Top 100 Companies: North America

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cities. Countries with a large enough user-base get an “Elance ambassador,” of which there are currently more than 100 spread across different markets.

As of February 2013, about 500,000 businesses use Elance. Despite 2 million freelance professionals from more than 150 countries already registered on the site, Elance still pushes to build market awareness. “The numbers are still small compared to the size of the market, and we know that there are a hundred times more freelancers and businesses,” Rosati says.

Evolvenwww.evolven.com

Sasha Gilenson

Software

New Jersey

Yes

» IT operations teams can confront overwhelming and dynamic data that may disrupt the performance of their business operations. Evolven aims to solve these issues using innovative analytics.

“I saw how many enterprises were frustrated with critical business systems going down or underperforming, and how complexity and gaps in IT operations created problems that no technology filled,” says Sasha Gilenson, Founder and CEO for Evolven. Gilenson founded Evolven in 2007 after spending 13 years at Mercury Interactive (which was acquired by HP), developing the company’s Business Technology Optimization (BTO) strategy and establishing Mercury Interactive’s Software as a Service (SaaS) group, and more.

Evolven applied a new analytics approach to resolve change and configuration challenges and dramatically minimize the risk of

downtime and slash incident investigation time. Evolven’s IT Operations Analytics help accelerate incident resolution, avoid harmful and risky changes, and assess and optimize IT operations performance.

Based on the size of the managed technology environment, a subscription model and licensing are available for customers. “We operate using a ‘land and expand’ approach,” says Gilenson, explaining that from the subscription moment, the solution can grow in two dimensions, either through additional teams that start to use Analytics results to get insight into areas of their responsibility, or through the distribution of Evolven to additional environments to include them into the analysis process.

In three rounds of funding, the company raised a total of $16M from Pitango Venture Capital and Index Ventures. The company reached profitability in 2012. However, the management decided to utilize its investment to expand the team and focus on continuous growth. “Our decision on the timing of additional funding will be defined by our ability to fulfill the growth opportunity. Current feeling is that we will not be able to address market demand without significant expansion,” Gilenson says.

“We need to grow and expand very rapidly in all dimensions,” he ads, as he mentions the sales teams, product and marketing. “The entire sales team has names starting with J, so there is an unofficial belief in the company that a salesperson should have ‘the right name’ to succeed,” Gilenson ads.

Evolven has 25 employees and serves about 50 customers in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East.

“Using Evolven we’re able to know exactly what has changed in our environment, investigate incident root-cause, maintain environment consistency, validate changes, and eliminate configuration drift,” says Dave Chivers, Vice President and Chief Information Officer of VSE Corporation, which focuses on improving governmental

systems and located in Alexandria, VA. VSE installed Evolven’s application and had a complete operational system in less than one day, and above the initial requirements that VSE had, according to Chivers. “As a Federal Contractor supporting the Federal Government, VSE competes all procurements, and during the procurement process we have found that Evolven was the best value for the services that it provides compared to other vendors with similar applications,” Chivers ads.

The company is developing new products, while finding new partners across the globe. “Our focus is on growing revenues from software licenses while our partners expand their value added services including or based on Evolven’s technology,” Gilenson says.

IT Operations Analytics was identified by Gartner as an on-the-rise, strategic area of IT management. The change and configuration management segment, where Evolven started, was estimated around $6B last year, by various industry analysts. Gilenson estimates that the company will reach the size of $30M by 2015.

The key indirect competitors the Evolven has are Splunk, headquartered in San Francisco with 600 employees worldwide, and TripWire, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, which has operations in 15 countries. Gilenson says that the company doesn’t have direct competition, “Our differentiation lies in applying analytics to the change and configuration challenges,” he says, explaining that this application to IT analytics doesn’t exist in other solutions.

“Evolven’s solution turns a pile of data into actionable insights,” says Rona Segev, a General partner at PITANGO. Pitango decided to invest in Evolven due to a strong and growing market need, unique technology that can really disrupt the industry and a strong founding and management team. “Evolven is really at the beginning of a strong growth curve. With dozens of blue chip customers already on board, technology that is way ahead compared to any other company

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in the market and strong and growing market demand — we believe Evolven is well poised to disrupt the industry,” Segev concludes.

Fiksuwww.fiksu.com

Micah Adler

Mobile

Massachusetts

Yes

» Fiksu’s first customer for its mobile app marketing platform was itself. Founded in 2008, the company was originally founded through the marketing efforts of its own app, Fluent News Reader. That app was lucky enough to have a successful launch and was featured in the New York Times, resulting in tens of thousands of downloads. However, the flow soon dwindled to a trickle, dropping from thousands of daily downloads to a mere handful practically overnight.

Such experiences are typical with apps — even those with heavy traction initially soon find themselves spinning their wheels. Micah Adler, Fiksu’s CEO, was not about to give up, however. A former tenured professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Adler helped launch four successful companies that used computer science and algorithms to make digital marketing more efficient. He observed the inefficiencies inherent in marketing an app. Fluent News Reader was marketed through three different companies, for example, costing the company $3 per download, an expense that made monetization nearly impossible.

“We found tremendous inefficiencies in how mobile apps are marketed, and realized we could do better,” Adler said. In six months, the company developed a

marketing platform to minimize its costs, dropping its price per download to a mere 26 cents.

It then developed a corporate product that provided a complete network to all app advertising sources, a complex system that varies according to the type of ad as well as the type of app.

Through a simple SDK with a user-friendly data interface, the product optimizes performance results for expense and effectiveness. It improves not only the rate of downloads, but the quality of those downloads as well. Whereas only 20 percent of downloaded apps are used beyond the first day, and only 5 percent of apps beyond the first month, Fiksu’s users see a 50 percent adoption rate for their apps. Typically, Fiksu improves the cost for marketing an app by a factor of three.

“We make it very easy to reach mobile users through a single platform,” Adler said. “We establish a great degree of efficiency so our customers do not pay more than they can afford. And we provide visibility into the true value of users so our clients can optimize every cent.”

The Boston-based company first launched in beta to 10 customers around 2010, with a full public launch in April of 2011. Last April, Fiksu marketed its billionth download, generating over 100 billion launches, registrations, and in-app purchases. Growing over 300 percent annually, Fiksu today serves over 400 customers, including Groupon, which uses its marketing to improve download quality.

“We’re a commerce business, and we need our advertising to be efficient,” said David Katz, Vice-president of Consumer Mobile at Groupon. “We don’t just want downloads — we want new customers who are going to love the app and hopefully buy Groupons. We look to Fiksu to help us find the pockets of ad inventory with users most likely to become loyal Groupon customers.”

The company has raised $18 million from

Qualcomm Ventures and Charles River Ventures. It employs 140 people and competes against Taptica.

With the mobile app market expected to be $80 billion to $100 billion over the next few years, Adler anticipates tremendous opportunity for his company. As apps transition into cars and televisions, and digital downloads for goods and music become more popular, Adler does not see why Fiksu could not eventually be a multi-billion dollar company.

“We’re starting to see larger clients enter the mobile app market with more serious investment potential,” Adler said.

Finoverawww.finovera.com

Purna Pareek

Internet/Online

California

No

» The mailbox is a money pit for consumer businesses. Businesses send out over 30 billion paper bills, statements and notices every year, costing more than $30 billion in postage and handling fees. Despite pushes from financial services and utility companies, paperless adoption currently lingers below 11 percent. Most people simply do not have the time to sign up for paperless billing with every provider, leaving the bills to pile sky high on the kitchen table.

Finovera makes that proverbial pile of bills obsolete. Within a single ten minute sign-up process, the company’s software automatically signs a user up for paperless billing with every provider she does business with. The user simply logs in to Finovera, and the company’s software automatically goes to each business’s

website to complete paperless billing sign up, downloading all available documents for the past year to create a digital file cabinet. The inbox features digital copies of a user’s bills and relevant due dates. A premium version of the service also enables automatic bill pay.

Aside from the premium bill pay function, the service is completely free, with the bill providers picking up the tab, saving at least $1 per bill in postal and handling fees off their own balance sheets.

“Ultimately, the household is going to go paperless. The writing is on the wall,” said Purna Pareek, CEO of Finovera. “The mail is the last digital hold out. Finovera provides a digital file cabinet in the cloud with all bill statements, notices, or what you ever you choose to upload and store.”

The company competes against Dropbox, PayTrust, eBills and BillingOrchard, but these services require the user to make a connection to the provider. Finovera provides a one-step, simplified approach that makes paperless adoption as simple as setting up an email account. “Most of these solutions are time consuming, which is a huge barrier to adoption,” Pareek said. “Finovera uses very complicated, sophisticated technology so that set-up is a simple one step process.”

Finovera beta user Toby Salgado described the setup process as “a breeze,” though it required a verification by his bank because he had not previously used Finovera servers. “After using the service for a while I have found it extremely useful,” Salgado said. “I have actually saved a bunch of money because of Finovera. When I only got paper statements I never really looked at them, and now because I have 12 months of statements I have found myself digging through them.”

Taking its time to get the process right, the company only recently came out of a private beta program with 1,000 users. “We’re early in the process, but we’re seeing a lot of pent up demand,” Pareek said. “Pretty much everyone we talk to are excited about the

service and want to use it. It’s a service that can make just about anyone’s life easier.”

A founder of three successful previous companies, Pareek was inspired to launch the company from his own frustrations with bill pile-up. His most recent company, AdviceAmerica, was a wealth management enterprise class platform. He understood the problem of bill management, and when he looked into existing solutions, found that most services required the user to register with each company, which proved too time consuming. “We knew that digital was the way to go, but it had to be an easy service to join,” Pareek said. “The more we looked at the problem, we realized it was indeed solvable, but difficult. It required a complex solution.”

Finovera will first concentrate on the US market, and then adapt the software to other countries. Digital bill pay is further evolved in Europe, with many national post offices implementing their own digital alternatives to cut costs.

The company has raised seed and angel investment, and plans to soon raise a Series A of around $5 million.

“It is clear that digital billing is the wave of the future,” Pareek said. “We simplify the sign up process, and in turn, simplify the lives of our customers significantly.”

Full circle crMwww.fullcirclecrm.com

Bonnie Crater

Cloud Computing

California

Yes

» Even in a well-run marketing campaign, only about 80 percent of the marketing dollars are actually spent correctly, asserts

Bonnie Crater, CEO of Full Circle CRM. The remaining 20 percent is an experiment. How does an advertiser measure success from failure?

Full Circle CRM provides the only marketing performance management tool built completely on Salesforce.com. This allows the company to manipulate and measure data in a complete historical record so it maintains its integrity, without the standard workflows of the marketing team rendering it invalid or corrupted. The company’s software enables the marketing department to accurately measure every face of a marketing campaign.

“The next big trend in marketing is being able to measure effectively,” Crater said. “Often, sales and marketing teams don’t have the right data to be able to have a productive conversation and work together. We solve that sales and marketing divide with our software. We can define what is not doing well so budgets can be adjusted successfully.”

Founded by ex-Salesforce talent, the company grounded itself in Salesforce’s platform from the beginning. Crater worked as marketing VP for a number of different companies, helping to bring them on to Salesforce, and later went onto work for Salesforce itself. She got a call from Andrea Wildt, a former product manager for Salesforce’s marketing project, who worked as a consultant for companies that had difficulty measuring their marketing efforts. The two joined forces with Dan Appleton, who had written several popular Windows programming books. They built the platform for Full Circle CRM over the next year and a half.

“We realized that sales and marketing people did not have right data,” Crater said. “They are only guessing. We sought to remove the guesswork.”

They launched Full Circle CRM at Dreamforce in fall of 2012. Already, they have over 15 customers on the platform, ranging from tech to financial services to telecommunications, including Good