detecting and tracking cancer. From that lunch time discussion, Guardant Health was born.

Since that day, the company has made tremendous progress in an immensely important and competitive field. Guardant 360, the company’ flagship offering, is a non-invasive cancer testing solution that is used by more than 1,000 clinics and most of the leading cancer centers.

“Optimistic analyst forecasts about the potential massive market in non-invasive cancer testing have drawn enormous capital and competition to our space.

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Nonetheless, no other comprehensive liquid biopsy is commercially available.

In that sense, we face no competition yet, but we know we have a target on our back,” explains Eltoukhy. “In liquid biopsy, there are many tests that look at single ‘hot spots,’ but have higher error rates and often miss clinically relevant information.

Our customers are constantly offered these cheaper, less comprehensive tests. And when new products eventually reach the market, they will be aiming to displace us. We also compete against tissue-based sequencing providers that require patients to undergo an invasive biopsy to access material for sequencing.”

Guardant 360 was launched in 2014 and is still the only liquid biopsy available for clinical use. The company has a strong plan to stay ahead of the competition, while advancing the technology for patients. “We’ve run 20,000 tests for 2,000 oncologists, facilitating rapid iteration of our product. And we show our work.

We’ve published six peer-reviewed scientific studies and delivered dozens of presentations at scientific and clinical conferences,” says Eltoukhy. “And we continue to push our technology into new areas. Our R&D has benefited from the lessons we learned running tens of thousands of samples, which gives us a head start on our competitors as we develop new products that span the cancer-care continuum, and increases our credibility with customers and our scientific collaborators at top comprehensive cancer centers.”

The company has enjoyed generous backing from investors, raising nearly $200 million to date. Sequoia and Khosla have been involved since the early days of the company and both have seats on the Guardant board. Other investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Formation 8 and OrbiMed, which led the company’s most recent fundraising round.

Customers appear just as enthusiastic about Guardant’s offering as investors.

“Guardant360 made a huge difference in

the way I communicate with patients, I manage their disease and can explain to patients the way their disease has evolved over time with treatment,” says Massimo Cristofanilli, MD, - Associate Director, Precision Medicine and Translational Research, Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The company’s future also holds exciting prospects. “The next 18 months will be exciting for Guardant Health. We continue to improve Guardant360, our non-invasive test for sequencing the ctDNA from solid tumors found in the blood of patients with advanced cancer. Beyond that, we are seeing encouraging results in our research and development pipeline for applications that span the cancer-care continuum.

Today liquid biopsy is a tool for therapy selection in patients with advanced cancers. But soon it could be used for early detection, recurrence monitoring, and more. Because our technology is capable of isolating, detecting, and analyzing DNA and RNA molecules at low concentrations in blood, many non-cancer applications can be contemplated as well,” says Eltoukhy.

Technology like Guardant Health’s really does change the world, and makes a huge difference in the lives of those suffering from cancer. The company has the knowledge, backing and know-how to save even more lives in the future.

Top 100 Companies: North America

Hyginex www.hyginex.com Efrat Raichman Healthcare Los Angeles, California » It began in tragedy. Efrat Raichman was an electronics and computer sciences grad in Israel when her uncle was admitted to hospital. Just days later he was dead, as the result of a hospital-associated infection (HAI). “It’s scary,” Raichman would later admit. “I am afraid to go to the hospital.”

Raichman, whose experience had been focused on local startups and an educational toy business called Indot.

An adamance that her uncle’s death was avoidable, however, led her down an altogether different career path. It was 2008. Eight years later Raichman’s novel approach to hospital cleanliness has won a host of backers, and customers, worldwide.

HAIs are a huge healthcare concern: one in 25 U.S. patients contracts one of them, with around 75,000 dying each year. That amounts to over 205 HAI deaths annually a huge pain point to which Raichman, and Hyginex, believe they have the answer.

Hyginex is an online software solution that interacts with a watch-like bracelet worn in hospitals by medical staff. The bracelet is equipped with a variety of sensors, gyroscopes and other functions that remind the wearer to wash his or her hands between patient visits. When those hands have been washed, the Hyginex bracelet, and cleaning fluid and water dispensers, tell a computer via Bluetooth Low Energy how long and well they have been cleaned.

“As Hyginex grew, the founders became increasingly aware of the pressing issues globally in public health,” Raichma company spokesperson told Red Herring. “Now in its third generation

product, Hyginex has several customers in Israel and the United States. Healthcare practitioners find immense value in the Hyginex technology helping them to deliver an excellent quality of care to their patients and reduce the financial burden of HAIs from their operations.”

That financial burden is estimated at $40 billion in the United States alone.

Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act has exacerbated the need for improvement with “very strong ramifications on how hospitals get reimbursed by Medicare.” The company has won one patent for Hyginex, and is waiting on another.

“Additionally, hospitals with low quality rankings get penalized if they are among the bottom 25% of quality scores,” the spokesperson added. “Hyginex offers a very strong and unique value proposition that gives hospitals the opportunity to improve their quality metrics by increasing hand hygiene compliance, reducing infection rates, and subsequently decreasing lengths of stay and patient satisfaction scores.”

There is competition in the shape of Gojo Industries, HyGreen, Hill-Rom, Intelligent M, BioVigil, Proventix and SwipeSense, all of whom have a solution to increase hand hygiene compliance. Yet Hyginex is the only company with a product that detects the quality and duration of hand washes.

A Version 3.0 has recently been piloted, and operations are being streamlined for manufacturing.

All of which makes it unsurprising that Hyginex has been successful in wooing investment, having raised $3.8 million from a March 2014 Series A round. The company is looking for additional strategic investors currently, with which it can push forward and grow into the U.S., where it is currently based. That market, says Raichman, has a market opportunity of at least $2 billion, with another $4 billion on offer in Europe.

Hyginex is ready for the challenge especially in an era which is becoming increasingly perilous for patients

worldwide. “The world is approaching the post-antibiotic era where a large number of antibiotics are becoming ineffective in treating superbugs,” the company said.

“Even a 50% compliance rate among hospital staff, she added, would be “great.”

iboss www.iboss.com Paul Martini Security San Diego, CA » iboss Network Security is a leading provider of innovative Web Security, Mobile Security and Layered APT Defense Solutions. iboss next-gen products are built on patented stream-based technology that offers unparalleled visibility across all Web streams and data channels including nonstandard UDP ports, where sophisticated data exploits hide. In addition, the company’s exclusive in-line deployment and granular packet-level approach allows iboss to analyze data movements and stop suspicious traffic mid-stream to prevent data loss. While competitive legacy solutions focus only on malware block rates, iboss watches all inbound/outbound traffic with the ability to detect, respond and prevent advanced threats and data loss in real-time.

The company’s multi-layered security approach includes next-generation features such as agentless, selective SSL decryption at the gateway, integrated BYOD controls, proprietary MDM integrated with Web security, Intelligent Bandwidth Management and advanced, layered APT defense that includes behavioral sandboxing, continuous infection monitoring and network baselining for anomaly detection.

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iboss’ global presence includes offices in the UK, Latin America and Asia.

Leadership: As CEO and cofounder of iboss Cybersecurity, Paul Martini pioneered the award-winning iboss Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and has furthered iboss’ position as a leading security innovator with the introduction of FireSphere™ Advanced APT Defense. Prior to founding iboss, Martini was with an electrical engineering firm where he developed proprietary security solutions for clients such as Phogenix, the U.S. Navy and Hewlett Packard, leading the design and implementation efforts for HP’s e-tester used in their TIJ print heads. He was also a key contributor at Copper Mountain Networks and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), both of which, launched successful IPO’s.

Martini holds a computer science degree from the University of California, San Diego and has had his work published in prestigious scientific journals including, the Journal of Foundations in Computer Science, and Journal of Analytical Biochemistry. As a recognized security expert, he has been featured in a wide range of publications such as USA Today, Forbes, and CSO magazine.

Martini has been recognized for his leadership and innovation, receiving the Ernst Young 2014 Entrepreneur Of The Year™ award in the technology category for San Diego, and one of Goldman Sachs’ 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs of 2014.

He is committed to the advancement of San Diego as a cyber-security hub, and is a member of the Cyber Security Sub Committee for CAL OES (California Office of Emergency Services) and also serves on the board of the San Diego Economic Development Committee.

iCharts www.icharts.net Seymour Duncker Cloud computing Location: Sunnyvale, CA » iCharts is the leader in Collaborative Visual Intelligence. The company’s cloud-based platform empowers rapid visualization of complex business information. iCharts’ simple, easy to implement solutions empower users to rapidly create, distribute and collaborate via comprehensive and interactive dashboards. The embedded technology empowers SaaS platforms to offer bestin-class visual analytics native to their solutions. iCharts was founded in 2008 as a consumer service helping individuals create and share highly interactive visualizations on the web. The company’s focus on the consumer market helped develop and battle-test core technology across tens of thousands of users. iCharts’ 45K+ users have generated over 21K visualizations that have garnered almost 30M impressions. iCharts are being shared daily on sites such as CNN, CBS Interactive, Fox Business, ZDNet, Mashable, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, Wired, ReadWriteWeb, ComputerWorld and many others.

Despite the broad public adoption, in late 2013 the company decided to re-focus the company to selling to businesses in order to accelerate revenue growth. During the past 15 months the company has been able to reposition itself and build a B2B goto-market model. In the process, iCahrts established partnerships with NetSuite and Google that today constitute the focus of the business.

Today the company’s patented technology is trusted by global brands such as Coca Cola, IDC and D&B in addition to fast-

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growing companies such as Medidata Solutions and CivicPlus.

Leadership: Seymour Duncker is an entrepreneur and product visionary and has been both a consumer and developer of visual analytics. He started his career in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and was a member of two earlystage CRM and SaaS companies in the late 1990s. iCharts was born based on his experience managing SAP’s global product portfolio. During his 3-year tenure at SAP, he found it exceedingly difficult to get the kinds of analytics he needed for his job and ended up building his own team and set of spreadsheet tools. It was during that time he realized how broken the Business Intelligence / Analytics technology industry. He founded iCharts with the sole purpose of putting the power of visualization to the hands of the people that need it.

Duncker founded iCharts in 2008 and subsequently moved to Silicon Valley realizing he needed access to both the capital and talent there. He publicly launched iCharts at TechCrunch50 in 2008.

Top 100 Companies: North America

IdealSpot

Instart Logic

InVisage Tech

www.idealspot.com

www.instartlogic.com

www.invisage.com

Marc Smookler

Manav Mital

Jess Lee

Big Data/Storage

Software

Consumer Electronics

Austin, Texas

Palo Alto, California

Location: Menlo Park, CA

» dealSpot is developing a commercial real estate marketplace where buyers can find their ideal locations, and sellers can find their ideal tenants by applying machinelearning, predictive algorithms to big data.

Think of the company as developing the “location score” like a credit score for every location, where that score gets reviewed by all parties involved in the transaction.

The IdealSpot algorithm helps retailers in evaluating a prospective location by analyzing 15,000+ factors of demographic, psychographic, social, mobile, and traffic data points for every retail location, store, or restaurant. It then tells you, without human bias, if the location is ideal for your business for less than the cost of a smartphone.

This enables the company to get a wide variety of retailers to provide us with all sorts of data about their locations. As the company develops this retail map of data it is then able to help the property owners identify who the right tenants would be.

Leadership: Marc Smookler has founded six companies– four of which are current market leaders in their respective spaces including: Fonality – the leading cloud and open-sourced based unified communications competitor to Avaya and Cisco, Sake Social - the largest online retailer of Japanese sake, and Written - a leading content marketplace. Smookler has a BS in Finance and Accounting from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.

» Instart Logic accelerates cloud application delivery for the world’s most performance-obsessed organizations. Its patented software-defined application delivery (SDAD) technology solves performance challenges inherent in wireless connections and obsoletes content delivery networks (CDNs). Using Instart Logic, organizations can provide ultrafast, visually immersive experiences on any device to supercharge revenue, deliver unsurpassed customer experiences and gain absolutely measurable competitive advantage.

Leadership: Manav Mital is a co-founder of Instart Logic and has been CEO since the company started in late 2010.

Previously, he was with Aster Data, where he led the design of major components of their flagship product, including the core database engine and all query processing.

Aster Data, a pioneer in the big data market, was acquired by Teradata Corp for $263 million. Before Aster, Mital was part of Yahoo’s Web Search team, where he helped design and build systems to improve search rankings by better webpage classification.

Mital has a MS in Computer Science from UCLA and a BS in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

» InVisage Technologies, Inc. is a venturebacked advanced materials & imaging platform company based in Menlo Park, Calif. that has developed QuantumFilm™.

A breakthrough camera technology that addresses the fundamental limitations from which silicon CMOS image sensors suffer, QuantumFilm™ is a patented nanomaterial that dramatically enhances the sensitive capture of light in image sensors.

Its first product captures high-fidelity, high-resolution images from mobile devices such as camera phones and digital cameras. In addition to greater light sensitivity, other groundbreaking features of QuantumFilm™ include the ability to produce images with greater dynamic range, Dynamic Zoom (a zoom function built directly into the photosensitive layer), and Global Shutter (an instantaneous shutter that solves the problem of warped images when taking video of fast-moving objects). Founded in 2006, InVisage Technologies is venture funded by GGV Capital, Nokia Growth Partners, RockPort Capital, InterWest Partners, Intel Capital, and OnPoint Technologies.

Leadership: Jess Lee joined InVisage in March of 2007, and brings more than 20 years of high–technology management, marketing, and product development experience. Previously he was the vice president of the Mainstream Business Unit at OmniVision Technologies, where he helped them grow their business from $50 million in annual sales to over $500 million in four years. Lee’s previous companies include Altera, Silicon Graphics, and Creative Labs. He holds a bachelor’s degree of applied science and engineering degree in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto. www.REDHERRING.com

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iovation

Krux

LoopUp

www.iovation.com

www.krux.com

www.loopup.com

Greg Pierson

Tom Chavez

Michael Hughes

Cloud computing

Big Data/Storage

Cloud computing

Location: Portland, OR

San Francisco, CA

San Francisco, California

» iovation protects online businesses and their end users against fraud and abuse through a combination of advanced device identification, shared device reputation and real-time risk evaluation. More than 3,000 fraud managers representing global retail, financial services, insurance, social network, gaming and other companies leverage iovation’s database of Internet devices and the relationships between them to determine the level of risk associated with online transactions.

The company’s device reputation database is the world’s largest, used to protect more than 10 million transactions and stop an average of 200,000 fraudulent activities every day. The world’s foremost fraud experts share intelligence, tips and online fraud prevention techniques in iovation’s Fraud Force Community, an exclusive virtual crime-fighting network.

Leadership: Greg Pierson is the visionary leader behind the use of reputation systems to prevent fraud and abuse of online services. He has over 20 years of experience in building real-time business systems. A serial entrepreneur, Pierson has a strong passion for developing leading fraud fighting solutions that make the Internet a safer place to do business. He drives iovation’s overall business and product strategy.

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» Krux delivers cloud-based data management software and secure connectivity for companies to capture, analyze, protect and manage people data across all screens and sources. With Krux, companies in the U.S., EU and Asia-Pacific are delivering cooler, faster, smarter web experiences to over 2 billion monthly users across the globe.

Companies capturing some of the world’s most valuable consumer data depend on Krux to protect and manage their data and connect it safely with trusted partners. Digital innovators depend on Krux to build better brand experiences and improve revenue from commerce and advertising operations.

Key investors include SAP Ventures, Time Warner Investments, Visionnaire Ventures, Temasek, Accel Partners, IDG Ventures and The Entrepreneurs Fund. Krux is headquartered in Silicon Valley and has offices in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, London, Singapore and Sydney.

Leadership: Before starting Krux with Vivek, Tom Chavez served as General Manager in Microsoft’s Advertiser and Publisher Solutions (APS) group. Prior to Microsoft, Chavez was CEO of Rapt Inc. from its founding in 1999 to its acquisition

by Microsoft in 2008. Before Rapt, Chavez worked as a systems architect at Sun Microsystems and as a researcher at the Rockwell Palo Alto Science Lab. He holds a B.A. in Computer Science and Philosophy from Harvard and a Ph.D. in EngineeringEconomic Systems and Operations Research from Stanford University, where he was a NASA Doctoral Fellow. He sits on the Board of Meritus, a San Francisco nonprofit that helps low-income students enter and complete a four-year college degree.

» LoopUp is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution for remote business meetings. The company’s mission is to make these everyday conference calls and online meetings less painful, more secure and more productive.

LoopUp does this first by disrupting the legacy world of audio conferencing – solving classic annoyances that have grown up with the industry over the last 20 years, such as not knowing who’s joined or who’s speaking and distracting background noise. Second, LoopUp guides more mainstream users to adopt richer online collaboration capabilities – the 85% of the market who, until now, have defaulted to the safer, risk-averse option of ‘just emailing out the slides’.

This proposition has led over 1,500 enterprises to switch to LoopUp as their provider of everyday remote meetings.

Unusually in this crowded, pricecompetitive space, these companies have switched for product reasons, rather than price. The efficiency of this direct enterprise distribution is noteworthy, with a supernormal ratio of lifetime value of a customer to the cost of acquisition of 14.

This direct business engine has now attracted major channel partners; our first three such partnerships are with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, BT, and Cable & Wireless Communications.

The company has 93 employees currently, with offices in San Francisco, Boston, London, Hong Kong and Barbados.

Leadership: Michael Hughes is responsible for LoopUp’s product development and platform operations worldwide, based

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Top 100 Companies: North America

out of San Francisco. Prior to LoopUp, he was a founding member and CEO of Pagoo, a pioneering VoIP company.

He played a key role in setting strategy, fundraising, building the early stage team and expanding into Europe and Asia. Prior to Pagoo, he was a strategy consultant with Monitor. He has an MEng from Imperial College, an MBA from Stanford as an Arjay Miller Scholar, and was awarded a Sainsbury Management Fellowship by the Royal Academy of Engineers.

MagnaCom www.magna-com.com Yossi Cohen Telecommunications Petach-Tikvah, Israel » MagnaCom is a privately held technology company aiming to reinvent the evolution of digital communications.

The company was founded around a whole new, patented modulation technology called WAM™, which can help alleviate the global spectrum congestion and insatiable demand for more bandwidth. WAM can be adapted in cellular, Wi-Fi, satellite and cable TV, wireless backhaul, cable and DSL modems, long and short haul fiber and numerous other applications.

The company assembled a world-class team of scientists, executives and advisors from Broadcom, Motorola Mobility, Texas Instruments, Intel, ST Microelectronics and Passif Semiconductor (acquired by Apple).

WAM technology applies to carriers, handset manufacturers, any wired and wireless system OEMs, and communication IC vendors who strive to save spectrum, increase bandwidth, speed and distance or reduce powe r consumption. With over 25 patents and over 50 pending MagnaCom is challenging the 40-year dominance of QAM as the modulation of choice for all advanced wired and wireless systems.

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Leadership: Yossi Cohen serves as the CEO and co-founder of MagnaCom. Cohen is a proven serial entrepreneur with a highly successful track record of creating new businesses and leading them to success. Cohen brings nearly 30 years of engineering and business leadership experience to MagnaCom. Most recently, he served as Senior Vice President and General Manager at Motorola Mobility and a member of Motorola’s senior executive staff, until its acquisition by Google in 2012.

From 2008, he served as President and CEO of Symwave, where he recapitalized, revamped and redirected the company to the forefront of the USB3.0 industry transition until it was acquired in 2010.

Cohen joined Broadcom while still small and private, participated in its IPO in 1998, and held multiple senior executive roles for more than 10 years during the hyper-growth stage of the company. These roles included Senior Vice President and Group General Manager of Broadcom’s Mobile Platforms Group, encompassing four Business Units with over 1,100 employees worldwide.

As VP and GM of Broadcom’s Bluetooth Business Unit, Cohen and his team were responsible for its massive growth from nearly no revenue to generating hundreds of millions in highly profitable revenue.

Prior roles at Broadcom, included leading the company’s launch of Gigabit Ethernet products and participating in or leading eight acquisitions ranging from multimillion dollars to over $2B (ServerWorks).

Prior to Broadcom, he held senior product and marketing management roles at National Semiconductor, and engineering roles at Elbit. Cohen holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering (BSEE) from The Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

MediaAlpha www.mediaalpha.com Steve Yi Marketing/Advertising Redmond, Washington » MediaAlpha is an emerging leader in advertising technology reshaping how performance media is bought and sold.

The company operates the MediaAlpha Exchange, a transparent, RTB-enabled clearinghouse for insurance and other vertical-specific performance media, handling over $10 million in advertising transactions each month. Through the company’s Exchange platform, advertisers utilize best-in-class targeting, analytics, and optimization capabilities to maximize their ROI from click, call, and lead media purchased across all sources, while publishers maximize revenue through the industry’s only real-time demand management and yield optimization solution.

MediaAlpha is transforming performance marketing for the insurance industry.

Our flagship product is the MediaAlpha Exchange which offers the first and only real-time bidding platform for leadgeneration web traffic. Using structured search and big data, the Exchange offers best-in-class data-driven targeting capabilities to help advertisers increase conversions, and real-time analytics and reporting to help publishers generate greater ad revenues.

Leadership: Steve Yi is responsible for driving MediaAlpha’s overall business strategy and vision. Prior to MediaAlpha, Yi co-founded Fareloop.com, a travel comparison engine that was acquired by Oversee.net. Previously, Yi was a Senior Vice President and General Manager at Oversee.net, where he led its lead generation arm. Steve graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and Harvard College.

Top 100 Companies: North America

MenoGenix www.menogenix.com Debra Duke Healthcare Aurora, Colorado » Many drugs have been discovered as a result of ‘unexpected accidental observations’, says MenoGenix founder Debra Duke: “In fact some of the blockbuster drugs advertised on television, such as Viagra, Latisse, Rogaine, Cymbalta, Botox and many others share this unusual drug development path. These drugs were discovered while in clinical trials for one indication and were observed to relieve other unrelated symptoms.”

MenoGenix shares a similar background.

Several years ago Duke was given a medication and found, to her surprise, that her menopausal hot flashed had dissipated.

After making this clinical observation, Duke added in a Q&A with Red Herring, “the wheels were set in motion for a budding biotech company.”

Duke hired top patent attorney Gladys Monroy, a partner at global law firm Morrison & Foerster, to patent and protect sales and marketing rights to use this drug to treat hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms. Following that MenoGeniX was founded, attracting investment to design and execute a phase 1 clinical trial for its drug, MNGX-100.

“There are only two FDA approved drugs to treat symptoms of menopause, hormone therapy and Brisdelle, a low dose version of the anti-depressant Paxil,” said Duke.

“Both of these classes of drugs have socalled “black box warnings” due to severe, life-threatening side effects, which lead many women and their physicians to seek safer alternatives.

“In contrast, MNGX-100 is based on a naturally-occurring human protein that has been used in more than 10 million subjects and does not have ‘boxed warnings’,” she added. “By starting with an approved drug with a known safety record, product development is less risky, less costly and more rapid than starting with an entirely new drug.”

Duke’s firm, based in Aurora, Colorado, now has an experienced advisory board and is backed by almost $1 million in funding, including a $150,000 Advanced Industry Accelerator Grant from the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT). Patents have issued in the U.S., China and Japan, and more are anticipated in Canada, Australia, Europe and Israel.

“In lieu of entering into a partnership, the company will pursue venture capital financing as well as federal grant funding to carry out phase 2 clinical trials,” she said. “In parallel the MenoGeniX team will be working with industry experts and consultants to further define plans for manufacturing, regulatory affairs, clinical trial and business development.”

Duke herself is an industry veteran and president of Duke Medical Research Group, a large consultant. She has also served in several leadership, fundraising and marketing roles for civil professional and charitable organizations. She told us that thus far tests of MNGX-100 have been very positive.

“These trials will cost approximately $30 million,” she added. “The company’s challenge is to raise this capital on terms that will be favorable to the angel investors that have funded the company thus far.”

The pain point, argues Duke, is huge.

Two-thirds of all women aged 50-65 have menopausal symptoms, with roughly half of those seeking therapy annually. “This equates to 10 million women in the U.S. and an additional 60m in the other major world markets,” she said.

“Despite the significant risks, approximately 5 million women take hormone therapy which generates $3 billion in sales,” she added. “Thus, the market potential for MenoGeniX is several billion dollars.

In addition, and as opposed to hormone therapy, MNGX-100 can be used by the millions of women who, like Angelina Jolie, have had their ovaries removed because of the risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. These women cannot take hormone therapy and most will reject the side effects associated with anti-depressants, pain medications and anti-anxiety drugs.”

Duke is currently looking for foreign partners and licensors for MenoGeniX’s patents, and expects that foreign sales will be carried out by one or more ex-US partners. The medical field is notoriously slow and difficult to navigate. But with so much already achieved, product development will surely keep Duke very busy in 2016.

“While small in terms of number of subjects - 30 - the phase 1 clinical trial nonetheless showed that MNGX-100 provided a significant reduction in hot flash frequency and severity versus placebo and that many of the treated subjects experienced relief that is similar to that seen with hormone therapy,” said Duke. “While these results are impressive, MenoGeniX needs to carry-out additional clinical trials to gain FDA approval.

www.REDHERRING.com

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Top 100 Companies: North America

Movius Corporation www.moviuscorp.com Dominic Gomez Telecommunications Duluth, GA » Movius is a trusted provider of mobile communications solutions for service providers around the world. The company’s powerful CAFÉ™ platform offers a broad set of pre-packaged applications and a rich set of APIs for future applications development. Powered by CAFÉ, Movius myIdentities™ solves today’s increasing BYOD concerns by separating both call and data usage for end users while enabling mobile operators to charge for an additional phone line on an existing device without needing to subsidize the device. Movius myIdentities™ is the only solution to support additional virtual lines for either circuit switched and/or VoIP calling and messaging, as well as offering split billing for each line. With its support for Android and iOS, it provides a superior quality of service and call experience.

Over 150 of the world’s leading communications service providers and enterprises leverage Movius’ personal communications solutions.

Leadership: Dominic Gomez joined Movius in November 2010, bringing a wealth of knowledge in the telecom industry, as well as an impressive track record of growth and achievement. He was president of Purple Communications, a leading provider of text and video relay and on-site interpreting services. Prior to

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Purple Communications, Gomez was chief operating officer for Hanaro Telecom, Inc., Korea’s second largest carrier and leading integrated telecommunications provider offering a range of broadband Internet, voice, and video services. He led all dayto-day operations and was responsible for $2.0 billion in revenue and more than 4 million customers. Prior to joining Hanaro Telecom, Gomez held senior and executive management positions at Qwest Communications, Pacific Bell and AT&T. Gomez received his Bachelor of Science degree in public administration from the University of Southern California and is a graduate of the Harvard Business School’s Executive Program for Management Development.

nCino www.ncino.com Pierre Naudé Cloud computing Location: Wilmington, NC » nCino provides cloud-based bank operating solutions to the financial services industry. Institutions use the nCino Bank Operating System to ensure regulatory compliance, reduce risk, increase transparency and efficiency, and increase profitability. It combines loan origination, document management, business intelligence and reporting, and the ability to become the omnichannel for all bank operations via one integrated platform. nCino can be accessed securely from any device with Internet access, allowing bank executives to operate the

bank from any mobile phone or tablet.

The power of nCino as a change agent and its ability to revolutionize the way banks operate and perform has become widely recognized in banking and technology channels. nCino delivers its banking intellectual property within the architecture of the world-class Salesforce.com platform. The platform provides the scalability, flexibility and security needed to develop nCino’s suite of features, which transform the way financial institutions interact with employees and customers.

The solution continues to gain momentum as a leader in the financial services sector.

To date, nCino has signed 81 financial institutions (banks, credit unions, and non-bank lenders) ranging in asset size from $150 million to over $200 billion. nCino continues to improve and develop innovative features and solutions, and has already started expanding into larger financial institutions.

Leadership: Pierre Naudé has more than 30 years’ experience in the financial technology industry. Named CEO of nCino in 2012, Naudé played a key role in the initial founding and oversees all aspects of the organization including strategy, sales, marketing, professional services, customer support and product engineering. Prior to joining nCino, Naudé served as divisional president of Community Financial for S1 Corporation, a leading global financial services software company, until its acquisition by ACI Worldwide in February 2012. Prior to S1, Naudé was vice president and managing partner of Worldwide Technology Consulting Services at Unisys Corporation, and general manager at Pioneer Systems, a software company focused on middleware solutions. Naudé earned his degree from Upper Iowa University.

Top 100 Companies: North America

Netsertive

Numecent

www.netsertive.com

www.numecent.com

Brendan Morrissey

Osman Kent

Marketing/Advertising

Cloud computing

Morrisville, North Carolina

Irvine, California

» Netsertive’s digital marketing intelligence platform brings brands and local businesses together to win local customers.

Netsertive’s proprietary learning engine combines the company’s deep industry experience with the collective knowledge of its extensive network of automotive, major appliance, furniture, consumer electronics, dental and eye care customers to deliver unprecedented campaign speed, performance and value. As a Google Premier SMB Partner, Netsertive drives local marketing success from campaign enablement through execution.

Additionally, Netsertive partners with brands in their co-op marketing efforts to ensure local brand compliance, seamless campaign execution and reimbursement of local dealers. Founded in 2009 and based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, the company has a history of rapid growth, a world-class team and the strength of venture capital funding from top firms RRE Ventures, Harbert Venture Partners and Greycroft Partners. Netsertive was named 2014 Software Company of the Year by North Carolina Technology Association.

» Numecent is a pioneer and technology leader in rapid, secure and friction-free provisioning of native applications from the cloud through virtualization. The company’s groundbreaking and patented cloudpaging technology can deliver a native application from the cloud between 20x to 100x faster compared to a linear digital download and execute on the client platform without installation and with a much reduced IT support footprint.

Leadership: What has Brendan Morrissey learned in two decades at digital media and early-stage companies? The most important lesson is that a business is successful when it becomes good at solving critical problems for clients. Sounds simple – but he knows it’s the execution that’s key. “Success is dictated completely by your team members and how well they are aligned.” Which is why he’s perfected the skill of moving seamlessly between the various disciplines within the company, and become a huge fan of ruthless prioritization.

Numecent is a software technology company, building software intellectual property and assets, as well as providing software and professional services for Cloudpaging, Deepstream, and Application Jukebox.

on the PC. He has a First Class degree in Computer Science and Electronics from University of Birmingham (UK), is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and is the inventor of numerous patents in computing and graphics. In his spare time, Osman incubates musicians through his record label Songphonic.

Unlike expensive remoting solutions which cannot scale, cloudpaging does not push pixels from the cloud – the technology actually transmits pre-virtualized native software instructions (a page at a time and on demand) which are then executed on the user’s machine in a transient manner and at full performance. As a result, cloudpaged native applications can reduce network usage by up to 95% and can become Webscale with minimal server footprint.

The genesis of the technology is originally from a DARPA project and is protected by 13 foundational and battle-tested patents.

Leadership: Osman Kent is a serial technology entrepreneur best known as the co-founder & CEO of 3Dlabs – at one time an almost $1 billion company on Nasdaq.

3Dlabs was responsible for making workstation class 3D graphics happen

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Top 100 Companies: North America

Numerify www.numerify.com Gaurav Rewari Cloud Computing Cupertino, CA » Numerify provides IT business analytics applications that rapidly deliver business insights to IT leaders. The Numerify360 cloud-native platform delivers systemof-record analytics in the form of bestpractice dashboards, reports and a rich metrics library combined with best-inclass analytics capabilities ranging from mobile application to visual discovery.

Our applications cover various IT business areas such as IT service management, assets and financials so that everyone from the CIO to the IT service line manager can effectively manage their business of IT. Organizations across multiple industries, where IT effectiveness is business-critical can use Numerify to identify and correct inefficiency, transform operational processes, and ultimately increase their competitive edge.

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Numerify provides a huge value to organizations that are spending hours trying to extract data from their IT systems in order to stitch together reporting spreadsheets, pivot tables or exporting such data painfully into other BI tools.

Numerify helps these organizations get rid of such manual work and eliminate data inconsistencies and errors. As a result, they get sophisticated visualizations, advanced analytical techniques and hundreds of pre-built metrics in a matter of weeks.

From incident aging analysis to trend information of KPIs, our solution provides best practices content to IT executives, line managers and business analysts alike so that they can make data driven decision.

Leadership: Gaurav Rewari is a co-founder and CEO of Numerify. Most recently, Rewari was Vice President of Product Management and Strategy at Oracle of a $2.5 billion Business Analytics business that included the Hyperion, Oracle BI and Siebel Analytics product lines. During his tenure, his team furthered Oracle’s industry leading position in analytics, and measurably advanced its BI Platform market share through the acquisition of Endeca and the introduction of the Exalytics in-memory Analytics machine, a product with one of the fastest ramps in Oracle’s history.

Rewari started his career as the first product manager at MicroStrategy where he rose to become VP/GM with responsibility for MicroStrategy’s Product Management, Professional Services & Analytical Applications divisions. He was part of a management team that grew MicroStrategy from single digit millions in revenue through its IPO and into a $200M+ BI products leader.

Before Oracle, Rewari was co-founder & CEO of FirstRain, a venture-backed leader in SaaS search-based market intelligence.

Gaurav holds SB, SM & EE degrees from the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received the Tau Beta Pi prize for Engineering Excellence, the Robert A. Boit prize in Humanities and was nominated to the Sigma Xi Scientific Honor Society.

Top 100 Companies: North America

OtoSense www.otosense.com

the next generation machine-perception system that will play a major role in the development of machine audition and human-machine fusion.

Sebastien Christian Software Cambridge, MA

Percona www.percona.com

» In the same way that Shazam revolutionized music recognition and Siri with voice recognition, OtoSense delivers environmental sound recognition, where it matters.

OtoSense has built a system able to identify, name, and categorize sounds.

OtoSense sound recognition engine has been built to meet the immediate needs of many industries. This software can operate on various devices, platforms and environments and it learns and evolves to get adapted to any task where sound delivers critical information.

OtoSense can be used to identify gunshots in a city, monitor machines and detect defaults before things turn bad, help elderly or deaf people by signaling them important audio clues, or check that all is all right in your home, when you are away.

The company intends to be the reference for machine hearing, on a global scale and now have deals and projects running in several industries, from Machine-toMachine to Surveillance and to Defense.

Leadership: Sebastien Christian is the CEO & Founder of OtoSense. He has advanced degrees in quantum physics, speech and language pathology and semantics.

Previously, Christian founded and served as CEO of Idova, the first independent R&D laboratory in France dedicated to finding innovative solutions to hearing loss issues. He also taught linguistics and neuroscience at Paris III University and conducted research on how the brain creates a coherent and partially sharable mental world using individual perception.

His work now is dedicated to growing

Peter Zaitsev Software Durham, North Carolina

Zaitsev was an early employee at MySQL AB, eventually leading the company’s High Performance Group. A serial entrepreneur, Zaitsev co-founded his first startup while attending Moscow State University where he majored in Computer Science. Zaitsev is a co-author of High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication, one of the most popular books on MySQL performance. Zaitsev frequently speaks as an expert lecturer at MySQL and related conferences, and regularly posts on the Percona Data Performance Blog.

He has also been tapped as a contributor to Fortune and DZone, and his recent ebook Practical MySQL Performance Optimization Volume 1 is one of percona. com’s most popular downloads.

» Percona has made MySQL faster and more reliable for over 2,000 consulting, support, and managed services customers worldwide since 2006. Percona provides enterprise-grade MySQL support, consulting, managed services, and training services to companies such as Cisco Systems, Alcatel-Lucent, Groupon, and the BBC with a worldwide staff of over 120.

Percona’s founders authored the definitive book “High Performance MySQL” from O’Reilly Press and the widely read Percona MySQL Performance Blog. Percona also develops software for MySQL users, including Percona Server, Percona XtraBackup, Percona XtraDB Cluster, and Percona Toolkit. The popular Percona Live conferences draw attendees and acclaimed speakers from around the world.

Leadership: Peter Zaitsev co-founded Percona and assumed the role of CEO in 2006. As one of the foremost experts on MySQL strategy and optimization, Zaitsev leveraged both his technical vision and entrepreneurial skills to grow Percona from a two-person shop to one of the most respected open source companies in the business. With over 150 professionals in 20 plus countries, Zaitsev venture now serves over 3000 customers – including the “who’s who” of internet giants, large enterprises and many exciting startups. Percona was named to the Inc. 5000 in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

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Top 100 Companies: North America

Phunware www.phunware.com Alan Knitowski Mobile development New York, New York » In 2009, when Alan Knitowski and his two other co-founders started Phunware, only 2% of the world’s internet traffic was mobile. Knitowski and co put mobile, native development and full integration first - eschewing the traditional telecommunication industry models of the time.

“As Phunware made its entry to the mobile industry, its competitors were focused on consumers,” Knitowski told Red Herring in a recent Q&A. “They built games and applications to entice direct users, but Phunware directed its efforts on the Fortune 5000. It introduced the high-value touchpoints that brands could share with their anytime, anywhere users. It created a platform that allows enterprises to achieve consistency and standardization at scale and across devices - with a low total cost of ownership.”

It was a bold but successful move. As of 2014 that 2% has jumped to over 60%, with mobile a core component of most digital companies’ strategies. Now, with the Austin, Texas-headquartered firm growing exponentially and making a number of strategic acquisitions, the company is ready to push on to translate its award-winning model into international dominance.

Knitowski, who is now Phunware’s chairman and CEO, is unsurprisingly bullish about the company’s fortunes, which include a Red Herring Top 100

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award, Deloitte Technology Fast 500, Forbes list of America’s Most Promising Companies, and Inc. 500. The firm’s solution is certainly tailored for success.

“Phunware offers a wealth of experience building user-focused solutions,” said Knitowski. “These include pre-packaged, ready-for-market global implementations at scale, platform modules - SDK and APIs that enhance existing mobile apps - and fully custom and engaging experiences built on Phunware’s dependable, technically-sound platform.

“No single competitor offers the breadth and depth of mobile capabilities that Phunware does,” he added. “Platform modules include alerts and notifications, mapping/navigation/wayfinding, content management, mobile advertising for monetization and audience-building, analytics and location-based marketing.

There are many point solution competitors offering these pieces individually, but none offering them all.”

Phunware is tooled with 20 patents currently, and two more are planned. That will help it navigate around a competitive market that includes major players like Adobe, Salesforce and HP/Aruba. Growth, however, has been no problem - in fact Knitowski argues that continuing to spend alongside Phunware’s phenomenal expansion is its biggest challenge to date.

“A major challenge for Phunware is simply having a large enough balance sheet to support the insane operational growth the company has achieved since inception,” he said. The company is currently in the largest and fastest growing markets in the world. The market for mobile solutions is already big - and it’s just going to keep getting bigger. Brands must meet their audiences where they are, which is on mobile.

“According to the eMarketer, the number of U.S. mobile phone users who owned or used a smartphone in 2015 reached 74%, up from 58% in 2014,” he added. “The explosive growth of mobile has led to the birth of an ocean of mobile point solution providers that solve one mobile problem or another - app development, push notifications, analytics, mobile advertising and on and on.”

Phunware has already raised $67.1 million from VCs such as Fraser McCombs Ventures LP, and Firsthand Technology Value Fund. And with a raft of acquisitions that most recently includes London-based Odyssey Mobile Interaction, Knitowski and co can continue plans for international growth. The company is looking to venture into the Middle East with Meraas Holding and other brands in mixed-use spaces.

Little wonder that Knitowski’s plans for Phunware are anything but modest, heading into another busy year: “Phunware’s most promising area of growth is tied to the subscription licensing of our global application data set for customers interested in 1:1 indoor and outdoor targeting of their consumers, channel partners and employees.

“Phunware currently reaches more than 625 million monthly active users across its multiscreen-as-a-service (MaaS) platform products and solutions - which is actually larger than the current global reach of Instagram and would represent the fifthlargest social network in the world by comparison of size, scope and reach,” he added.

Top 100 Companies: North America

Pivotal Systems www.pivotalsys.com John Hoffman Manufacturing Fremont, California » Pivotal Systems provides monitoring and process control technology for the gigantic semiconductor manufacturing industry.

The company aims to enable an order of magnitude increase in fab productivity and capital efficiency for current and future technology nodes.

The market opportunity for a company like Pivotal Systems is huge. “The Total available market (TAM) for gas flow controllers is approximately $500 mil in semiconductor and an additional $500 mil in adjacent markets like Flat Panel, LCD, LED and Solar,” explains John Hoffman, CEO of Pivotal Systems.

That means the $1 billion market space is very competitive, and as many as seven competitors are battling for ultrahigh precision gas flow controllers in

the semiconductor, FPD, LED and solar process equipment markets. But Pivotal Systems does its best to stand out. “Our company stands out from the competition because of our innovative GFC (Gas Flow Controller) technology. Our ability to be nimble to respond to our customers’ needs and ever changing requirements,” says Hoffman.

The company offers GFC, GFM and Sensor X product lines that deliver high-accuracy, real-time monitoring and control of the most critical parameters difficult to control in wafer processing today: Gas Flow and Chamber Condition. Companies that use Pivotal’s products are able to dramatically increase yield and productivity by avoiding catastrophic scrap events, tightening process windows and matching chambers more effectively.

The company’s plans for the next 18 months will see it release additional products to increase its share of the billiondollar global market, while still ensuring its current customers are happy. And it also has big plans for its bottom line. “We have gone through a 1522% growth in the past 3 years and we ranked 301 in the 2015 Inc. 500. We expect to continue to grow annually at a 150% - 200% rate for the next 2 to 3 years,” says Hoffman.

The company faces challenges every day as it ensures it maintains zero defects and on time delivery in its manufacturing during this growth period. But operating in such a gigantic space and growing so fast means all of the hurdles are worth it, as the company marches from one success to another.

Pivotal Systems has secured investment from Firsthand Technology Value Fund, Quan Fund and Network 1 Financial Securities. “We are excited that Pivotal has taken a fresh look at what a mass flow controller can do and has developed a truly game-changing product,” says Kevin Landis, CEO of Firsthand Technology Value Fund.

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Top 100 Companies: North America

Predixion Software www.predixionsoftware. com Simon Arkell Software San Juan Capistrano, CA » In the five years since Simon Arkell (CEO), Steve DeSantis (CFO) and Jamie Maclennan (CTO) co-founded Predixion, the company has transformed from a risky start-up (focusing primarily on product development, customer acquisition and cash flow) to a growth-stage company with over 70 employees, $33 million in capital raised, and an award-winning product.

Predixion has continued its positive momentum in 2014, reporting record revenue in the first quarter alone. More than 200 companies currently use Predixion Insight, spanning multiple industries and including GE, Chevron, United States Armed Forces, Kaiser Permanente, Carolinas Healthcare Systems, California Lottery and Maritz, with global partners and investors including Accenture, GE and EMC and Salesforce.com.

Predixion develops a cloud-based predictive analytics platform designed to expedite the deployment of predictive applications in order to broaden the adoption of predictive insights at the point of decision. Instead of trying to compete in the “we-have-a-better-tool-war,” Predixion is focused entirely on increasing the adoption of predictive analytics. They do this by helping organizations use their innovative platform to get actionable predictive insights to the decision point where the end user can use them in daily decisions. In order to do that, they’ve simplified the entire predictive process, removed the complexity barrier and sped up the time to value.

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Leadership: Simon Arkell, as founding CEO of Predixion and accompanied by a world-class team, has grown Predixion from inception in 2009 to its current position as a major disrupter in the fastpaced predictive analytics industry, boasting major global partnerships and customers.

Prevoty www.prevoty.com Julien Bellanger Security Los Angeles, California

Arkell is an experienced technology entrepreneur and executive with extensive global experience. Before founding Predixion, Arkell was an operating partner with Triton Pacific Capital Partners, President of a 600-employee, 10-country, Oracle software consulting firm based in the U.K., and a Principal with Gramercy Venture Advisors, an international boutique investment banking firm where he assisted technology companies with fundraising, M&A and corporate strategy.

» Prevoty’s founders know, more than most, that applications, and the databases they access, are at the heart of modern enterprises. So do hackers. It’s where the money is, after all. And, in this new world of Big Data, a craven attack can have doubly disastrous consequences.

In 1998 Arkell co-founded Versifi Technologies, Inc. in Newport Beach, California, a venture-backed enterprise content management software company which sold to Reef SA (Belgium) in 2000.

Arkell holds an MBA from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, a BA (econ) from the University of New Mexico, and is a twotime Olympian for Australia in the pole vault. Arkell is also program chairman for Megan’s Wings – a charity that provides assistance to families with children fighting cancer. In 2014 he was named Orange County Technology Alliance CEO of the year for mid-sized companies.

“Security can only do so much guesswork about what is actually going to happen inside an application at runtime, and major breaches happen because sophisticated hackers know how to bypass those perimeter defenses, get into the applications themselves and exfiltrate data,” added Bellanger, in a recent Q&A session with Red Herring.

The Menlo Park-headquartered firm realized quickly that the only way to deliver true application security was to think radically, according to co-founder and CEO Julien Bellanger: “Applications need to be able to monitor and protect themselves.”

“Prevoty developed an application security engine that monitors and protects applications at runtime,” he added. “Plugins for existing or new applications call the security engine, providing real-time visibility into what threats the applications are actually seeing and the option of transforming or blocking content and database queries so that everything the application processes is safe.”

Prevoty was founded in 2013 to deliver the most cutting-edge application security in the world. Its technology is easy to use, as customers have cited a need for visibility. “No other tool provides real-

Top 100 Companies: North America

time, actionable threat intelligence on what attacks an application is actually seeing,” said Bellanger, who alongside co-founder and CTO Kunal Anand has wooed a total of $11.13 million across three separate funding rounds.

That includes an $8 million Series A round in March last year, courtesy of Menlo Park neighbor US Venture Partners. They, and countless clients, have found Prevoty’s solution fairly priced, scalable and effective.

“It is both simple and powerful, and can easily be turned on to protection mode for automatic vulnerability neutralization,” added Bellanger.

“One of the biggest challenges that enterprises are facing today from a security perspective comes from hackers exploiting vulnerabilities in home-grown applications,” said Andrew McDonnell, VP of security solutions at AsTech Consulting.

“To make things worse, enterprises don’t even know when these applications are being attacked. Prevoty provides both the visibility and the ability to mitigate these risks at the vast scale of the problem.”

The market, Bellanger says, is still nascent: “Legacy security solutions that have covered xAST (Static and Dynamic testing) are now entering this runtime application security market. We see about three to five competitors entering the space that are about one to three years behind our innovation.” Vera code, HP Fortify and Contrast Security work in a similar sphere.

But Bellanger isn’t worried about anyone impinging on Prevoty’s already impressive rise to fortune. The TAM, he added, is worth around $2 billion.

The company will spend 2016 focusing on domestic business, before it considers spreading its wings abroad. But that doesn’t mean Bellanger, Anand and their charges

won’t be pushing for even bigger chunks of an innovative market, in the next 18 months.

“Our plans are to continue our leadership in the runtime application visibility and monitoring market,” Bellanger said. “We envision that after years of static and dynamic testing as well as efforts to solve application security issues with traditional methods like signatures, heuristics and data flow analysis, LANGSEC-based approach will place the good guys ahead of the hackers.”

Prolifiq Software www.prolifiq.com Jeff Gaus Software Beaverton, OR » Prolifiq helps people work smarter, faster.

Prolifiq provides 3-screen (smartphone, tablet, PC), sales force automation solutions to the Life Sciences industry.

Companies use Prolifiq’s apps to inform employees and engage customers in meaningful business conversations using controlled compliant content. Each employee sees only the apps they need; workflows and audience segmentation ensure access to the latest content and resources; and the Good Promotional Practices rules engine keeps customer conversations and transactions compliant and measureable. Prolifiq’s platform also integrates third-party apps and internal systems providing a seamless

user experience, and leverages existing IT investments.

Prolifiq Software has a deep understanding of the communications issues of regulated industries, possesses the technology and expertise to address the requirements of these industries and has a proven track record executing for global industry leaders. Prolifiq Software has five issued patents, five patent applications and four provisional applications.

Leadership: Jeff Gaus is Prolifiq’s CEO, a position he has held since 2006; he has been with the company since 2002. Prior to his current role, he led the company’s business development, marketing, and sales activities, establishing relationships with Prolifiq’s largest customers and partners.

Gaus is a telecommunications industry veteran, having invented and delivered enterprise communications applications and solutions for the retail and mail-order pharmacy industry and telecommunications systems, applications, and solutions for North American healthcare delivery networks for industry leader NEC and its affiliates.

Gaus has designed several communications protocols and has co-authored two United States patents. Jeff completed his education at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Marketing and Executive Leadership at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.

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Top 100 Companies: North America

Quisk www.quisk.co/en Steve Novak Finance Sunnyvale, California » Quisk, a global technology company that digitizes cash and empowers financial institutions and others to prosper in the mobile economy, has grown phenomenally since 2007, when it was known as MOBIbucks.

Nine years ago the company, under founders Jorge Fernandez and Dave Barram, developed the first and only patent-pending mobile payments solution that required nothing but a mobile phone number and PIN, eliminating the need for consumers to carry cash, credit cards or even their mobile handset to make purchases.

In 2011 the Sunnyvale-based firm recapitalized and evolved into Quisk, Inc, hiring a new and experienced team from the payments processing and technology industries. “Our focus became the offering of a cloud based, extremely efficient next generation electronic debit platform, for the processing of ‘digital cash’ transactions,” a company spokesperson told Red Herring. “Our digital services platform handles both payments and loyalty and rewards on an integrated basis.

A primary application has been to enable mobile payments offerings.”

The mobile money or mobile payments

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space is filled with both established participants such as Google Wallet and PayPal, new entrants such as Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, and a variety of startups with novel new offerings. However, the vast majority of these are point solutions, such as software ‘wallet’ wrapped around a credit or debit card as a funding source, with the transaction running over a traditional payments processing network with its attendant high fee structure.

CEO and chairman Steve Novak’s illustrious career has brought him to Sunnyvale via e-payments processor CyberSource Corporation, which was bought by Visa in 2010.

“Depending on how broadly one defines the word ‘competition,’ it is either nearly everyone, or no one,” the spokesperson added. “To the best of our knowledge no one else has come up with a similar solution, and no one else can accept transactions from the traditional POS network.”

Quisk has managed to raise $30 million in funding thus far, primarily from a Series A round led by Acacia Woods Partners. 2016 will bring a Series B round, according to the company. That will help Quisk meet a number of challenges - not least fintech’s notorious regulatory roadblocks.

Deploying the Quisk solution in a particular country involves interfacing with the central bank from a regulatory standpoint, working with local financial service institutions who issue accounts to customers, and connecting with merchant acquirers to gain access to the POS terminals at merchant locations. “These are complex undertakings, and never go as

quickly as one might like, and finding and associating with the right local partner is important,” the company said.

The company is also deploying outside the U.S., with a recent expansion into Jamaica one of what it hopes to be many.

“As we look out over the next five years, the combination adding new users, growing transaction volumes per user, additional transaction types, and the entering of new markets should enable revenues by the end of the forecast period in excess of $100m, with a high degree of profitability,” said the spokesperson.

That will help it address a market the CEO sees as ripe for change. After over 50 years of credit and debit cards, 85% of all retail transactions are still conducted in cash. The opportunity to displace cash with a safe, fast and easy to use alternative is vast, according to Quisk, and potential transaction revenues are in the billions of dollars.

2016 will also see the company alpha test a new product for the U.S. market, following the regulatory impact of the Dodd-Frank legislation, and the Durbin amendment.

Add to that Quisk’s continued evolution, and you can expect to see the company grab plenty of headlines soon.

Top 100 Companies: North America

Ravello Systems www.ravellosysems.com Rami Tamir Cloud computing Location: Palo Alto, CA » Ravello (acquired by Oracle) was founded in 2011 by the same team that developed the KVM hypervisor for Linux. With deep expertise in infrastructure software, Ravello has built HVX - the industry’s first platform that virtualizes public cloud compute, network and storage resources.

Ravello operates an overlay cloud service, powered by HVX, that makes it easy for enterprises to run complex data center application environments in AWS and Google Cloud. The company was acquired

by Oracle in February 2016.

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Leadership: Rami Tamir has 15 years of experience in management of multidisciplinary software development, as an entrepreneur has a proven track record of driving technology companies and projects from inception to maturity.

In 2011 Tamir co-founded Ravello Systems and serves as its CEO. Ravello Systems develops next generation virtualization solution that focuses on IT services lifecycle in the cloud.

Prior to that, in 2005, Tamir co-founded Qumranet Inc. and served as its president.

Qumranet developed KVM (Kernel Based Virtual Machine - the leading open source Hypervisor) and was acquired by Red Hat in 2008. After the acquisition Tamir served as VP engineering in Red Hat where he oversaw the development of Red Hat’s virtualization solutions (RHEV-H and RHEV-M) Prior to that, in 1998, Tamir co-founded Pentacom and served as its head of

software. Pentacom developed products implementing Spatial Reuse Protocol (SRP) for IP based metropolitan networks.

Pentacom was acquired by Cisco in 2000.

After the acquisition Tamir led several groups in Cisco mainly in high end routing.

Tamir holds a BSEE/CS in Electrical Engineering from the Technion , and an MBA from Northwestern University and Tel Aviv University.

Top 100 Companies: North America

RedSeal www.redseal.net Ray Rothrock Security Sunnyvale, California » Ray Rothrock is one of the cybersecurity industry’s most respected investors: some of his winners have included Check Point Software, Vontu, PGP, P-Cube, Cloudflare, CTERA and Shape Security. When RedSeal approached the Harvard Business School educated entrepreneur, with plans to create an accurate virtual model of customers’ networks, he quickly saw the potential.

He wasn’t wrong. Since its 2004 inception, RedSeal has risen to become one of the United States’ best security startups. It is now the only company measuring a network’s ability to withstand an incident and keep functioning. With its Digital Resilience Score, RedSeal’s customers can measure and benchmark their digital resilience - and set targets to improve.

Years of knowledge have also allowed the Sunnyvale-headquartered firm to respond quickly to incidents and vulnerabilities.

“The cybersecurity market is very competitive and confusing to customers,” Rothrock told Red Herring, following its Top 100 North America victory. “There is no one company providing a full solution, so customers have to choose among thousands of companies offering part of the solution. To add to the problem, many companies with very different products sound as if they do the same thing.”

Rothrock lists Skybox Security as RedSeal’s primary competition. But, with $71 million banked across three rounds of funding - from highly respected VCs such as Venrock, Olympic Venture Partners, Leapfrog and others, the company has managed to win record growth and record

numbers of new customers in 2015. That is performance which Rothrock sees no sign of dampening.

Refractive Dialer

“We plan to accelerate momentum in 2016, including expanding our global channel partner program, continuing to scale global expansion with new offices in Canada, and increasing headcount by 50% in order to expand engineering and sales groups,” he told us. RedSeal will also increase its presence in EMEA and Japan.

www.dialsource.com

With a global cybersecurity market estimated to grow from $75 billion in 2015 to $170 billion in 2020, there is plenty of wiggle room. The company’s biggest challenges this year, however, are “education and awareness.

» DialSource is a global leader in cloud communication technologies, offering a cutting-edge sales accelerator, custom-fit to any enterprise. Maximize sales team’s performance, increase outbound call volume, and accelerate ROI with the No. 1 dialer on the Force.com AppExchange.

The company’s native Salesforce design efficiently boosts lead generation, agent productivity, and client contact rates. With next-generation software, DialSource is quickly revolutionizing the power of the modern sales enterprise.

“There are many companies that have recognized the cybersecurity opportunity,” added Rothrock. “And, despite strong differences in actual approach and functionality, many of these products sound the same. Because it is an important, but technologically complex problem, potential customers have difficulty sorting through the variety of products.

“RedSeal’s biggest challenge will be to cut through the noise and make sure its messages reach the range of managers in the many organizations that need its product. Also, like most every company in cybersecurity, RedSeal anticipates difficulty in finding enough talented engineers to support its growth.”

Challenges aside, RedSeal looks to be pouncing on its full potential in 2016 and beyond. And with such an experienced and storied CEO at the helm, the firm won’t stray from its core as it continues to grow: “Networks continue to get more complex and difficult to understand. RedSeal could - and does - help customers understand and continuously monitor their networks and verify compliance with standards and policies.”

Joshua Tillman Telecommunications Location: Sacramento, CA

Leadership: Joshua Tillman’s flair for business came into its own after a few years of Economic training from the University of California.

Tillman strongly believes in automation and efficiency in order to do more for less. This is a centric principal regarding Refractive Dialer, and the goals we bring to the table for all of our clients, big and small.

RD leverages best in class technology to allow our clients to derive top line revenue growth, increased market growth, all while creating and maintaining long lasting customer relationships.

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Top 100 Companies: North America

Reltio www.reltio.com Manish Sood Cloud computing Redwood Shores, California » Data is now a crucial part of any business.

Any company not gathering, analyzing and acting on the data it produces is quickly falling behind the competition, stumbling around in the dark while more illuminated companies seize the initiative. Reltio is one of the firms behind the illumination, providing companies with data-driven business insights which allow them to be more efficient, and make better decisions.

The company was founded in 2011 by the team behind Informatica MDM, and headed up by Manish Sood, the founder and CEO. Sood describes the opportunity he and his team identified: “One of the things that we saw early on that led to the creation and founding of Reltio was that the number of sources of data were increasing and the complexity in terms of how businesses were evolving and how they needed to pivot and switch to business models.”

“If you think about retail, some retail brands and stores were in the B2B channel type model and some were in B2C type model, but very quickly the market was evolving where each one of these players needed to address both parts of the market segment. They needed to grow the channels and effectively leverage both as a way to build their footprint,” Sood adds.

These types of changes were taking place across multiple segments. Another example was the healthcare sector, where the Affordable Care Act had shaken the industry upside down, and left companies struggling to make the right decisions in which direction to move next.

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“That was the type of example that we saw coming up more and more and that’s when we decided we needed a solution that would allow customers to have an overarching view of their business,”” Sood states.

But the company did not just focus on gathering and providing data to these companies, instead providing an end userfacing application which gives companies the insights that can be garnered from the data which is gathered. This allows the end user to consume the information, consume the insights and then take action.

Reltio’s data-driven applications can be utilized by sales, marketing and compliance professionals, and are easy to use so data scientists are not needed at all. The applications are able to uncover data relationships to improve productivity across the whole of the enterprise, reducing cost and complexity while dealing with the ever increasing mounds of data a company produces.

The company was founded using friends and family and personal funds, and quickly turned a profit. Despite this, Sood saw an opportunity to expand into more verticals, and looked to raise money. The VC market responded with apparent keenness. Reltio secured more than $10 million from .406 Ventures and Crosslink Capital in March 2015.

“The data-driven applications and data management market is exploding, and Reltio is poised to play a major role,” said Jim Feuille, partner at Crosslink Capital at the time of the funding. “Reltio is the first company in this arena to put tailored data-driven applications into the hands of business users, with the data management compliance and discipline that IT requires.

We look forward to playing a part in helping the company expand its product offerings, market reach and earnings.”

The company’s success and ambition to expand brought with it a set of challenges.

Chief among these, according to Sood, is

picking and choosing the right verticals to move into. Reltio’s pipeline has been growing fast, and the company must now build up the right infrastructure for its customers so it can serve them in its next sector. Sood says they have moved into oil and gas with success and one or two other verticals already.

Reltio’s competitors come on two fronts: the first is the legacy management infrastructure that is provided by large organizations such as SAP, Oracle and Informatica. Here the customers are looking to move into the cloud and place those capabilities with a software-as-aservice type application. There are also some competitors which work in the same verticals as Reltio.

There are some capabilities they provide that we might have some overlap with,” explains Sood. “But looking across the verticals, there are very few companies that provide the entire depth and breadth of capabilities that we have in terms of helping companies solve their problems.”

2015 was another successful year for Reltio, with new clients, new funding, new hires and new headquarters in Redwood Shores, California. With the masses of data being produced by businesses only increasing, the need for companies such as Reltio, which are able to decipher that mass and turn it into real, useable information, will only continue to grow at the same time.

Top 100 Companies: North America

Revolar

RiskMatch

www.revolar.com

www.riskmatch.com

Jacqueline Ros

Kabir Syed

Wearables

Finance

Denver, Colorado

Greenwich, Connecticut

» Revolar was born out of a passion to keep our loved ones safe in a smart, modern way. Founder and CEO Jacqueline Ros created Revolar out of love for her little sister who was assaulted as a teenager.

Ros found herself wishing her sister had been able to simply press a button to call for help, so that’s exactly what she built.

Ros and her team are a dedicated group of allies and survivors, who are all committed to building safety technology to empower people to keep themselves and those they love safe.

Leadership: As the CEO and founder of Revolar, Jacqueline Ros has always held a passion for social issues. Ros founded Revolar to disrupt rape culture and change the way people keep themselves and those they love safe. At the helm of Revolar, Jacqueline and her team ran a successful Kickstarter campaign, did the Techstars Boulder 2015 accelerator program, made the Top 25 for Sir Richard Branson’s Extreme Tech Challenge and most recently closed a $3 million financing round with The Foundry Group. Ros is a Florida native, but moved to Denver, CO three years ago to build Revolar where she enjoys rock climbing, volunteering, and spending time with her family.

» RiskMatch is an analytics company delivering web-based solutions for insurance intermediaries and underwriting partners throughout the U.S. The company was formed after the founders saw a number of problems in the industry.

“Seeing the constant repetition of problems endemic to this industry we created Riskmatch,” says Kabir Syed, CEO and co-founder of RiskMatch. “It does not matter if you are a small or a large broker, the problems are the same. Insurance as an industry needs to have efficiency, transparency of deals, flow and pricing, and a better way to move forward. Every other industry has embraced change and moved ahead, participants will eventually whittle away if they didn’t embrace the change happening. The industry participants agreed and we are have thus grown rapidly.”

The RiskMatch platform provides an array of portfolio management and placement solutions, analytics, internal and external benchmarking capabilities, and information management services.

These features are designed to enhance performance, reduce costs, facilitate growth and improve client service.

The company operates in a fairly new space, and as such doesn’t encounter much competition. Despite this, it still ensures it stays ahead the game. Syed lists the company’s main differentiators: “Our speed to transform data. The ease of use in sales, marketing and placing business with insurance companies and the clear

visualization of data that point areas that need correction,” he says.

RiskMatch has not yet raised any funds.

Syed says the company is currently in talks with potential investors. By the end of this year the company hopes to have an international presence, focusing on London and Bermuda.

The company holds two patents. The second of those was awarded in October 2015, and was entitled: ‘Systems and methods for facilitating an insurance marketplace for negotiations among brokers and insurance carriers.’ “The new patent relates to our capabilities for facilitating collaboration between brokers and insurance companies to effectively address the needs of clients,” Syed, said at the time. “In particular, it references our approach to giving brokers a formal mechanism to gather insights about insurance company risk appetites so they can identify insurance markets best suited to the needs of their clients. At the same time, the patent describes the capabilities we offer insurance companies to pinpoint brokers with client coverage needs that specifically meet their underwriting criteria.”

The industry is relatively new, so there are challenges associated with that which RiskMatch must overcome. Those challenges specifically are talent shortages, slow behavioral changes of the very large participants and fragmentation of industry players.

RiskMatch has a head start and two patents in an industry which many have overlooked. Although technology in the industry can be adopted slowly, the company is already in prime position for when the inevitable widespread adoption does occur.

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Top 100 Companies: North America

Roadie www.roadie.com Marc Gorlin Internet/Online Location: Atlanta, GA » Roadie is an app-based shipping community that utilizes excess capacity in passenger vehicles, connecting people with stuff to send with drivers already heading in that direction. The company ships local and long haul, same day, next day and even on weekends. Simply put, Roadie is a faster, cheaper, friendlier way to get your stuff where it’s going.

The Roadie app enables efficient, low-cost delivery for senders, rewards drivers for trips they were already taking, and offers members of the community a variety of other benefits including free roadside assistance, roadside discounts, and tax write-offs on miles they were already driving.

Leadership: The idea for Roadie struck Marc Gorlin one day when he needed a couple boxes of custom tile from a warehouse a few hours away to finish a bathroom renovation, and had no economical or practical way of getting them the same day.

Gorlin previously co-founded Kabbage Inc., which provides working capital to small and medium-sized businesses and has raised more than $100 million in venture funding.

In 1996, Gorlin was a co-founder and an original board member of Pretty Good Privacy (“PGP”), a company formed to commercialize one of the most prevalent security standards used on the Internet, and recently popularized in the book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Gorlin assisted with the initial formation of PGP and oversaw the financing, growth

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and eventual sale of the company (to Network Associates (Nasdaq: INTC), a public company worth over $1 billion) in December of 1997.

After PGP, Gorlin co-founded VerticalOne Corporation, a content personalization service that was sold to S1 Corporation (Nasdaq: ACIW) for $166 million.

Gorlin was Executive Vice President of VerticalOne and worked in multiple areas of the company including financing, business development, sales, M&A and security issues. Gorlin is an active speaker on raising venture funding and has spoken at the Technology Association of Georgia, Internet Summit, Southeastern Venture Conference, and Finovate among other conferences. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from the Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia and remains an avid bulldog fan.

Salesify www.salesify.com Gurdeep Chimni Software Redwood City, CA » Salesify helps close deals faster. The company’s Customer Intelligence Platform, powered by Big Data, has deep insights on companies, install base of the competition’s products, and targeted role-based contacts.

Salesify has Integrated Services Apps for Content Syndication, Live Verification and Data Refresh. With the Pipeline Catalyst App, customers can start having meaningful conversations with their prospects sooner and fine-tune marketing campaigns to highly relevant targets.

Leadership: Gurdeep Chimni—or Singh, as he is casually known to friends and colleagues—brings more than 20 years of high-tech sales, marketing, business, and product development experience. As co-founder of Salesify, Chimni continues to leverage this extensive knowledge to develop the proven sales methodologies, tools, and processes that form the foundation of the company’s service offerings. In his role as CEO, Chimni is focused on strategic customer acquisition and development, operations and overall corporate strategy. Before joining Salesify, Chimni spent time in Vice President roles at both British Telecom and Virtela Communications, where he helped generate sizable profit gains as well as drive top-line growth rates of over 400%. In the past, Chimni has held leadership positions within technology companies such as Lucent and Siemens, to name a few. On weekends, he can be found doing outdoors activities with his two boys. His employees love that he brings them free food from his wife’s company Sukhi’s Gourmet.

Top 100 Companies: North America

Satisfi www.satis.fi David Montoya Software Montvale, New Jersey » Satisfi is a customer feedback and issueresolution SaaS solution. It is a patent pending, mobile app and enterprise class software solution that provides real-time, bi-directional customer feedback and problem resolution management between consumers and businesses, and businesses and businesses. It is the “1-800 How’s My Driving” (just like on the back of trucks) for the physical world. Currently, companies with brick and mortar locations have no easy way of identifying and solving the problems, concerns, and issues, of customers in their stores.

Satisfi is an app that companies can deploy within their stores, which enables consumers, while still in the store, to give feedback and tell management when they have a problem (or positive experience).

Satisfi helps companies improve their customer service, satisfaction and retention and ultimately increase revenues as well as avoid the “shame game” on social media; we are the anti-Yelp. Later on, companies can analyze the data within the Satisfi dashboard to understand customer trends, likes and dislikes, etc.

Leadership: David Montoya, CEO, Co-founder and Director, has more than twenty-five years of startup, operational, programming, investment and transactional experience. Prior to co-founding SuperSolver, Inc., Montoya co-founded Buddha, Inc., which was an ambient network and mobile app. Prior

to Buddha, Montoya founded SeaView Mezzanine Fund, LP and its affiliate companies, which is an investment firm focusing on investments into businesses in the business services, light manufacturing and business distribution sectors.

Prior to SeaView, Montoya was a principal at Silicon Alley Venture Partners (“SAVP”), a venture capital fund in New York City.

Prior to joining SAVP, Mr. Montoya was the Director of Investments at the New York City Investment Fund (“NYCIF”), a private investment fund created by Henry Kravis and Jerry Speyer. Mr. Montoya’s portfolio of companies included Right Track Recording, StarMedia and TheStreet. com, among other investments. Prior to joining NYCIF, Montoya was an attorney specializing in mergers and acquisitions at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom LLP, the owner of an investment advisory firm, and an accountant at Ernst & Young LLP working in the financial services audit group and the M&A tax group.

Montoya sits on the Board of Directors of numerous businesses. Montoya received his undergraduate B.S. degree in Finance from St. John’s University, his MBA from Columbia Univ. and his JD from NYU. His is also a CPA.

Scalus www.scalus.com Kristen Goldstein Software San Francisco, CA » Scalus’ Professional Services Automation software provides service delivery teams with the freedom to get work done by automating process management, client communication, and provisioning liberating service teams from constant status checks and reactive firefighting.

Leadership: Kristen Koh Goldstein is the CEO of Scalus and Chairwoman of BackOps. She founded BackOps in 2010 to enable skilled moms to work from home while their children are at school. In 2013 with institutional backing from several investors including Sherpa Ventures, eVentures, Google Ventures, and HVF Labs, BackOps gave birth to Scalus, a software to manage a remote distributed workforce.

Prior to Scalus and BackOps, Goldstein was an Investment Analyst for Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse covering the software industry. She was also the CFO of Loyalty Lab (now Tibco) and Director Finance of Epinions (now eBay), where she developed a deep expertise in financial operations. Goldstein, a mother of three, was motivated to start BackOps not only to create flexible work schedules for moms, but also to provide affordable back office services to SMBs.”

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ScientiaMobile www.scientiamobile.com Krishna Guda Mobile Reston, Virginia » We’ve all been there; trying to read an article or access a webpage on a smartphone, only for a disproportionately sized advert to appear, taking an age to load and blocking the view of what you want to read. ScientiaMobile provides device detection technology that allows mobile websites to run smoothly, no matter where they are accessed from.

“We solve the problems caused by the Web shifting to a mobile-first paradigm,” explains Krishna Guda, CEO of ScientiaMobile. “Increasingly, users access the Web via mobile devices – not just laptops, but smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, game consoles, and thousands of emerging devices. The complexity of targeting mobile users, controlling and optimizing their Web experience, and then analyzing the success of their experience overwhelms most Web development teams.”

The mobile device detection field was pioneered by two of ScientiaMobile’s founders, Luca Passani and Steve Kamerman. In 2011, they joined forces with Guda to start a company that would offer commercial licenses and generate innovations for the open sources

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project, Wireless Universal Resource File (WURFL). By 2014, ScientiaMobile had grown to over $4 million in sales, and 30 employees.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize any service for the mobile-first web world will enjoy a gigantic market opportunity. But that also means competition. “We compete with providers of device detection technologies similar to ours, but we also compete with different ways to manage mobile complexity and mobile performance,” says Guda. “This means we have to compete with both startups and large networkfacility based competitors. The key to success is continuing to innovate to solve mobile web problems, and not being afraid to cannibalize legacy technologies.”

The company has raised one round of seed investment to date, from private investors.

Over the next 12 months the company will look to raise more funds to help with scaling of marketing, sales and global operations.

ScientiaMobile has big plans for the future. “We are increasing marketing and advertising efforts and budget to raise awareness of both our existing solutions and new innovative products launched in the last 6 months. Through social media, digital advertising, and higher profile talks at conferences for our targeted industry verticals we plan on increasing our lead generation,” says Guda.

The company has also targeted several verticals where the value of its solution is very high and will continue to grow its global operations platform as well. “By the

end of 2015, we have scaled our operations to handle over 2 billion transactions and over 3 billion image requests per month.

We expect this to double in the next year.

Therefore, we will strategically invest in geographic regions to ensure that our server operations and delivery meet the expectations of our customers,” says Guda.

Top 100 Companies: North America

Seal Software www.seal-software.com Ulf Zetterberg Contracts analytics Walnut Creek, California » Contracts and legal documents are tough for anyone. But for a business, losing a contract, misreading one, or breaking one without realizing it, can result in millions of dollars down the drain. Seal Software tells companies where their contracts are and what they contain, providing immediate, accurate and actionable intelligence.

In today’s global business world, the legal and regulatory environments can change fast, and that makes it even more important to be on top of obligations, opportunities and contractual relationships, so companies know how those changes affect them. With legal documents, a regular search engine jut won’t cut it.

“Search tools are generic; you don’t know what you’re going to search for when you wake up. Google doesn’t have a psychic feature,” explains Seal Software CEO and co-founder Ulf Zetterberg. “If you search for a contract with Sony Music, if you put that into Google it’ll give you everything that has Sony Music the name. If you put it in Seal it’s going to find contracts only.

That was the idea.”

Most large enterprises these days take part in a large number of M&A deals, meaning they have the headache of transferring over data and information from the company they have bought, and trying to integrate it into their systems. This can result in a lot of lost data, and that’s another area where Seal Software helps larger organizations.

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The potential losses from losing or misreading a contract are huge. “The first thing is that companies have to live up to the obligations and commitments. It could be a certain level of quality they have promised a customer, it could be a certain price or service level they’ve promised and can’t live up to,” says Zetterberg. “It could also be they have a relationship with a supplier they want to terminate, and don’t know how and when they can terminate the contract because they don’t have access to it.”

“There are regulatory things to consider. If you’re in a particular state, for example, oil and gas by state has significant differences of when and how they can explore oil and gas. Not having control over that in a timely fashion can stop production,” he adds.

The financial sector is another industry where the need for regulatory compliance is high, and particularly in the U.S., regulations are changing rapidly on a day by day basis following the financial crisis of 2009. “They’re still getting to grips with what they need to report on, and also to become more agile, because these are moving goal posts. They know there will be more regulatory changes in the future so how do you change how you’ve been operating from something static to something very dynamic,” says Zetterberg.

Despite the crucial services Seal Software provides its customers, there are few competitors offering the same type of product. “There are quite a few companies in the legal sector looking at leveraging machine learning, trying to speed up the work lawyers do in how you create and review contracts. So they compete partly with what we do. But there’s nobody helping the corporate customer. We haven’t seen anyone carrying a solution like we have,” explains Zetterberg.

Zetterberg estimates that it would take a competing company anywhere between 18 and 24 months to build a product similar to Seal’s, meaning they could be caught if they stood still. But the company has improved its offering with every version it has released.

Customers have certainly been impressed.

“Having visibility into your contracts is the first step to preforming analytics. We think Seal accomplishes that goal for us,” says Chad Johnson, VP Procurement Services, McKesson.

More good news for Seal Software is how fast the market it operates in is expanding.

“I think that the market opportunity is a $5-6 billion as it stands today. If you look at the corporate customers and how many contracts they have. And there are further services that we plan to add that will help customers to draft a contract more effectively in the future, that will increase the market opportunity. And we think the market is growing anywhere from 30-40% a year, because people are making more contracts. There are shorter review cycles, today in a more dynamic world people prefer shorter relationships which means you’re creating a new contract more often than a few years ago,” says Zetterberg.

Seal’s software can process contracts in pretty much any language, but the rules which it uses to extract information are only written in English at this point. By the end of the year the company hopes to launch international rules, making the potential market even larger.

Seal provides a crucial service to a growing market, with an elegant solution to a huge pain point. It seems nothing, not even in the small print, can stop this company making its mark.

Top 100 Companies: North America

Secure Islands www.secureislands.com Aki Eldar Security New York » Inspired by a theft of intellectual property within the company he was working for at the time, Secure Islands CTO Yuval Eldar and his brother Aki Eldar (CEO) founded the company in 2006 in order to develop a new approach to securing unstructured data (files and emails) free of the management and performance issues that hindered existing information protection solutions such as encryption and DLP. Secure Islands (acquired by Microsoft) flagship product, the IQProtector Suite has changed the data security game with a unique, patented, data-centric approach to data protection: Data Immunization.

Data Immunization intercepts data at the point of creation, applying persistent classification and encryption, usage-rights and auditing that follow files and emails throughout their entire lifecycle.

Utilizing flexibly defined parameters, IQProtector classifies in real-time sensitive data from any source – users, applications, file repositories or directories – based on context and content. Then, leveraging existing IRM and encryption frameworks, IQProtector intelligently generates, applies and enforces persistent encryption policies enterprise-wide.

IQProtector was designed with maximum consideration to the user, classifying without user involvement and supporting any application in its native form on PC, smartphones and tablets. Fully assimilated within the IT environment, IQProtector eliminates the need to change any infrastructure including indexers, archiving, Anti-Virus scanners, and more.

Leadership: Aki Eldar has more than 22 years of management, sales and business development experience in communications, security, and software.

Prior to founding Secure Islands, Eldar was VP Sales and head of a Business Unit at Bynet Data Communication, where he was responsible for developing annual sales in excess of $50 million. During his tenure at Bynet, Eldar successfully developed and applied new business strategies that significantly enhanced the company’s leading role in the local and the global market. Prior to joining Bynet, Eldar worked for the Israeli government in the field of national security initiatives.

Seismic www.seismic.com Doug Winter Software Solana Beach, CA » Seismic is the leading sales enablement solution that allows sales teams to deliver the right content at the right time on any device. Seismic’s mobile-first, cloud-based platform enables field and inside sales reps to quickly create customized, compliant materials that dramatically increase time spent selling, improve win rates, reduce sales cycles and increase customer satisfaction. Founded in 2010, Seismic is privately held by its three-time serial entrepreneur executive team and leading venture capital firms JMI Equity and Sigma West.

Leadership: Doug Winter serves as Chief Executive Officer and founder of Seismic, the only platform that enables LiveDoc creation for brand-approved, real-time enterprise content management. Winter previously co-founded Objectiva Software Solutions, which was acquired by EMC Document Sciences in 2004. Winter was the COO and General Manager at Document Sciences until founding Seismic in 2010.

He holds a MSEE and an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BSEE from Virginia Tech.

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SkyKick www.skykick.com

Smart Utility Systems

Todd Schwartz

www.smartusys.com

Cloud computing

Aman Singha

Seattle, Washington

Energy Irvine, California

» Over the next ten years, 100,000 IT Solution providers will be hired to help migrate over 50 million small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) and nearly a billion SMB users to Office 365.

SkyKick’s mission is to help those IT solution providers successfully move those millions of SMBs to the cloud. To achieve this, SkyKick has created a new category of migration software called “Migration Project Automation.” The software automates nearly 90 percent of the consultant work for a SMB migration, which would typically be a 40-hour deployment project. The company’s SMB and Enterprise Migration Suites help partners manage migration projects including the sales, planning, migration, management and on-site phases of their customer’s move to Office 365. SkyKick is a 2013 Microsoft Partner of the Year and is headquartered in Seattle.

Leadership: Todd Schwartz is the CoFounder and Co-CEO of SkyKick—the company with the world’s only automated platforms to migrate businesses to the cloud. Prior to SkyKick, Schwartz was Director of Product Management at Microsoft, where he held a number of leadership roles, including the launch and double-digit growth of Bing, AdCenter and Windows Live businesses. Prior to Microsoft, Schwartz worked as a consultant with Deloitte Consulting and Accenture, and held roles in venture capital, startups, and as a Captain in the US Army. Schwartz holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and B.A. in Economics from Colorado College.

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» All industries value efficiency, but companies in the energy sector perhaps have more cause than any to make sure their operations are undertaken in the most efficient way possible. Smart Utility Systems offers solutions to companies in the energy and utilities sector doing just that.

The company was established in 2009, with the goal of contributing to a sustainable future and revolutionizing energy efficiency and water conversation.

With that in mind, Smart Utility Systems launched a suite of technology oriented solutions for customer engagement, mobile workforce and big data analytics, all catering to the energy and water utility industries.

The energy and utility industry is one facing numerous challenges. Stricter environmental regulations, regulatory compliance, technological innovations, and demand response management are all hurdles that need to be overcome to succeed. Smart Utility Systems aims to deliver software-as-a-service solutions that help companies maintain a balance between addressing the challenges faced and optimizing revenues.

Smart Utility Systems ensures it stands out from competitors by making sure its solutions are available to everyone and solve real problems. “Our solutions are device agnostic and enable utilities to engage and empower their customers through realtime two-way communication via web, tablets and smartphones. Through in-

built analytic tools, utilities get access to a 360-degree view of customer information, such as their consumption data, usage pattern, that helps in identifying target customer segments and recommend energy efficiency and water savings programs basis behavioral analysis,” a company spokesperson said.

The company’s customers certainly seem impressed with its Smart Customer Mobile platform. ‘’We knew it was time to take our technology to the next level, but we didn’t want to settle for a solution that would give us more problems to solve in the end. SCM took our customer engagement to the next level and made a significant impact in several business processes and objectives,” said Glendale Water and Power (GWP) in a statement.

The next 18 months hold a great deal of potential for the company. “At SUS, customer service is part of our brand promise and our future strategy necessarily envisages developing customer-centric solutions for our clients while creating an energy and water sustainable future. We are driven by a vision to help revolutionize the way, world approaches energy efficiency and water conservation. Thus, product innovation and development is a key focus area for us,” the company writes.

“SUS is also working towards addressing the California drought situation through its latest Smart H2O app that enables utility customers to report violations related to water leak and adhere to state mandates on water use. We are also assessing and weighing various factors in high potential markets with the objective of expanding our geographic footprint. Over the next few months, we also look forward to strengthen our partner eco-system to build upon our delivery capabilities and be able to leverage opportunities in new avenues.”

The company is also planning international expansion, targeting India, the Middle East and Singapore in particular.

Top 100 Companies: North America

SoftNAS www.softnas.com/wp Rick Braddy Cloud computing Houston, Texas » Four years ago Rick Braddy founded SoftNAS on the back of some pretty huge pain points for the storage industry.

Storage costs were expensive and had to be replaced every few years. Braddy, a 30year technology industry veteran, saw the perfect opportunity for a startup: if he could create storage that was simple and powerful, clients would come flocking.

Today his choice looks a wise one. SoftNAS is the best-selling cloud network-attached storage (NAS), providing a softwaredefined unified NAS/SAN (storage area network) storage solution for businesses that need “powerful, hassle-free and agile storage,” he told Red Herring upon his company’s victory at the Top 100 North America event.

“With SoftNAS cloud NAS, you can have enterprise-class NAS with high-availability running in less than one hour - without prior storage training,” added Braddy, who has previously served as contract CTO

for Virtual-Q, and as a software and IT consultant. “SoftNAS Cloud NAS runs on AWS, Azure, CenturyLink Cloud public clouds and can be deployed on-premise on VMware, easily creating any combination of public, private or hybrid clouds.

“SoftNAS also provides file services in front of object storage,” he said. “The solution scales efficiently and is highly redundant, making hundreds of millions to billions of files accessible, backed by the ‘No Downtime Guarantee’.”

Unlike other applications that do not support legacy devices or the latest backup applications, Braddy’s brand is built using Linux running on popular hypervisors, making it compatible with older and newer technologies.

The “easy button for storage” that Braddy developed, has secured six patents, and clients including Netflix, Nike, Lockheed Martin and CallSource. In fact, SoftNAS has managed formidable growth despite considerable competition in its sphere, including from Zadara Storage, Nasuni and Avere Systems. The company has also raised $6.4 million in venture funding across two rounds, and plans to secure more institutional funding in the near future.

aspect for his company moving forward.

“Because of the complex nature of the problem SoftNAS solves,” he said, “success and visibility on one platform does not automatically ensure the same recognition across multiple platforms because there will need to be a shift in the current perception that less rugged NAS devices are solutions and the continued reliance of the industry on enterprise NAS devices.

“While these can be loaded with features they are expensive, require up-front payments, are pricey to expand, require weeks of training a storage specialist, and take a long time to implement,” Braddy added. “Additionally a competing and challenging problem is the adoption of open-source storage software which may be free, but it is often fragmented by inconsistent developers, is rarely well tested and lacks enterprise-level technical support.”

Those major challenges tackled, Braddy and SoftNAS are confident they have what it takes to revolutionize the storage industry even further as technology, and customer demands, continue to grow.

“We will continue to support the need for enterprise file services as the gap continues to be an issue as migration to the cloud accelerates,” he concluded.

That will help SoftNAS ensure it can prove its mettle across multiple platforms, which Braddy says is the most challenging

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SparkPost www.sparkpost.com Phillip Merrick Email delivery San Francisco, California » Many predicted email would die out as instant messaging grew in popularity. But the email is here to stay. There are some things only email can accomplish, and with the types of services provided by companies like SparkPost, the possibilities only increase.

SparkPost is an email delivery service based on the Momentum platform from Message Systems. The company’s services offer high inbox placement rates and seamless integration to companies looking to send transactional emails, integrate bigdata and personalize content or managing one-to-one marketing programs.

The company was originally founded as a consulting organization to solve large scale email sending issues, and has since evolved from that. Phillip Merrick, CEO of SparkPost, explains how competitive the market which the company evolved into has proven to be. “Email is the most profitable, widely used customer engagement and communication channel in the world. Because of that, there are many different companies and solutions that play in this market.”

Those competitors include SendGrid and Mandrill in the transactional emails market, while email service providers such as ExactTarget provide competition in the marketing space. SparkPost differentiates itself from the competition in several ways. One of the major advantages it holds is its ever-growing customer list, which includes the likes of Zillow, LinkedIn, CareerBuilder and Pinterest.

Those customers are effusive in their praise of SparkPost’s services. “Email is 146

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an extension of the [Pinterest] product,” says Seth Weisfeld, engagement manager at Pinterest. “Pinterest itself is a very personalized platform, so our email needs to be, too. Our relationship with SparkPost extends the personalized feel of the Pinterest site to email.”

SpendHQ

SparkPost currently moves 25% of the world’s emails and processes billions of emails per month. The company also boasts a 98% inbox delivery percentage, which it says is the highest in the business.

The company has enjoyed large investor backing, raising $65.5 million over four rounds, and including LLR Partners, NewSpring and Hercules among its investors.

Atlanta, Georgia

The next 18 months is looking bright for SparkPost. “We will fully transition SparkPost to a SaaS business model. In addition, we plan to dramatically expand our partnerships,” Merrick explains.

The company is also planning expansion internationally, initially in Europe where it already has a small direct presence to build on.

As email continues to play a key part in the business models of companies across all industries, SparkPost is well positioned to continue to expand for many years to come.

www.spendhq.com Tom Beaty Finance

» Sometimes running a company can lead to an excellent idea for another one. That happened to Tom Beaty, CEO and Founder of Insight Sourcing Group and SpendHQ. “I have another company that is a consultancy firm (Insight Sourcing Group) focusing on procurement. In that process we go into companies, hundreds of companies, and our goal is to take out costs. In order to do that we need visibility into what they are spending money on already,” Beaty explains.

“Through the years of doing that it was stunning how few companies had decent useable data. In almost every case we had to manipulate and clean up data in order to use it again to take out costs. That raised two questions – one question was: if companies are spending so much money on systems, why are they not getting good data? And the second question was: if they don’t have good visibility then how they managing their spend?”

Insight Sourcing Group was doing a spend analysis for all of its clients, collecting the data manually with Excel. Those clients loved the analysis, and were extremely excited about it, so Beaty acted fast. First they decided to make the spend analysis more efficient, and secondly they tried to find a way to automate it.

“We went out to the marketplace and looked at all the available solutions and we were stunned by how deficient many of them were, says Beaty. “Our background is as practitioners and many of those building software in our space are technologists, and they really didn’t quite understand the needs of the customers. For example,

Top 100 Companies: North America

there would be errors in the ways they categorized the spend in their demos. We decided to build our own tool and clients loved it, and they began to ask if they could get it, and wanted to pay for it.”

In 2012, Beaty and co. decided to commercialize the spend analysis tool they had created, and in 2013 hired a full executive team for SpendHQ. The company has since taken off in a major way.

SpendHQ was launched with the profits of Insight Sourcing Group and hasn’t taken any outside funding. Beaty says the potential market in front of SpendHQ is massive.

“There’s the addressed market and the addressable market. The addressable market is almost unlimited in the U.S. There’s probably $500 million plus in licenses in this current marketplace and we have a relatively small market share of that,” he says.

Although there is competition, the majority of them are bigger companies, which come with disadvantages. “The main thing is this is a very disruptive entry into the space. I’d call it a 2.0 type entry into the space. All of the major players have been around a long time and are kind of bulky. Ours is lean and it strikes right at the heart of value for our customers,” says Beaty.

There are other huge differentiators between SpendHQ and its competitors. Because of the company’s background in consulting, it relies less on automation than other players in the space, as it can call on a wealth of knowledge from the original company. The so-called ‘humanware’ really comes into play when there is great variation in data from company to company.

“The competition tends to rely on algorithms to automate it as much as possible. They are really closely focused on automating it but the problem is it can’t be completely automated fully and be accurate,” Beaty says. “When they do the manual labor associated with it they typically do it offshore in India. The challenge there is it creates a security issue,

and secondly you’ve got a bunch of people on a radically different time zone who are not really familiar with the North America or European marketplaces which is where the majority of spending is. So a lot of the time they don’t really understand the context of the data, even if some are very worldly and intelligent. We have decided not to offshore the data, we’ve developed an operations center in Puerto Rico and all our employees there are U.S citizens. They all speak English and Spanish and are in the same time zone.”

The company’s success hasn’t come without challenges however, and SpendHQ attempted a couple of different sales models before settling on a winning formula. The company initially tried the same sales model that all its competitors use, which is to hire software sales people and to go into the market. But one of the company’s biggest advantages is the domain expertise built from the consulting business. For that reason, sales staff are teamed up with people boasting that domain expertise to help clients understand how to use the product to better create value.

SpendHQ has come a long way in a short time, but Beaty hopes it can go even further, even quicker, in the future. “Our objective is to grow about 250% in the next two years,” he concludes.

StartApp www.startapp.com Gil Dudkiewicz Marketing/Advertising New York » StartApp is a one of the industry’s leading Global mobile advertising platforms.

Headquartered in New York, the company has additional offices in San Francisco, Brazil, India, China and Israel. StartApp

currently partners with more than 150,000 applications, and have 350 million monthly active users worldwide.

Founded in late 2010, StartApp presents today’s mobile industry with smarttargeted, sophisticated and engaging ad units. By using a programmatic ad platform the compay is able to present the best ad anytime, anywhere. With the combination of innovative ad units and advanced business intelligence StartApp has the tools that enable it to deliver outstanding value to publishers and advertisers.

Using the platform, publishers can easily improve their user experience with beautifully designed ad units and increase their monetization earning potential and performance. Advertisers are able to optimally target users by taking advantage of the advanced targeting capabilities and improve their campaigns results by generating high ROI on their users.

Leadership: Gil Dudkiewicz, StartApp’s Founder and CEO, is a member of the board of directors of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Mobile Center. Dudkiewicz is a serial entrepreneur who brings more than 20 years of experience in mobile and internet services to growing revenues and optimizing operations in the online world.

Among his recent positions, Dudkiewicz was the Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR) at the Cedar Fund.

Prior to this, Dudkiewicz was the CEO of SweetIM, which he joined when it was a small startup consisting of five employees.

During Gil’s tenure, Sweetim generated over 100M downloads and won the Technology Rising Star Award in the Deloitte Fast 50 Competition. SweetIM was later acquired

by Perion Network on November 2012 for $41 million. Dudkiewicz was also founder and CEO of MyDTV/MeeVee a personalized TV Guide and TV search program. He holds a MBA from UC Berkeley and B.Sc. in Engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

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SteadyServ www.steadyserv.com Steve Hershberger Internet of Things Fishers, Indiana » Steve Hershberger previously co-founded and ran a craft brewery. But he found his job was made harder by significant market gaps in business intelligence – he didn’t know where his beers were tapped, what the age or quality was, and which beers were his direct competitors. He saw a chance to fix that problem, and founded SteadyServ.

Breweries receive seasonal sales guidance to plan their brewing schedule, but Hershberger found that the insight from the guidance varied on average by 30150%. Using data which was off could mean individual beers sat waiting to be sold, getting closer to their expiration date.

SteadyServ technology gives businesses insights into real-time keg levels, draft beer waste data, personalized inventory and pricing recommendations and beer list optimization, essentially eliminating the guesswork used throughout the industry.

SteadyServ boasts the world’s largest and most comprehensive database of beer, meaning the company knows exactly what beers are on tap, as well as everything they need to know about those beers. The beer-selling company knows what is going to run out and when, the quality of each product and what decisions need to be made to maximize sales. The system is also 100% automated and frictionless for the user.

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Customers certainly seem grateful for the savings made when using the system. “It is nice to see when a keg is getting low so we can tell our bar staff to go ahead and get the backup keg ready to go… I was surprised to see that some beers I thought were good movers were just not selling, and beers that I was looking to get rid of were actually moving relatively quickly, so it has adjusted my outlook on ordering,” says Jake O’Rourke, Bar Manager at The Score Restaurant & Sport Bar.

Symphony Commerce

SteadyServ is the first to provide an automated solution to the problem, meaning competition is limited. The main competitive force is the desire to maintain the status quo. BevIntel provides a manual inventory system, where staff are required to physically count product and issue a report, and on the data side of the business, SteadyServ competes with IRI/ Guestmetrics and Neilsen.

» E-commerce is no longer optional for any company selling goods. The chances of a business surviving without online sales are slim, and only getting slimmer.

But the complexities of e-commerce can sometimes be overwhelming, particularly when selling over multiple channels.

Symphony Commerce’s solution aims to put an end to all of the hassles associated with e-commerce.

The draft beer market in the U.S. alone exceeds $23 billion, and there are over 500,000 licensed retailers in the U.S. that can utilize SteadyServ’s solutions. But globally, the numbers are much higher and the company is planning international expansion.

Symphony Commerce CEO and CoFounder Harish Abbott first saw the gap between the commerce infrastructure at Amazon.com, and the infrastructure used by most brands. Abbott founded Symphony Commerce to provide the best possible commerce infrastructure to brands. Symphony technology takes the burden off brands, and allows them to thrive off the strength of their products, rather than their ability to set up an extremely complicated commerce stack.

SteadyServ plans to scale in North America, EEA, the U.K., South Africa, Australia, Japan and Korea in the next 18 months. The company is also looking to acquire data science resources to extend its predictive capacity.

Providing business analysis like SteadyServ’s is crucial in any industry, but in the beer business, where guesswork has been used for so long, many beer sellers around the globe will surely be raising a glass to SteadyServ in the near future.

symphonycommerce.com Ken Fine E-commerce San Francisco, California

The e-commerce market gives Symphony Commerce plenty to aim at. “Estimates say that the global eCommerce market is $1.6 trillion. What’s more, it’s projected grow at a double digit rate for the foreseeable future. There’s a lot of market share that’s there for the taking, and as consumers demand better shopping experiences from both branded web stores and online resellers alike, world-class commerce

Top 100 Companies: North America

infrastructure is the need of the hour,” says Abbott.

That kind of market opportunity brings with it competition. But many of the solutions out there are on-premise, meaning they are expensive to set up and maintain. Symphony offers a commerceas-a-service approach, which is entirely on the cloud. The company also differentiates itself from competitors in other ways.

Those include its end-to-end enterprise class solution including fulfilment and returns, and an onboarding time of just 60 days.

The company is growing fast, and as such, faces challenges. “Symphony is scaling fast.

We plan to double in size in 2016. Our biggest challenge is recruiting passionate people that meet the high standards required to help revolutionize commerce.

Our second biggest challenge is onboarding these new recruits and brands to keep up with our fast pace of growth. It’s an exciting time to be at Symphony, and these are great problems to have,” says Abbott.

Customers are certainly impressed. “When you see the Symphony demo, you see a platform that provides clear strategic advantages for branded commerce. Their continuous innovation, precision, and dedication towards superior customer experiences are just a few reasons why we chose Symphony,” says Roshanna Sabaratnam, VP of eCommerce, J Brand Jeans.

Symphony Commerce may be successful right now, but that’s not to say it’s slowing down, and has big plans for the future.

“Symphony is quickly becoming a leader for Food & Beverage brands and Fashion & Apparel brands. One of the key initiatives we are working on is giving Brands a single system and view across Wholesale and

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eCommerce business channels. Brands are increasingly becoming omnichannel and Symphony is working to address the richness and complexity of all business channels. We are working on giving more control to brand marketers through “Compose” - our user experience creator to create and edit their web stores without going through engineers and support tickets,” says Abbott.

TalentWise www.talentwise.com Todd Owens Cloud computing Bothell, Washington » TalentWise is a technology company that has completely transformed one of the most critical tasks that every company depends upon for success – hiring new employees.

TalentWise automates the hiring process from start to finish with compliance built in, allowing HR to manage offers, screening, and onboarding activities with just a single solution.

Leadership: Todd Owens is the Chief Executive Officer at TalentWise and has been with the company since 2006.

Owens previously held senior Product Management and Business Development roles at both Wind River Systems and Siebel Systems. Early in his career, Owens was a United States Navy submarine officer serving aboard the USS Pogy (SSN 647) and on the Third Fleet staff. He has been recognized four times as a “Superstar for outsourcing innovation in support of HR organizations” by HRO Today magazine.

Owens holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Naval Academy and a Masters in Business Administration from the Harvard Business School.

Top 100 Companies: North America

TEEMA Solutions Group www.teemagroup.com Brian Antenbring Professional services Vancouver, British Columbia » TEEMA is focused on providing Staffing and Technology Solutions that achieve targeted results. Everything the company does comes down to helping clients align their People, Process, and Technology.

TEEMA’s staffing experts are the most highly tenured in the industry. Each TEEMA Member brings experience, skill and acumen across a variety of specialties, industries and public service sectors.

Together, they’re formidable. Their wealth of knowledge converges with a nimble and flexible entrepreneurial spirit to provide a truly unique and fully customized experience for clients and job seekers alike.

Leadership: Brian Antenbring’s taste of entrepreneurialism started at the early age of 9. The annual rodeo came to town in the hot summer days of August and it was 6 blocks away from his house. Setting up a lemonade stand at the end of the driveway was not good enough, so he took his stand to the rodeo which transformed his young life and set him on a path towards shameless entrepreneurialism.

It wasn’t the seemingly vast amount of money he made at that rodeo that transformed him (at $.25 per cup it was hardly retirement, but to a 9-year-old in the 1970’s it was a windfall). It was the rush he felt with every transaction. That rush is what still fuels him today.

After a variety of micro-business ventures growing up, Antenbring started his first legitimate business in his third year of university. It was an importing business and it came about when he went down

to Costa Rica with his family during Christmas break.

When Antenbring was introduced to the staffing industry, he couldn’t believe such an industry existed. ‘You get paid to find people jobs?’ was his first question. That sounded too good to be true. It didn’t take him long to fall in love with the industry.

As he fine-tuned his skills in the staffing industry, he knew he wanted to carve something out for his own. The journey of successes and setbacks prior to, and within, the staffing industry helped form what TEEMA has become today; one of North America’s fastest growing staffing firms.

ThreatConnect www.threatconnect.com Adam Vincent Security Arlington, Virginia » To combat a threat, it’s necessary to first understand it. That’s why companies like ThreatConnect focus on the most comprehensive threat intelligence possible.

ThreatConnect was founded in 2011 by Adam Vincent, CEO of the company, and other founders with just $50,000 in seed money. The company started out with a services and consulting edge, in order to fund and shape future product development. This allowed Vincent to build the product with a small team of developers, rather than jumping straight into the market.

A recent survey from Forrester showed that 77% of North American and European security leaders said improving their threat intelligence capabilities was a priority. “Threat intelligence should be assessing risk for better decision making - which is the core of all good

business intelligence (BI),” a company spokesperson writes. “BI software has transformed organizations’ operations for years - from the board and C-suite level downward. Now ThreatConnect is revolutionizing security decision making in the same fashion, giving security teams powerful new insights that they can share with all levels to shape how organizations deal with immediate and long-term cyber related business risk.”

ThreatConnect launched its commercial product at the Black Hat event in Las Vegas in 2013. The company has been profitable since its inception, and has more than 7,000 users of its threat intelligence platform to date. The company raised $4.2 million in Series A funding at the end of 2014 and a $16 million Series B round at the end of 2015.

When the product was first launched, ThreatConnect acknowledged it was a risk, as it wasn’t clear the market was completely there at that point. As such, market education it still a major challenge.

“As an emerging market, it is essential that potential customers understand threat intelligence and threat intelligence platform (TIP) capabilities.

The marketplace is expanding quickly, resulting in adjacent products migrating toward marketing themselves as threat intelligence platforms,” the spokesperson says.

“Traditionally, the security industry has largely focused on protection/prevention, but recent years has seen a lot of research and development on the detection and response side. A large marketplace challenge is to not only improve the capability to detect and respond to threats when they happen, but also determine how relevant each threat is to the specific organization. ThreatConnect’s consistent investment in the product is helping to forward this thought process.”

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for making intelligence driven security decisions across the enterprise.

Customers and investors alike are certainly sold on the platform, and the company’s vision for the future. “Security operations has become a mission critical element of the enterprise in national security and commercial organizations alike. ThreatConnect is the leader in the marketplace and provides a true threat intelligence platform to address the unmet needs of those organizations. It’s difficult to imagine a better solution and partner to showcase the speed, scalability and power of HANA,” said Ron Police, COO of SAP NS2. “It’s time for security operations to have the same access to enterprise software as do other aspects of the business, and we expect ThreatConnect’s threat intelligence platform to do just that.”

TowerSec www.tower-sec.com Saar Dickman Security

has been recognized by the industry: named the Hottest Startup in 2015 at the North American International Auto Show for its work on automotive cyber security and was chosen to present in international auto shows. TowerSec’s products are a ready to embed, cost effective, Intrusion Detection & Prevention System software which protects vehicles from hackers and intrusions. SHIELD technology monitors, detects, actively mitigates and eliminates threats in real time, logs data & provides double perimeter protection. ECUSHIELD - in-vehicle networks protection, is real time software, uses unique machine learning and anomaly detection algorithms and is embedded to one of the car’s ECU. TCUSHIELD seamlessly integrates into telematics and infotainment systems with no additional hardware and protects vehicles, fleets & service providers.

Leadership: Saar Dickman is a Homeland Security innovative technologies specialist.

Prior to TowerSec, Dickman served as the CEO of touchdown technologies and Director at ADT Ventures, as well as a consultant to several Homeland Security and Defense startups. Dickman’s military experience includes serving in the Israeli air force as COMBM for nearly a decade.

Ann Arbor, Michigan » TowerSec - Automotive Cyber Security, is a leading global solution vendor of, onboard, cyber security software products to OEMs, suppliers, & aftermarket telematics and service providers. Since its inception in 2012, TowerSec’s vision has been to be the global standard for on-board automotive cyber security and to help OEMs and suppliers to prevent car hacking threats.

Founded by team of highly trained Israeli cyber security experts and experienced entrepreneurs, TowerSec is backed by decades of automotive manufacturing experience.

With offices in Michigan, Maryland, Germany & Israel, TowerSec maintains a close relationship with its clients. TowerSec

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Transactis www.transactis.com Joe Proto Cloud computing New York » Transactis transforms traditional paper billing and payment processing by enabling businesses of all sizes to replace paper bills, statements, invoices, payments and documents with more efficient digital alternatives.

The company goes to market exclusively with resellers (financial institutions, technology companies, and business process outsourcers) to provide their business customers with secure, configurable, white-label, industry-leading SaaS solutions. Transactis is more than a technology provider to its resellers – it is a full service business partner. The company delivers a full suite of unmatched sales, marketing, technical and operational support, empowering resellers to more successfully serve their clients.

The Transactis team includes executives, board members and advisors who are seasoned industry experts with decades of experience in the billing and payments industry. Transactis meets the strictest regulatory and compliance requirements including HIPAA, SSAE 16, PCI Level 1, and SOC 2.

Leadership: Joe Proto is Chairman and CEO of Transactis, part of his three decades in the billing and payments industry as a senior executive and successful entrepreneur. Prior to Transactis, he launched REMITCO, a payments company acquired in 2000 by First Data, as well as Financial Telesis (CashFlex) which was acquired in 1992 by CoreStates, now part of Wells Fargo. Proto co-founded Windham Ventures (an innovation leader in healthcare and med tech), and is a limited partner at Metamorphic Ventures (digital media and e-commerce), ff Venture Capital (technology), and Alpine Meridian Ventures. Proto is a director at SpendSmart Payments Company (SSPC: OTC) a fast growing mobile loyalty platform with 5 million digital subscribers.

Proto is a member of various financial services organizations including the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP), he is Co-Chair of the Consumer Payments Advisory Committee of the Payments Innovation Council as well as serving on the Board of Advisors at the National Automated Clearinghouse Association (NACHA), and is a frequent speaker at conferences in the financial technology industry.

Top 100 Companies: North America

Trifacta www.trifacta.com Adam Wilson Data analytics San Francisco, California » Trifacta’s rise to prominence has been one of the most spectacular in recent tech memory. The San Francisco-founded firm, initially a joint research project between UC Berkeley and Stanford, has grown into a multinational, multifaceted corporation, with offices in three countries and an advisory board that includes some of the industry’s biggest names.

Take Tim O’Reilly, for example, who is widely considered to have coined the terms open source and Web 2.0. Or New York Times digital superstar Michael Bostock, or DJ Patil, the chief data scientist of the United States Office of Science and Technology, or a host of well-respected academic heads. If Trifacta is lacking in anything, it certainly isn’t an expert boardroom.

The most important people at the company, however, are its triumvirate of founders: Joe Hellerstein, Jeff Heer and Sean Kandel.

They created the company to address a great need in the data analysis field.

Their initial research “looked at the work of data analysts from 25 organizations across a variety of sectors, including healthcare, retail, marketing and finance,” CEO Adam Wilson told Red Herring. “This research revealed that as much as 80% of analysts’ time is spent manually wrangling data.

“Trifacta’s co-founders…created Trifacta to address the need to make data wrangling more efficient, to help analysts overcome this productivity bottleneck in the analysis pipeline and to allow more users to get hands-on with data during the critical preparation phase.”

Trifacta realized that data wrangling needs a new interaction model, Wilson says “one that allows humans to work more iteratively with data of any size and format through the aid of an intuitive visual interface in combination with machine learning. Trifacta’s platform combines visual interaction with intelligent inference and ‘predictive transformation’ technology to close the gap between people and data.”

Trifacta has filed ten patents in its three years of operation, all of which have helped it quickly corner the data preparation field and pave the way for huge growth. And as we were told, there really isn’t much in the way of competition for the firm, which is now active in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Boston, Berlin and London. Trifacta raised sales more than 700% from 2014 to 2015, and has won users at over 3,000 companies in 120 countries. Paxata, Alteryx, IBM and ClearStory are all working in the sphere.

But it is very nascent.

“The self-service data preparation space is still emerging,” Wilson said. “There are a growing number of vendors trying to tackle the problem, but most companies continue to approach the problem manually or with legacy solutions that aren’t suited for the world of big data and the proliferation of semi-structured data sources.”

Big data analytics to be the next trilliondollar market, forecasting a 23.1% CAGR, reaching $48.6bn by 2019. Little wonder, therefore, that investors have rushed to inject capital into Trifacta, which has raised a total of $76.3m from Accel, Greylock Partners, Cathay Innovation and Ignition Partners.

“Companies large and small struggle to analyze and make use of today’s data due to its scale and complexity,” Wilson said. “In fact, the process of converting raw data into a usable format for analysis takes up to 80% of any analytics process.

This challenge of preparing the growing volume and variety of data for analysis is exactly the problem Trifacta is focused on solving.”

Expansion, therefore, is key in 2016. The company launched its European operation last December and plans to open up in Asia later this year. “As the demand for analytics and self-service tools grows, so does the market opportunity for Trifacta,” the company added. “Organizations are increasingly looking to harness the power of data and more people within those organizations want to innovate and improve their work through the data they have available.

“Due to those needs, companies are demanding solutions that maximize the productivity of data analysis to allow more people within an organization - those with the most business context - to get hands on with their data.”

90% of the world’s data has been created in the past two years. Computing honcho Michael Dell recently estimated that

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USEReady www.useready.com Uday Hegde Business Intelligence New York, New York » Data analytic solutions are in strong demand. Businesses all over the world and in every industry want to use data to develop their own competitive advantage.

USEReady was founded to help businesses achieve that goal.

The company uses internal research and advanced technology vendors delivering self-service products, championing analytics governance as a way to adopt selfreliant solutions within an enterprise.

“We decided that we should found a company that truly focuses on helping businesses to be self-reliant on data.

We founded in New York city and we’re headquartered in New York City.

Subsequently we started primarily helping banks and insurance companies which are very near and dear to us and where we have strong competitive advantages, we started working with them,” says Uday Hegde, CoFounder and CEO of USEReady.

Over the last five years, as the appetite for data discovery, security and visualization

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solutions has grown, companies have also faced an increasing number of choices.

However, this can also make the selection difficult, as there is a glut of tools and technologies with varying degrees of differentiation. That’s where USEReady comes in, to make that choice easier, and to evaluate and identify the best solution that meets their requirements.

“Large enterprises have a steep learning curve to attain analytics maturity. It requires transformation from grassroots to the upper management within the organization. Large organizations need complex set of techno functional skills combined with deep expertise in enterprise B2B technology,” says Hedge.

Customers certainly appear satisfied with the consultancy services. “With USEReady, it is instant ROI! They have been a real support system. From data structuring to visualization to putting in place every governance piece - USEReady team really knows what works for the customers. While implementing each solution, they make sure that everyone is on the same page. It has been a very professional, strategic and trustable relationship from the beginning to the end,” said a regional head at a leading financial services company.

USEReady raised a seed round of $1.5 million from a private investor based out of Hong Kong, and has also secured debt financing from New York-based Sterling National Bank.

Now the company has big plans for the near future. “Next 18 months are going to be a scale out phase in USEReady’s journey.

USEReady has established its offerings in local, global and remote delivery models.

We are planning to scale this to offer competitive pricing and execution to our customers,” We have partnered and collaborated with several schools during our early years. We are going to continue invest in partnership with more academic institutions to hire talent and collaborate in innovating Analytics Governance. We are also introducing new offerings around Data Strategy with Cloud. Many large enterprises are looking to integrate business solutions such as SAP to enterprise private cloud.

USEReady is working with Big 5 consulting firms to evolve a data fabric architecture for Business Solutions.”

Top 100 Companies: North America

VeloCloud Networks www.velocloud.com Sanjay Uppal Cloud computing Mountain View, CA » VeloCloud, a cloud networking services company, simplifies branch Wide Area Networking (WAN) by automating deployment and improving performance over private, broadband Internet and LTE links for today’s increasingly distributed enterprises. VeloCloud is the first to provide all three elements needed to achieve a Cloud-Delivered Software Defined-WAN (SD-WAN): a cloud network for enterprise-grade connections to cloud and enterprise applications, software-defined control and automation, and virtual services delivery.

The VeloCloud Cloud-Delivered SDWAN solution, has been validated by 80+ customer engagements within 8 months of launch. All this, with a subscription model to ease IT budget management. VeloCloud is backed by top tier VC firms including NEA, Venrock and The Fabric. VeloCloud has its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., with a development center in Chennai, India.

Leadership: Sanjay Uppal is the CEO and co-founder of VeloCloud where he leads the team that is working to Re-Invent WAN and transform how businesses connect. Prior to VeloCloud, Uppal ran publicly traded OnMobile Global, serving as its President and COO. Uppal also spent time at Citrix through the acquisition he negotiated with Caymas where he was President and CEO. At Citrix, he defined the product strategy and go to market for the Access Management, Delivery Controller and

WAN acceleration product lines. Prior, Uppal served in executive roles at Webvan (Vice President of Engineering and Business Development) and at HewlettPackard where he initiated and rapidly grew Internet Infrastructure as a profitable new business for HP. He holds an MS from Stanford University, an MS from the University of Wisconsin, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from The Indian Institute of Technology.

Veniam www.veniam.com Joao Barros Internet of Things Mountain View, California » João Barros, founder and CEO of Veniam presented an idea at MIT in late 2011. With every vehicle serving as a WiFi hotspot and an active node of the internet, it’s possible to leverage the mesh of connected vehicles as a massive urban scanner, and gather valuable physical data for smart city applications. The response was encouraging, to say the least.

“A former investor came to me and said: ‘You must do two things: 1) start a company and 2) talk with Robin Chase.’

We decided to start the company together with my colleague Susana and Robin’s husband, Roy Russell, who had been the first CTO of Zipcar,” Barros says.

Three years on, Venium built and operates the largest vehicular mesh network in the world, and is one of the first Portugalborn companies to close three rounds of financing with top VC firms and strategic investors in three different continents.

The Internet of Things market is very competitive, and everyone wants to be a part of it. But Veniam’s market of the

Internet of Moving Things is not quite so hot yet. “This is because it is very difficult.

Its new product line that delivers managed services over networks of connected vehicles enabling a myriad of Internet applications, run software updates over the air and ensure secure wireless communications between each vehicle and any wireless device in its vicinity. Veniam’s networking platform for the Internet of Moving Things solves the key longstanding challenges of connection management, multi-hop mesh, mobility, cybersecurity, and cloud-based network management,” says Barros.

With both the idea of a moving internet of things and smart cities relatively new, there are some challenges ahead for Veniam.

“With population growth and economic power rising in so many urban areas at the same time that city governments have their hands tied by weak revenue and tight budgets, the situation has created fertile ground for innovative uses of technology.

Still, there is simply not enough smart city innovation budgets to deploy the technology required. Most importantly, there are deployment challenges with the complex interworkings of city governments and municipalities,” explains Barros.

“There’s a need for a fully managed platform for connecting vehicles to each other and to the Internet that easily integrates with the existing efforts in smart cities and smart transportation. Innovation in smart transportation can be strongly energized by a communications platform that is easy to manage, control and monitor, and that enables the automotive industry, smart cities stakeholders, telcos and end-users to deploy and reliably update applications and services,” he adds.

Veniam plans to expand its full-stack platform and deliver managed services over networks of connected vehicles to be deployed in urban fleets, ports, airports, factories and other transportation ecosystems around the world, including New York Singapore, Barcelona, and

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London. To achieve this the company will grow its teams in Silicon Valley, Porto, Portugal, and Singapore.

With a unique idea, a solid road map and innovative leadership, Veniam looks to be on a smooth path to success in the future.

Vysk www.vysk.com Victor Cocchia Security San Antonio, Texas » The idea for Vysk came when its cofounder Victor Cocchia was CEO of GDC, a leading aircraft completion center that customized wide-body aircrafts for heads of state. Cocchia became frustrated that he couldn’t discuss sensitive business matters over the phone, and would have to fly to remote locations to conduct meetings.

Cocchia, an Army veteran and serial entrepreneur, contacted Dr. Michael Fiske, one of the world’s foremost cryptographic experts. In 2012 they began work on Vysk, a mobile security firm with a twist.

“Vysk’s disruptive technology solution is unique to the marketplace and has no true peer,” Cocchia told Red Herring recently.

“Our competitors only offer softwarebased solutions, such as a) encrypted phone calls are achieved through a userinstalled app that connects to another party via VoIP protocols within a standard build of Android or iOS. Or, b) an Android app is deployed within a special - and often, limited - build of the Android OS that is sold along with custom smartphone hardware.

“In some cases, a trusted computing environment is attempted through the use

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of virtual machines or special operating modes,” he added. “In both of the above instances, the same audio hardware and processor is employed to perform the phone call audio encryption, leaving the customer to operate and navigate in a compromised ecosystem, with no endpoint protection.”

That’s where Vysk’s solution, QS1, comes in. The San Francisco/San Antonio-based company pulls encryption functionality outside of smartphone hardware, creating an entirely separate and secure ecosystem.

“We don’t ask our customers to change phones or change habits,” said Cocchia.

Vysk, which currently holds over a dozen patents, is looking to dominate the privacy and mobile endpoint security markets, which are rapidly emerging. The worldwide cybersecurity market will grow from $77 billion in 2015 to $170 billion by 2020.

Gartner, a consultant, predicts that global spending on IT security is set to increase 8.2% in 2015 to $77 billion, and the world will spend $101 billion on information security in 2018.

The cyber security market is estimated to grow to $170 billion (USD) by 2020, at a CAGR of 9.8% from 2015 to 2020, according to a report from Markets and Markets. “The aerospace, defense, and intelligence vertical continues to be the largest contributor to cybersecurity solutions,” says Cocchia.

North America and Europe are the leading cybersecurity contributors, with a recent PWC report finding that U.S. information security budgets have grown at almost double the rate of IT budgets. It is keeping up with that demand for QS1, Cocchia said, that is Vysk’s biggest current challenge.

“For businesses and enterprises, the concept of information security is top-of-mind, after several high-profile data breaches and the related costs of billions of dollars after fines and loss of business,” he added.

“Governments, military organizations, healthcare and financial services sectors all understand the need for end-to-end vocal

encryption and the response to Vysk’s technology has been very positive.”

But while the U.S. will still be front and center of Vysk’s 2016 strategy, the company hopes that this year will be a launchpad into other markets - specifically Europe and Latin America. And, as Cocchia stressed, it is vital to service regions where attitudes towards privacy are traditionally much more stringent than the States. “In many parts of the world privacy is a very real daily issue and the concept of the importance of privacy is more mature when compared to the U.S.”

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Top 100 Companies: North America

WhoKnows

Wiser

Work Market

www.whoknows.com

www.wiser.com

www.workmarket.com

Chris Macomber

Arie Shpanya

Stephen DeWitt

Internet/Online

Cloud computing

Cloud computing

Santa Clara, CA

Location: San Francisco, CA

New York

» WhoKnows is the first smart enterprise network that offers a private expertise and referral network for any company. First, WhoKnows can automatically build an enterprise network by deriving expertise and relationships for every employee.

The company then keeps profiles and relationships up to date, so clients no longer have to worry about data entry and maintenance.

Secondly, the WhoKnows browser plugin will contextually recommend any colleague that can introduce or help right at the point of need. This drives incredibly high engagement as users can leverage the network in any CRM, web app, or search engine.

WhoKnows has already been deployed at multiple F500 and mid-market companies in order to accelerate their sales and crosscompany collaboration.

Leadership: Chris Macomber has over 16 years of product management experience in the technology industry and a fondness for introducing kick-ass products that disrupt large markets and delight customers. He was most recently at Lytro as the Director of Product Management, where his team launched the first light-field camera. Prior to WhoKnows and Lytro, he held multiple product management positions at Reputation.com, Intuit, Cisco, and Sapient.

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» For retailers, it’s all about offering the right product, at the right time, at the right price. It seemed like there was one eCommerce behemoth that was doing it right by utilizing the power of data to optimize their strategy. The creators of Wiser we wanted to disrupt Amazon’s hold on dynamic pricing by providing the necessary technology to retailers. The company brings Amazon’s wisdom to the world’s top merchants by monitoring over 25 million products daily and analyzing data in real-time.

Wiser is a product by retailers, for retailers.

The founding team is composed of eCommerce experts that were involved in all facets of the eCommerce space: on the retailer, consulting, and technology side.

The company has the advantage of having not only the technological expertise, but the merchandising and marketing understanding.

Wiser’s founders developed their own advanced product tracking technology and launched in August 2012 with WisePricer, the company’s first product. An innovator in price intelligence, Wiser has since leveraged that technology to successfully launch the growing suite of Wiser products designed to meet the business intelligence needs of both retailers and manufacturers.

Leadership: Arie Shpanya is a second time eCommerce solution entrepreneur, having successfully bootstrapped both imOnline and Wiser to profitability. He is a guest blogger on Econsultancy, VentureBeat and more, as well as a former eCommerce consultant to various capital firms. Shpanya holds a LL.B. (Magna Cum Laude) in Legal Studies from IDC Herzliya.

» Work Market is A SaaS solution that helps companies easily engage and manage their freelance and independent contractor workforce.

Leadership: Stephen DeWitt recently joined Work Market as the company’s Chief Executive. Prior to joining Work Market, DeWitt served as a Senior Vice President and General Manager at Hewlett Packard. There he held multiple leadership roles including leading the Americas for the Personal Systems Group and as the worldwide leader for Enterprise Marketing. During DeWitt 30+ years in the technology industry he has served on the senior staffs of industry leaders such as Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, and Symantec and has scaled multiple start-ups from the earliest stages, through dynamic growth to market leadership.

As President and CEO of Cobalt Networks, DeWitt led the company from its market creating roots to a high profile IPO and ultimately a multi-billion dollar acquisition

by Sun Microsystems. DeWitt is a graduate of Babson College in Wellesley, Mass and has served on many public and private boards throughout the years.

Top 100 Companies: North America

Xceedium www.xceedium.com Glenn Hazard Security Herndon, VA » Xceedium, Inc. (acquired by CA Technologies), is a network security software company and the leading provider of privileged identity management solutions for hybrid cloud enterprises.

Large companies and global government agencies use Xceedium’s products to reduce the risks privileged users and unprotected credentials pose to systems and data.

Xceedium’s award-winning product, Xsuite, enables customers to implement secure privileged identity management.

Xsuite vaults privileged account credentials, implements role-based access control, and monitors and records privileged user sessions. With unified policy management, the Xsuite platform enables the seamless administration of security controls across systems, whether they reside in a traditional data center, a private cloud, on public cloud infrastructure, or any combination thereof.

Xceedium’s solutions enable organizations to comply with security and privacy mandates, such as PCI DSS, FISMA, HIPAA, and NERC CIP. The company’s products provide industry-leading reliability, availability, and scalability, and they are the most highly certified products in the market, with designations including FIPS 140-2 validation, Common Criteria EAL4+ certification, and inclusion on the U.S. DOD Unified Command Approved Products List (UC/APL).

Leadership: Prior to joining Xceedium, Glenn Hazard was a managing partner at Zero-G, Inc., a venture-management firm that invested in and governed early-stage technology companies. Before that, he served as chairman and CEO of NetSec, a

leading managed security service provider that was acquired by MCI/Verizon. He has also served as chairman and CEO of FTP Software, Inc., a public company and leading provider of Internet network technology and connectivity software.

Earlier in his career, Hazard was the senior vice president and chief information officer at Legent Corporation, a provider of systems-management software and solutions. He also spent 17 years with AT&T Corporation, serving in a variety of executive-level sales, marketing and general management roles.

Xirrus www.xirrus.com Shane Buckley

experience to the Xirrus team, expanding business and markets worldwide. Most recently, Buckley was the General Manager and Senior Vice President at NETGEAR where he led the growth of NETGEAR’s commercial business unit to 50 percent revenue growth over 2 years, reaching $330 million in 2011 – and played a prime role in growing corporate revenues over 30 percent.

Prior to that Buckley was President & CEO of Rohati Systems, a leader in Cloudbased access management solutions, Chief Operating Officer of Nevis Networks, a leader in secure switching and access control. He has also held the position of Vice President WW Enterprise at Juniper Networks, President International at Peribit Networks, a leader in WAN Optimization and EMEA vice president at 3Com Corp.

Buckley is a graduate of engineering from the Cork Institute of Technology in Ireland.

Internet/Online Thousand Oaks, CA » Xirrus is the leading provider of highperformance wireless networks. Xirrus solutions perform under the most demanding circumstances, offering consistent “wired-like” performance with superior coverage and security. The Xirrus Wi-Fi optimized solutions suite – arrays, access points, cloud services and wired switches – provide seamless connectivity and unified management across the network.

Xirrus delivers a vital strategic business and IT infrastructure advantage to industries that depend on wireless to operate business-critical applications. With tens of thousands of customer solutions deployed globally, Xirrus maintains operations and partnerships across the globe. Xirrus is a privately held company and is headquartered in Thousand Oaks, CA. Leadership: Shane Buckley brings more than 19 years of executive management

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Top 100 Companies: North America

Yupp TV www.yupptv.com Uday Reddy Content provider Atlanta, Georgia » Broadcast communication has seen a revolution in recent years with the advent of on-demand, over-the-top (OTT) and IPTV - not to mention a host of satellite and television breakthroughs that have completely changed the way we are entertained.

At the heart of that change was Uday Reddy. He began working for Nortel Communications in 1995 India, just as the country’s economy was being liberalized, and its wireless networks were beginning.

It was a telecom revolution in the world’s largest democracy, and Reddy saw an opportunity: he travelled to over 50 countries as an expat and saw the dearth of Indian entertainment content for the Indian expat community living abroad.

Even news, he noted, wasn’t available to them in Hindi, or any other of the subcontinent’s dozens of languages.

Reddy wanted to bridge the gap, to connect expats with life back home. He left salaried work in 2006, and founded Yupp TV shortly after, It was a salient decision. Today Yupp TV is the world’s largest OTT platform for live TV and on-demand video solutions. Yupp TV delivers over 250 live channels in 13 languages to South Asian expats all over the world. It even premieres Bollywood movies via a pay-per-view (PPV) platform, and leading sports tournaments, such as the Micromax Asia Cup T20 cricket, to more than 400 million households.

“For customers it’s an easy, convenient and affordable option to watch the new release

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on their home TV screen with friends and family,”the company said in a Q&A. “For production houses, it helps them reach International markets where they can’t do theatrical release or if they wish to kill piracy.”

helps content partners track, report and kill piracy.”

Ten years in and Yupp TV has built an enviable empire of platforms and content for the huge South Asian expat community, which is scattered across almost every country in the world. Yet there is no opportunity for the company to relax: the market is an incredibly competitive one, with content costs remaining stubbornly high.

“YuppTV is planning to reach out to as many countries possible to offer expats living away from home their favorite South Asian content with best quality, features and at affordable price,” the company wrote.

“We have recently launched our services in Singapore, Malaysia and Middle Eastern countries. We will continue to expand to more territories.”

“Once all the platforms have similar content offering, they either proceed towards a price war strategy or differentiate themselves with respect to features and reach. YuppTV has created that differentiation in its offering. It has more content, better reach via multiple devices and aggressive pricing.”

Combine that with plans to expand Yupp TV’s movie catalog, and the launch of Yupp TV Bazaar, a marketplace of curated videos “which enables broadcasters and content creators to make their content available to their target audience across the world without any big capital investment and effort,” the company has a busy time ahead.

“I had Fire TV,” one user, Sandip, said. “I love it. For me it’s better and refreshing than my old Roku. Having an Asian accent, I know the troubles of voice recognition in other devices. This one is just awesome. I just saw YuppTV app launched on it which has doubled the value for the device. Now I don’t need to purchase any other device. I am happy with my Netflix and my parents are happy with their Indian TV Channels.”

While there is no company providing such an exhaustive range of South Asian content, across such a breadth of devices, Yupp TV’s competition in the U.S. includes major providers such as Dish Network and Sling International. Abroad a handful of competitors includes Australia’s Fetch TV, and Britain’s Sky and Virgin.

But even they do not present the biggest threat to Yupp TV’s market dominance.

“The biggest challenge in this space is piracy,” the company said. “In every country we see piracy of content which affects services like Yupp TV. YuppTV has a dedicated anti-piracy division which

That aside the company has managed to accrue an eight-figure revenue, and Series A funding to the tune of $23 million.

Top 100 Companies: North America

Zadara Storage www.zadarastorage.com Nelson Nahum Data storage Irvine, California » The amount of data collected and used by companies in all industries has exploded over the past few years. But that data needs to be stored, and data storage can be expensive to set up, which is why storageas-a-service exists.

Zadara Storage was founded by a proven team who worked together at StoreAge Networking Technologies, regrouping years after selling the company and deciding there was a better way to provide storage. The timing of the founding of Zadara Storage was timed perfectly with the transition to public and private cloud adoption.

The storage industry is changing fast.

“The storage market is very competitive.

However, the market is in turmoil. The market for traditional CapEx storage is decreasing rapidly as customers adopt public and private cloud solutions,” says Nelson Nahum, CEO and co-founder of Zadara Storage. “Therefore, the increasing trend toward OpEx-based Storage-asa-Service (STaaS) solutions is where the main competition will be moving forward.

In our case, we are well positioned to compete in this marketed given that we have established a leadership position in this growing market.”

Zadara claims to be the only storage service to offer a single tenant experience at a multi-tenant price, which immediately makes it stand out from the competition.

The service is also offered everywhere, across four continents, in the cloud, on premise and in hybrid configurations. The commitment period can be as short as one hour, making it an extremely flexible and elastic solutions.

“We primarily compete with traditional, hardware-based storage providers. We offer a product with comparable features, performance, reliability and compatibility, but one that is offered purely as a service, with zero up-front costs, and a 100% OpEx business model. This approach offers our customers added agility, the ability to focus on their business (because we manage customers’ storage on their behalf), and significant cost savings,” says Nahum.

Zadara has raised $27.5 million to date, through three investment rounds. Genesis Capital Advisors and Toshiba have both invested heavily, and the company is seeking more investors for its next round.

awareness for its unique solution. Because the industry has been conditioned to believe that one must choose between reliability and flexibility and that storage must be purchased up front, customers do not realize they can have a better experience,” says Nahum. “We plan to continue to generate awareness via all traditional and online marketing venues, with a focus on customer success stories. Our customers are delighted to share their experiences and are eager to educated their colleagues about this new and fundamentally advantageous option. We currently have a portfolio of eleven written case studies as well as video testimonials on our website.”

In the next 18 months, Zadara plans to grow its market share by building its marketing engine, sales force and partner program.

With a strong product roadmap established and a huge market opportunity ahead, the future holds exciting opportunities for the storage company.

The agility of the company’s solution is one of the main attractions to investors and customers. “Our fundamental problem was aligning our IT infrastructure with our company growth. We moved from a storage solution that was hindering growth, to one that is enabling growth. We saved 85% of our storage-related costs by using Zadara Storage,” explains Anders Holm, Senior Systems Engineer at GILT. Zadara’s biggest issue now is to make sure potential clients know about the full capabilities of storage solutions. “The company’s biggest challenge is creating

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Top 100 Companies: North America

Zephyr www.getzephyr.com Scott Johnson Software management San Jose, California » Software developers have one overarching goal: delivering on time, on budget and fully operational software. Software testing in the past would only really help with the last of those three prerequisites, and would sometimes give developers no option but to miss deadlines and budget targets. But software testing solution these days can address all three, at the same time.

Zephyr provides on-demand, real-time enterprise test management solutions. The company was founded in 2007 by a group of people with decades of experience in the software testing space.

Samir Shah, CEO and Founder of Zephyr, explains the mission his company embarked upon almost 10 years ago. “We said, the world needs a much better way of managing the various different software quality processors that would allow them to release high quality software products on time and on budget. That was the impetus to start Zephyr in 2007.”

That year was not one most would choose to start a company, but despite the difficult market conditions, Zephyr thrived. That was in part due to the changing nature of software development, and a growing need for a different means of testing.

Shah describes a massive shift towards an agile way of working and releasing software products. “Cloud was becoming very important to a lot of people,” he adds.

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“Given the market conditions, software licensing models, the complex ones, were coming under scrutiny, and people wanted to get a much better handle on their software testing, and subscription models were becoming more and more prevalent. We had a lot of open source technologies that were being released and adopted and hence a lot of tools for the open source world were being created.

But they were all siloed and needed to be integrated. A bunch of these factors led us to design from the ground up a new test management solution: the solution to let software companies release high quality software on time.”

But Zephyr wasn’t the only company to see the shifting trends and act on them, and the firm has had to work hard to differentiate itself from the competition. Shah outlines four major factors which make the company stand out from its rivals. The first, is focus. “We are very focused on a specific segment of the market which is test management, and we do not try to focus on trying to do too many things for too many people. Keeping focus on test management is one very important thing.

We’ve seen many large companies flounder as they start to do too many things for too many people and they start to lose their core audience,” he explains.

The second differentiator is experience.

Zephyr’s team has hundreds of years of know-how, all of which is put into the design of the testing solution. Another key advantage for Zephyr is time to market.

“You can build the coolest product on the planet, but if you can’t get it out in time and you can’t get it to your customers when they need it, what’s the point, right? Says Shah. “We make sure that we are constantly executing and building new product that our customers want and getting it into their hands as quickly as possible.”

The fourth and final differentiator is the company’s alignment with current trends in the software testing market.

Zephyr was bootstrapped in 2007 and raised a small Series A investment in 2010.

For the last three years, the company has been profitable, and isn’t currently looking for further investment. But the company does have a number of goals for the next 18 months. Zephyr has more than doubled its customer base in the last year, and aims to continue along the same trajectory going forward. Shah also aims to expand the firm’s products.

The company’s success doesn’t come without challenges, however. One of the major ones is educating customers and helping them make the transition to agile testing. “There’s a lot of confusion in the market on what it means to be doing agile testing, and we are trying to show them what it really means. We are helping them make that agile transformation that many of them are stuck in. We are doing that in a wide variety of different ways showing examples of how customers are already doing that, have gone past that hump, and so that continues to remain a challenge across the industry. Not just for testing, but for all things related to agile,” says Shah.

Zephyr addresses that challenge by providing education programs to potential customers through webinars and other mediums. The company also has a blog and writes case studies, which highlight the benefits of moving to agile testing.

Software development has changed considerably over the past nine years, and always for the better. The amount of software being produced on time, on budget and of high quality has increased over that time as well, thanks in part to companies such as Zephyr.

Top 100 Companies: North America

ZestFinance

Ziften

www.zestfinance.com

www.ziften.com

Douglas Merrill

Charles Leaver

Fintech

Security

Los Angeles, CA

Location: Austin, TX

» ZestFinance was founded by a team of some of the world’s best data scientists from Google who came together with a mission – use machine learning algorithms to revolutionize how credit decisions are made to provide fair and transparent credit to everyone. The team of crazy smart data geeks, mathematicians and computer scientists have reinvented underwriting, enabling more accurate credit decisions, increased credit availability for borrowers and higher repayment rates for lenders.

Leadership: Douglas Merrill started his career with a Ph.D. from Princeton and has done lots of different things since then. He worked as a researcher at the RAND Corporation, a security consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Senior VP at Charles Schwab. He joined Google in 2003, and spent five years there as their CIO and VP of Engineering. He is a technologist and data junkie at heart, but also love motorcycles, tattoos, and ’80s music. He cares deeply about people and animals and support a variety of charities related to drug rehabilitation and animal rescue.

» Ziften’s groundbreaking solution provides continuous real-time visibility and intelligence, enabling incident Prevention, Detection, and Response.

Ziften continuously assesses user and device behaviors and highlights anomalies in real-time, allowing security analysts to hone in on advanced threats faster and minimize Time to Resolution. Ziften’s Endpoint Detection and Response solution allows organizations to more rapidly determine the root cause of a breach and decide on the necessary corrective actions.

Ziften Open Visibility™ integrates with and extends existing Security, Network, and Management solutions. Examples of powerful integrations include Arcsight and other SEIMs, Splunk, ServiceNow, Remedy, Palo Alto Networks, Lancope, Lookingglass, Virus Total, and National Vulnerabilities Database.

Leadership: Charles Leaver is Ziften’s Chief Executive Officer since October 2012 and previously Chairman of the Board. Most recently he was a Partner with Trellis Partners in Austin, Texas. He brings 30 years’ experience as an CEO, entrepreneur and advisor in the high-tech, mobile and media industries. His experience in Sales and Management includes application software and infrastructure technologies, ERP, SaaS, Web application development, E-Learning, Mobile and Gaming. His experience as a CEO, entrepreneur and innovator has led him to advise organizations in new market development, equity and capital expansion.

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Top 100 Companies: North America

ZoomInfo www.zoominfo.com Yonatan Stren Business intelligence Waltham, Massachusetts » Some say connections are everything in business. Without the right network of contacts, sales can be lost, opportunities missed and potential can go unfulfilled.

ZoomInfo looks to ensure that doesn’t happen, combining a comprehensive B2B database with sales and marketing solutions that fuel growth.

ZoomInfo was founded in 2000 by Yonatan Stern. The internet was not as sophisticated then as it is today, and Stern wondered whether there was a way to crawl online information about companies, then generate a list. That initial question become more complicated as he wanted to find information about people as well.

In order to capture this information accurately, Stern had to develop another piece of technology, which could read people’s email signatures. With these technologies in place, ZoomInfo was able to help recruiters and then expand later into the sales and marketing industries.

ZoomInfo isn’t the only company offering these services, and its competitors include Netprospex Dun & Bradstreet, InsideView and Avention. “The market is fairly competitive. However, ZoomInfo truly does have the highest quality contact and company intelligence, which is now

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available in one easy to use platform.

ZoomInfo’s information is also proprietary, whereas many of its competitors purchase data from each other,” says Stern.

“Although other companies make noise in the marketplace, ZoomInfo has a large number of satisfied customers, who continue to accelerate their growth using the ZoomInfo platform year after year.”

“ZoomInfo’s primary advantage over competitors is the size, depth and accuracy of their contact and company intelligence.

Additionally, ZoomInfo provides excellent customer service to its clients,” he adds.

ZoomInfo has received $7 million through one round of funding from Ascent Venture Partners, and is currently profitable and no looking for any more investment. The company recently achieved 46% yearover-year growth and its goal for 2016 is to double revenue.

Customers appear to be happy enough with ZoomInfo’s offerings. “ZoomInfo’s accurate data allowed the sales team to spend more time selling and less time researching. Of all the data we used from ZoomInfo, the vast majority had direct dial phone numbers, which we used to enable auto-dialing campaigns. We live in our CRM and our success is dependent on a high volume of quality data,” says Sean Goldie, Senior Segment Marketing Manager -- SMB, Concur.

The market opportunity is large, and growing. “B2B digital marketing and inside sales have grown significantly in the past few years. Both require data, which places ZoomInfo in a great position. There’s a huge market opportunity for the company, especially with their Growth Acceleration

Platform, which helps organizations growth with ease and efficiency. With the recent launch of ZoomInfo’s additional integrations and e-commerce solutions, they are also able to target anyone looking for contact information, which expands the market opportunity exponentially,” says Stern.

In the next 18 months, ZoomInfo aims to work to further increase growth and profitability, as well as for its customers.

The company’s Growth Acceleration platform provides customers with the tools needed to increase sales velocity and marketing campaign optimization, and ultimately help them grow faster.

ZoomInfo will also continue to create solutions and tools to allow customers to reach their buyers faster, and is focused on building additional integrations to make sure customers can utilize information in their existing workflows.

But there are also challenges for the company. ZoomInfo is continuously adding solutions to its Growth Acceleration Platform, and therefore the challenge is to educate the marketplace,” says Stern. “Going forward, the company will bring even more innovative solutions to the market. ZoomInfo’s goal is to double revenue without adding too many additional resources. This means they need to find additional ways to integrate their tools into customers’ workflows, helping them sell better, market better, and grow faster.”

Feature Story

RedSeal:

Increasing Governments and corporations’ cyber-resilience

A

s our use of technology has evolved, so have the threats that can derail and even destroy a business or even a country.

Remember December 2013 when 40 millions cards were stolen a few days before Christmas. Or the power outage (allegedly triggered by Russia) which lasted six to nine hours in Ukraine during Christmas season last year. Cyber attacks are more of a threat to companies today than they were yesterday, and will become even more so tomorrow.

RedSeal aims to ensure that companies and government agencies have the most sophisticated analysis of their assets and vulnerabilities possible, and so are equipped with the knowledge to provide constant vigilance against the dearth of threats that loom large over them. In other terms, it offers a digital map of the company’s network and measures its resilience level. And when there is a breach, it alerts and identifies where the attackers have penetrated and how to respond.

As a venture capitalist for more than two decades, Ray Rothrock has assisted entrepreneurs in achieving their dreams and produced outstanding financial returns for his limited partners.

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RedSeal was founded in 2004, started with an appliance offering. But it was given a fresh breath of life ten years later, when Ray Rothrock, formerly Managing Partner of Venrock, the VC company which was one of the security company’s founding investors, agreed to become CEO. Rothrock had a track record of investing in successful security companies, and had a vision and a mission to improve cyber security for everyone.

Since he joined, Rothrock has set ambitious targets for the company, and hit them. “I’d been here around two weeks and posted four targets for 2014, 2015, and 2016. We hit all the targets in 2014 and 2015 and we’re going to hit two in 2016,” Rothrock tells Red Herring. “We’ve recovered customers and improved the product.

We’ll do $30m plus this year and we’re building a cyber security armory.”

According to Rothrock, RedSeal is able to understand all of the elements of a network, just as an operating system understands a computer. He also compares RedSeal to a physical examination of the network, as a person would go to their doctor for a health checkup. The only difference is, unlike your doctor, RedSeal is constantly checking.

Rothrock now has ambitious revenue goals for the company. “The company can be $100 million in revenue by 2018. The market is $2-3 billion, and that’s just the Fortune 500.”It has solid backers which include Icon Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and of course Venrock with seasoned venture capitalists supporting Rothrcok’s ride as a CEO. Currently, a third of RedSeal’s U.S. business is in government, and two thirds is commercial. Financial industries, insurance and medical sectors have secured their ecosystem with the Silicon Valley software.

It is adding up new logos every quarter: Morgan Stanley, PG&E, Payless, the intelligence community in America.

The company also has big plans for international expansion, a road which it has already begun traveling. “About 60% of the world’s tech is outside the U.S. One of the 166

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patterns I observed when I was investing was that companies grow fast when they go international early. So, we’re going for speed there,” says Rothrock.

RedSeal has customers in Russia and Saudi Arabia and is targeting China. The company doesn’t currently have any business in China right now, but there are no restrictions in place despite its work in the U.S. government and it is a huge market which cannot be ignored.

The security industry has been kept busy in 2016. A wave of high publicity cyber breaches has shaken consumer confidence in the ability of big corporations to keep their data and information safe. The most recent divulgence of a major leak was at Yahoo in September, when it was revealed that more than 500 million customers’ details had been compromised in a cyber attack dating back to 2014.

Rothrock’s reaction to the attack was one of familiar despair. “‘Here we go again’,” Rothrock answers when asked what he thought when news of the breach broke.

“These things are preventable. Redseal could have helped a lot here. I doubt Yahoo had the bigger picture, the metrics, an overview.”

In reaction to the ever-changing nature of cyber threats, the security industry has had to evolve over the years. Originally as new threats arrived, the security industry would respond with new products, according to Rothrock. But then we connected computers to each other, and we needed firewalls. The evolution went on and on from there, but up to that point all of the protection was preventive.

Now the industry has recognized that there is no such thing as perfect protection, and that vigilance is the key word. “The world will get there very fast or we’ll have a Yahoo every week. We sort of do already,” says Rothrock. “At Sony” (whose data were stolen and leaked in 2015), “they turned off all their servers because they didn’t know what the problem was. You still need protection but resilience is where its headed.”

One of the major problems is a lack of

awareness of the problems at a board level of major organizations all over the world.

Rothrock believes that the decision makers at larger companies need to be educated so they fully appreciate what a huge issue cyber security is. “Awareness is minimal, pretty small,” says Rothrock. “Last year McKinsey published a book, it’s a damn good book, stuff that executives can relate to. These things help. Executives are coming along: they don’t need to be technologists but they need to know the vocabulary.”

Some companies are even buying cyber insurance, believing themselves to be covered against an attack. But, according to Rothrock, this insurance will pay the expenses of notifying people of the attack, but won’t give a dollar towards rebuilding a compromised network.

“A conversation has started by awareness is low. I’m an evangelist about this. I wish I could get other CEOs in our industry to be as evangelical as I am,” Rothrock adds.

Cyber breaches have become and increasingly visible and problematic issue. Unless some of the CEOs of major organizations take note, those hacking and compromising the networks of major companies and governments will continue to do so with little resistance. The types of attackers are also becoming more serious.

Whereas a decade or two ago a hacker was more likely to be a young person testing out their skills, today nations launch cyber attacks on other countries, and criminal enterprises are funded from illegal cyber activity.

For Rothrock and RedSeal, the job ahead is a tough one, but they aren’t daunted by the prospect. “In the ‘30s banks were being robbed left, right and center, but we got control of it. We’re a long way from that but we need to get there pretty fast because the world is going digital faster than expected,” says Rothrock.

RedSeal will be on the front line of the cyber battle for many years to come, and many a company and government agency will be all the better for it.

Feature Story

FRANCE

Heading for Dramatic Turnaround

F

rance is grabbing headlines for its pivotal elections which could have thrown Europe and the financial system into chaos. With Macron’s success, it appears the country will avoid this pessimistic scenario. But it does not stop there; it looks as if France has recently changed its raison d’être and morphed into a technology hub. In its latest white paper about sovereign funds, CB insights, whose research is widely respected, ranked BPI, the French sovereign fund, number one and heralded France as the most audacious, if not the most successful European country financing technology.

Photo couresy of: Bpifrance

That surprise is more than a mere turnaround. Silicon Valley and the rest of the world had long given up on the Gaulois’ ability to play any significant role in the third internet space. A few observers remember a former French Minister of Industry in 2013 who blocked the sale of DailyMotion, Youtube’s European rival, to Yahoo in favor of a local trade sale (Vivendi), long before President Trump’s ‘America First’ motto.

The country famed for its permanent strikes, crippling 35-hour week and labor laws had to change.

Startup CEOs were moving in droves out of France to Brussels or to London to avoid the compounding castigating effects of a punishing tax code, and a local culture emphasizing protection of the weakest as contradictory with digital transformation.

In spite of its large reservoir of premier engineers, among the best in Europe as Steve Jobs recruited heavily in their ranks since 1980, home-based invention painfully crossed the chasm. The country which had invented the word entrepreneur looked like it had turned its back on the future.

Almost paradoxically, a left-leaning government took upon itself to reverse the trend. The May 2012 French presidential election cast Francois Hollande against the

conservative incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy.

The socialist won handily with a mandate for change. Enter Emmanuel Macron, Francois Hollande’s protege and Head of Economic team at the Elysee Palace, the French White House. In less than 7 months, Macron (now President) pushed towards the setting of “BPI”, Banque Publique d’investissement, which translates into Public Investment Bank.

The law was passed by December 31, 2012.

From 2012 to 2014, his group, supported by the president, set the terms and governance rules, a true overhaul of public financing.

Endowed with $23 billion from the state and a similar sum from private financial institutions, BPI starts with enough firepower to become relevant.

One more important task remained at the time: identifying the right leader. France has a large cadre of civil servants whose career thrives under the public umbrella.

The wrong choice would have immediately meant the kiss of death. Francois Hollande and Emmanuel Macron picked Nicolas Dufourcq, a reputed executive in the tech private sector but also known as a maverick leader. The new appointee joined BPI in April 2013 amid strong expectations.

Dufourcq’s background does not match traditional guidelines. In college, at the well-known Ivy-grade HEC, he had started his own start up, prior to entering public service through the prestigious ENA (Ecole Nationale d’Administration) and its even more exclusive Inspection des Finances.

Almost immediately he jumped into a tech-related journey, leading Wanadoo, France Telecom’s online arm at the young age of 31, launching the internet services company into orbit, managing over 6000 employees. Once the operator consolidated

its operations, he switched and became second in command at Cap Gemini, the global services company where he spent twelve years. Hollande and Macron tasked Dufourcq with three key objectives.

First was geographic diversity. Until recently over 95% of investments were sourced and managed through Paris and its region, which barely accounts for 18% of the country’s population. This imbalance hampered entrepreneurs and pushed toward talent concentration; few could take advantage of the intellectual property surrounding regional universities or research centers.

BPI set up regional offices and started to organize its own Tour de France, having its CEO in tow preaching in 50 town hall meetings overflowing with entrepreneurs each year. Red Herring attended one of these back in 2015, with Nicolas Dufourcq evangelizing 2000 local entrepreneurs with a motto which borrowed from the Obama campaign : “Yes, you can”.

Now in an unexpected turnaround, 30% of the startups are headquartered near universities in regions which had been discounted for decades. Simultaneously BPI expanded internationally on the East and the West, and developed a large footprint in China and Israel through partnerships with CIC, the Chinese sovereign bank and local funds such as Cathay Capital in Beijing.

The second objective: build a lasting digital economy. In fact, under the impetus from Dominique Strauss-Kahn, France already tried to boost startups in 1999 but it fell flat due to the poor

Nicolas Dufourcq, a reputed executive in the tech private sector but also known as a maverick leader, appointed Executive Director of Dbifrance. www.REDHERRING.com

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ecosystem. Thanks to DSK, the former IMF Chief, VC funds received ample funding but the “whole food chain was faulty” according to Michel Dahan, an industry veteran and head of Banexi Ventures. Since, France has changed. This time around, Dufourcq and Macron have the wind in the back: a second generation of entrepreneurs is bursting with innovation; French engineering schools, reputed for their training are spitting thousands of affordable talents; but more importantly, with tens of thousands French professionals working abroad, in Silicon Valley or London, the mindset has shifted.

funds BPI invests in must emulate the best in class, the renowned European funds such as Index Ventures in Switzerland or Balderton in the UK. And they will cater to French start ups’ deployment across the globe. Alban Wyniecki, a late stage VC at IDInvest, comments: “For the first time, we are watching a structured approach at work. On one hand, they are not restricted, like normal funds to a cash on cash return.

Also, they can also lend money and issue convertible debt. On the other hand, they bet on the long term with companies such as Ynsect, and it works.”

More than 6000 startups were backed by BPI in 2016 with1.3bn euros or $1.4bn.

They received multiple funding, unsecured loans, guarantees but also equity from the organization in less than six months, seconded by pan European resources. The ones which survive and thrive over three years clocking a minimum 25% revenues growth per year are anointed with the BPI Pass, which signals their performance. The average revenue growth of the 84 start ups selected in 2016 reaches 186%, and half of them 100% year to year. As indicative of the turnaround 63% are born outside of Paris, a radical break from the past. “Undoubtedly, BPI has the best portfolio in France,” says Dahan.

BPI recruited 20 professionals in its growth team and expanded its portfolio to support mature stage tech companies, mostly Series D and later. Crucially, it pursues two advantages: BPI’s stamp attracts foreign and other capital to reinforce their portfolio’s balance sheet; and it fuels international growth helping some of these companies to become worldwide leaders.

The third goal consists of deploying capital to nurture later stage activity. The objective is twofold: support venture capitalists and strengthen the winners’ balance sheet. In hindsight, DSK’s 1999 VC law failed on follow on financings which lagged behind; less than a handful startups could go global due to lack of Series C or Series D funding.

BPI started a fund of funds activity and deployed 685m euros in 2015 and 700m euros in 2016 for late stage financiers.

Dufourcq did not hesitate and backed up Partech, with 100 million euros or $105m check, and even marched across the oceans with Cathay Capital in China or during last quarter poured money in Silicon Valley through BGV, the Palo Alto fund started in 2013 by Eric Benhamou, formerly 3COm’s CEO. The fund of funds activity is led by an executive who has spent most of his career in the private sector, Benjamin Paternot, and he has a clear agenda: the 168

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Macron, a tech buff, knew that most of his ENA classmates did not understand what it takes to manage a startup. A former banker himself, he diagnosed that France lacks late stage growth financing, or seed funding and does not fundamentally acknowledge how to support the complex journey faced by local entrepreneurs.

His own career and rise in less than a blink epitomizes the New France. His deliberate choice of Dufourcq over all other candidates can be traced to this issue. Not only does BPI support traditional startups but also lends money to medium cap companies forced to transition digitally. “It is absolutely undeniable that BPI saved French technology” says Jean-Marc Patouillaud, Partech’s the Managing Partner, one of the oldest cross Atlantic funds who adds:” Venture was at it lowest in 2008, post crisis, and BPI pulled it away from the brink”.

Dufourcq has obviously borrowed a page or two from America. To manage a staff of 345 professionals ranging from export support to hotel and real estate investments, he recruits half his staff from the private sector, some from the PE world, and is already noted for his strong abidance to

gender equality rules. Half of the executive committee is composed of competent and well-known women, a rare statistic in France and elsewhere. “Granted: BPI has more manpower than a normal VC outfit. But it is run by a group of young past entrepreneurs who know the game and are trusted by their hierarchy; this is their secret sauce” analyses Wyniecki. The flat organization, nested in a 19th century Haussmanian building a few blocks from the Paris Opera, runs 24/7 on emails and texts. Dufourcq does not relent about evangelizing his country: “The next adventures are in France now,” he touts with confidence in his annual report.

Once a month, scheduling permits, this music buff turns off the light at his office at 7:45pm, grabs his scooter and rushes to the programmed concert or ballet du jour.

Obviously, BPI faces several challenges: first, its late stage portfolio will require exits, some of which have already taken place to cover the next round of investments.

Rumors suggest some of the investments will soon cross Unicorn status, returning high multiples to the State of France. The second challenge also lies in the difficulty of managing late stage portfolios, and bumping valuations above market price sometimes, a critique often murmured among VCs. “But that can be said of every corporate investor” tempers Patouillaud.

Meanwhile, Dufourcq’s success has attracted much attention among the Parisian elite.

Some speculate that he will heading another large company soon as a reward for a job well done. This creates a lot of internal uncertainties among his cadre of young executives who assert that they joined BPI, and accepted a pay cut because they were lured by “Nicolas’ vision of the future”.

Others argue that his infectious optimism draws envy. Sitting in a coffee shop, with his self effacing humor, Dufourcq concludes: “One day at a time. BPI has a great mission and it is making inroads. The team has built a machine which will transform France and French psyche over the long haul”. D’accord, i.e., agreed.

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DOCUSIGN’S SIGNATURE GROWTH ...it’s all about trust, which is the basis for every business relationship.

T

echnology is making the world smaller. In our personal lives, we can speak face-to-face with people on the other side of the planet, we can share data and files with friends and partners, and we can buy products from all over the globe. In business, the world is shrinking even faster.

Contracts are an integral part of business, but a tricky aspect to factor into the digital world. That is the reason why DocuSign, the San Francisco-based digital transactions company, has grown so quickly. The company’s digital signature systems started the ball rolling, and it has now become a behemoth of business, enabling transactions all over the world. Even five years from now,

the idea of not being able to sign something digitally will be preposterous.

Keith Krach, Chairman and former CEO of DocuSign for 7 years, believes the reason for the company’s staggering growth is due to the changing nature of the business. “All companies see the digital transformation as a strategic imperative. DocuSign has become the catalyst for that transformation,” Krach says.

Krach believes there are three reasons why DocuSign is such a catalyst for the Global Digital Transformation.

First, DocuSign replaces paper and old processes which make it an essential first

Tim Höttges, Deutsche Telekom CEO (left) and Keith Krach, Chairman and former CEO of DocuSign (right), at Global User Conference in May, revealed that now on the DocuSign Global Trust Network there are 300,000 companies, 200 million unique users in 188 countries and they are putting on over 300,000 unique users a day.

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step before being able to apply Business Intelligence. It actually creates high fidelity data that the customers never had before, which can now be applied to e-commerce and Artificial Intelligence.

The second fact is an unprecedented and proven value proposition along three dimensions: the quantifiable impact on the top and bottom line; the improved simplicity and speed in the customer experience; and the reduction of risk in compliance and security due to its encrypted technology, multiple levels of authentication, and automatically generated audit trail.

The third, and often underestimated reason, is the impact on the cultural challenges associated with change. In this case the change is not only in business processes and models, but also the corporate mindset. The fact that the DocuSign solution is easy to implement and gives quick results provides an organization the momentum it needs to overcome resistance to change.

Digital Signatures need to be easy to use, simple to understand, but most importantly, trusted. Through reliability and security,

DocuSign has built a much-valued product that every business in the world can use, and many have come to rely on.

“We deal with people’s most important documents,” says Krach. “At the end of the day, it’s all about trust, which is the basis for every business relationship. At DocuSign, Trust is sacrosanct. We provide a trusted service on the DocuSign Global Trust Network that is fast, frictionless, universal and secure.”

For some companies, global expansion is an option. For others, it’s an opportunity. For companies like DocuSign, it’s a necessity.

DocuSign’s global reach not only benefits its own bottom line, but also provides a key ecosystem that is invaluable for all the businesses and individuals that use its services.

That is the reason DocuSign has so many partnership deals with major companies all over the world. In March, Keith Krach and Deutsche Telekom CEO, Tim Höttges, announced a multi-pronged partnership at CeBit in Hannover, Germany.

The German telecom giant was already a

customer and investor of DocuSign prior to the deal, and now sees the German company extend DocuSign’s Digital Transaction Management platform and eSignature service across its enterprise.

Deutsche Telecom also became a DocuSign reseller, meaning both the DTM and eSignature services can be offered to its own customers around the world. Deutsche Telekom will provide data centers in Germany and France as part of the deal, ensuring the customer data from the E.U. is kept protected and private.

“As the pioneer and global standard for Digital Transaction Management, DocuSign helped Deutsche Telecom become a more efficient, competitive digital business,” Höttges said recently at CeBIT. “Based on the success we’ve seen at T-Mobile USA where DocuSign delivered $200 million of annual value by eliminating more than 600 million pieces of paper and reducing the average in store sign up time from 60 minutes down to ten, we invested in DocuSign and are now expanding our deployment across our global enterprise.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel (right) and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (left) have both prioritized digitization in their countries.

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This deal shows how crucial a role DocuSign plays within major companies in Europe, but only tells part of the story of the scale the company has reached. Clearly, Krach’s partnership strategy has helped turbo charge this network. They have multi-pronged strategies with many of the most powerful companies on the planet including; SAP, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Visa, Dell, Intel, Samsung, NTT, Mitsui, Telstra, Comcast, FedEx and the Country of Singapore. Krach defines a global strategic partner , “We look at it as a four-legged stool - enterprise customer, equity investor, product integrations, and goto-market partner.”

In addition to Germany, Japan has recognized that Digital Transformation is a National Imperative. At the request of Nikkei and the Government of Japan, Krach recently keynoted at the Global Digital Summit in Tokyo and presented a case study on DocuSign as a catalyst for accelerating the country’s digital transformation.

At its Global User Conference in May, DocuSign revealed that now on the DocuSign Global Trust Network there are 300,000 companies, 200 million unique users in 188 countries and they are putting on over 300,000 unique users a day.

One of the questions Krach is asked most often is when the company will go public, and it is easy to see why. A DocuSign IPO would be huge, and would likely raise the appetite for technology IPOs across the board. Krach won’t give any estimation on when an IPO could come, but explains that not being a public company has allowed DocuSign to focus on their value proposition for their customers, expanding the product breadth and depth, as well as expanding global reach by strategically capitalizing on the exponential effect of multi-pronged equity partnerships.

“It’s a land grab – our competition is paper. It’s everywhere,” he concludes.

Companies, of course, are not the only ones seeking digital transformation. Many countries have digitization high on their agendas, and electronic signatures is a huge step along that path.

At Cebit, Chancellor Merkel emphasized this exact point on stage by saying, “We have to increase the rate of implementation of electronic signatures in Germany. Japan is probably 10 times faster than ours.”

The company’s potential reach is staggering.

As it’s only real competition is legacy technology, the addressable market is any company or individual who needs to sign documents. That’s an almost incalculable number of potential clients.

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Kyriba Moves Fast,

as Treasury Races to Cloud

T

he treasury management industry has changed immensely in the past few years. No longer is the discipline a darling of bigger banks only, and with the entry of cloud and a vanguard of those who know how to use it well, treasury management is something that is open to all financial firms, large or small.

Providing the tools for this revolution is San Diego-based Kyriba, which since 2000 has been delivering cutting-edge solutions upon which CFOs and treasurers across the board can rely.

Plenty of clients have enjoyed the company’s services: Kyriba currently supports 1,300 clients and 40,000 users across a hundred countries. In a relatively short space of time, Kyriba has become the treasury management brand of choice.

The company was spun out of French financial software provider XRT, and moved its headquarters to California in 2003. Its customers are mostly global corporations with revenues totaling between $1 billion and $20 billion.

Kyriba already has over 300 staff worldwide - a figure that is rapidly rising.

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Kyriba’s financial management software enables its clients to get visibility and control over their treasury related transactions through the tracking, management and seamless integration with other Kyriba capabilities and their valuable third-parties partners.

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The reasons for its success are many. Kyriba’s fully virtualized, multi-tenant SaaS solution, built upon a single code base, allows for predictable costing, better support and, crucially, security - a key component in any fintech solution. “Kyriba invests in the highest levels of physical and data security,” the company says. “We offer complete application and data security, so your workflows are encrypted and secure, delivering an effective barrier to fraud and cybercrime.”

It’s been nearly five years since the company won a Red Herring Top 100 award, and the company has achieved staggering growth since then. “We continue to grow significantly and became the true leader in TMS space. Recently, Kyriba has expanded its treasury management solution offering with integrated Supply Chain Finance (SCF), and strong channel push,” Jean-Luc Robert, Chairman and CEO, Kyriba tells Red Herring.

Kyriba is a global leader in cloud-based Proactive Treasury Management. CFOs, treasurers and finance leaders rely on Kyriba to optimize their cash, manage their risk, and work their capital. Their awardwinning, secure, and scalable SaaS treasury, bank connectivity, risk management and supply chain finance solutions enable some of the world’s largest and most respected organizations to drive corporate growth, obtain critical financial insights, minimize fraud, and ensure compliance.

The market has also changed over the same period of time. “The market is now entirely SaaS. Since Kyriba was conceived as a SaaS provider from onset, this change has given us a market advantage. The reason market has gone to cloud is ease of use, cost of ownership, cash management, a greater demand to protect risk in real time, and increased regulations and compliance requirements,” says Robert.

Having a treasury in the cloud is of utmost importance to the modern CFO. Financing programs are becoming more and more intertwined with a firm’s supply chain. Compliance and fraud minimization are also imperative as the digital world brings formerly disparate aspects of financial business together.

In fact, Kyriba, alongside the Association of Corporate Treasurers, recently released its 2016 annual treasury survey. Canvassing 332 finance professionals, the report found that resourcestrapped treasurers face a 19% greater risk of fraud; responsibility of liquidity management has increased 17%; and 36% continue to use spreadsheets despite error, inefficiencies, and lack of controls.

“Those who had suffered from fraud identified losses of up to $2.5 million through single

incidences,” the report added. “The findings of the Kyriba / ACT 2016 Annual Survey clearly show that CFOs and Treasurers are embracing treasury technology to become more influential within their organization,” said John Campbell, VP sales northern Europe at Kyriba.

“With fraud, risk management, and a heightened focus on unlocking cash and working capital consuming more of treasury’s time, treasurers will benefit from modular cloud treasury management solutions that simplify implementation and align perfectly with treasury’s expanding needs,” Campbell added.

Little wonder clients have been rushing to Kyriba’s cost-effective, integrated solutions. The company has also won a glut of respected awards. As well as Red Herring Top 100, it has been recognized

by Inc, Deloitte, Financial World and Global Finance. Many of the world’s leading financial institutions, such as HSBC and American Express, have chosen its solutions to push forward a fastchanging part of the industry.

Investors, too, have been delighted: Kyriba has been the recipient of $84.5 million since its inception, winning eight rounds from the likes of Daher Capital, Iris Capital and BRED Banque Populaire. That has allowed the company to move quickly and expand into other territories. Robert says Kyriba is well advanced in a new funding round, which will be the last investment round for the company. Kyriba now has ten global offices spread all over the world, including New York, Tokyo, London, Rio de Janeiro, Dubai and Singapore, and, most recently, Amsterdam.

The race, however, is still on to cater for treasury’s many pain points: a recent Deloitte report claimed that 40% of companies “remain challenged by visibility into global operations, including cash and financial exposures…Reliable, complete and consistent data, available on a timely basis, as a tool for treasury” is still required by big and small companies alike.

Kyriba has certainly proved it has the tools to cure those ills. With a growing team and global footprint, its ability to move with treasury’s needs is increasing by the day.

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Narrowing Technology Sector’s

Gender Gaps O nly 7% of tech startups are led by women. Among the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, only 25 are women and 23 have an all-male boardroom.

It was these startling facts that led filmmaker Lesley Chilcott to base her latest project around participants of the Technovation Challenge, which, in its sixth year, aims to redress a vast gender imbalance in the technology industry.

Chilcott, who made her name producing titles like An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and Waiting for Superman (2010), first got wind of Technovation while making a short film, CodeStars, for Code.org. The event draws high school girls from all round the world to compete in creating their own mobile apps.

“I came across some of the stats and saw how girls began dropping out of tech and science,” she says.

A trip round the world chronicling girls from far and wide ensued. Girls from Moldova made an app that maps the level of E-Coli contamination in drinking water. Team Charis, from Nigeria, created Discardious, a social media platform to help people safely dispose of waste. Other groups came from France, Brazil, the US and more - each vying for $10,000 investment into their idea.

What resulted was CodeGirl, a featurelength documentary that tracks the finalist teams and their personal tales. “I think you’re very impressionable when you’re a teen, and a competition is the best way to get motivated to do something,” says Chilcott.

“Teens are so over scheduled, so people have to be clever about how to pique their interest.”

The global app market will soon be worth $77 billion. Over 80% of developers are men. “51% of people are not involved in the design of technology,” she adds. “If you don’t have a diverse team, you will make mistakes with things.

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“Women have made a lot of progress worldwide, and arguments about the pay gap are real. But if women aren’t involved in the design of things, things will go wrong.”

Chilcott has received heady praise for exposing a rich and ubiquitous, yet rarelydocumented area of inequality. She has been criticized for focusing on too many of the teams - over 5,000 girls from 60 different countries entered - which even she admitted to have struggled with, saying, “there’s no tension because you want them all to win.”

But above all CodeGirl is a vital examination of the gender gap in tech, at a time when controversies such as GamerGate have hit the industry’s image hard. “That was overt sexism, and it exists,” says Chilcott.

“But what is even more rampant is this unconscious bias that everyone’s talking about,” bias exposed last March in a study of male and female workers’ resumes by Textio CEO Kieran Snyder.

“There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with creating technology, but when you’re writing an app no-one knows where you’re from, or if you’re a boy or a girl,” she adds.

“It’s a great equalizer.”

Chilcott also calls out tech’s current crop of female leaders, to help develop mentorship and enthusiasm for girls and young women to take up the baton: “56% of all degrees go to women now, but very few of them do computer sciences. There needs to be a longer study that says, not only do more women go into tech, but a lot of them don’t stay because the culture isn’t right for them - it might be sexist, it might be that there aren’t any mentors. I think a lot of women in tech are realizing that it was hard for them, but that they have to reach out and nurture the next generation.”

CodeGirl will, Chilcott hopes, help. It was released first on YouTube, then on leading on-demand platforms such as Amazon Instant Video, Google Play and iTunes and appeared on Netflix on April 1st. Chilcott has also received over 800 requests to screen the movie, while Google has hosted associated coding parties. “I can’t even keep up with all the screenings,” she says. “We came out at the right time, when it stands on its own as a movie but also that people are using it as a tool in their community, to ask what we can do.”

Filmmaker Lesley Chilcott’ recent documentary CODEGIRL follows a competition where high school-aged girls design an app that solves a problem in their community.

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KEEPING THE VISION Inside an acquisition:

Movea CEO Sam Guilaumé

A

ndrew Grauer was a sophomore at Cornell University when he started Course Hero. Before that he was a full time student, something which informed the company’s founding and ultimately its vision. It was simple – Andrew was the company’s primary user.

“I realized that for me and my peers, our fellow students and teachers, continuous performance at the highest level is often very stressful and very challenging. I came to the conclusion that there had to be a better way to study efficiently, to learn easily and to ultimately master my classes,” Grauer explains.

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Things came to a head when he tore his lateral meniscus in his right knee, an injury which made it all the more challenging to walk across campus, go to the library, or go to class or office hours. It was at that point that Andrew set out to build the largest online library of questions and answers, with the purpose of helping students and teachers master their specific classes.

The company’s platform allows students and teachers to browse millions of study resources and find exactly what they need.

They are also able to ask tutors for help ad consult subject-matter experts 24/7. Finally, users are able to share study materials and build a better learning community.

“Without collaboration learning is nothing more than a lecture. Course Hero means to help students and educators to be heroic in the way they master their classes, ultimately be best prepared to master their careers, and flourish in life,” says Grauer.

Nearly ten years late, the company is flourishing. But Grauer has ensured that the central mission has stayed the same. “What’s been wonderful is we’ve been consistently solving to help students and educators master their classes, but what we’ve learned over time is what that actually means. And for us at the heart of learning and classes, and at the heart of even the workplace and life is questions and answers. We believe that

Photo courtesy of www.coursehero.com

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Ask yourself, in the future what do you want to achieve? And then come up with some quantifiable metrics that can define progress towards that in the future. is the best way to inspire critical thinking and create ideas,” he says. “This gives a very wonderful framework and mission to define everything we try to do.”

The company has, of course, encountered challenges over the past nine years, among them recruiting and fostering the highest performing team it can, and building and improving the products on offer to ensure the business stays sustainable and valuable.

In 2014 Course Hero secured $15 million in Series A funding, with investors such as GSV Capital and IDG Capital backing Grauer’s vision. Seed investors SV Angel and Maveron also participated in that round.

The edtech space is competitive, but a lot of the company’s that people may thin share the same space as Course Hero, can actually work alongside its services.

What’s been wonderful is we’ve been consistently solving to help students and educators master their classes.

“We think less about competition and more about how we build the world’s future classroom, and taking the pain points that students and teachers have versus alternative offerings, especially if they are offline solutions. And how can we make with an online learning platform getting help more accessible, more on demand, more helpful, by connecting multiple perspectives,” says Grauer.

He adds that Course Hero thinks very highly of companies such as Khan Academy and Study Tools, as they are helping people get the most out of their education. The edtech market has expanded rapidly over the past ten years, and Grauer believes that can only be a good thing going forward.

“It’s a wonderful expansion. The expansion of focus and impact that edtech is having, is

highly correlated with more people around the world being on the internet and lowering of costs to build a business, whether its software, storage costs or hardware costs, it allows more people to build solutions in edtech to help students, teachers, parents, institutions provide solutions to challenging problems. I think in addition to that macro trend of software eating the world, is it’s rolling over into education.”

When Grauer looks back on the past nine years, he can draw on his experience which could be valuable to any sophomores aiming to build their own business. He says it takes time to create value, and results should not be measured on an individual level. He also lists persistence as an important attribute.

“Lastly as a really valuable framework for strategic thinking is to begin with the end in mind. Ask yourself, in the future what do you want to achieve? And then coming up with some quantifiable metrics that can define progress towards that in the future.”

As the company approaches it tenth anniversary, it can be proud of how closely it has stuck to its original, and extremely worthy, mission statement. Course Hero has already helped huge numbers of people get the most out of their education, and, as is crucial, has succeeded as a business as well.

“Education is a societal issue that many people care about, and should care about.

Hopefully there’s a dual bottom line happening where you can build great sustainable businesses that also have a societal positive impact on people’s lives,” Grauer says. Course Hero looks on track to prove that hope right for the next ten years and beyond. www.REDHERRING.com

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Drive Value at Your Organization with The Treasury Cloud Businesses need to leverage their capital more effectively to compete and drive long-term growth in the global market. The Treasury Cloud, powered

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