Applications were complicated enough, but with the advent of the cloud, they’ve reached a level of complexity that’s often difficult to manage. With multi-clouds, hybrid clouds, edge computing, and external data dependencies, applications have become a tangled web of interconnected systems. And the more complex a system, the more opportunities for things to go wrong. 

Our guest on this edition of UpTech Report is trying to solve this with his startup, Glasnostic, which actively monitors and manages interactions in the cloud, allowing problems to be resolved in real time before they take down systems.

Software development is an exceedingly complex endeavor. And often you have disparate teams with varying approaches that are difficult to connect. When it comes time to test, it’s difficult to know exactly what elements to test, and what tests to use. In 2017, Dan Widing began asking some questions about the process. 

“What if you didn't have to hire a bunch of people in QA engineering to scale up testing all of your development project? What would that mean to you? How much faster could you go? How much cheaper could it be?” These questions eventually led to ProdPerfect, which offers an autonomous end-to-end regression testing platform. 

They say it’s the first and only of its kind. On this edition of UpTech Report, Dan tells us how it all got started, how he managed to find his first clients, and just how the platform works.

Gil Friedrich was working at a successful cyber security company, and life was good. And then starting around 2011, he noticed that more and more clients were transitioning to cloud systems and wanted to ensure their security. But the solutions were still rooted in more traditional architecture and Gil felt they were inadequate for the job. 

“There was an opportunity to protect SaaS applications from the inside,” Gil says. That opportunity eventually became Avanan, which offers an enterprise solution for cloud email and collaboration security. 

On this edition of UpTech Report, Gil discusses some of the major cyber security challenges of the 21st century, how his solution works differently than others, and he offers some key advice on what all companies should be doing to protect themselves.

From day one, Rohit Vashisht knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur, and he didn’t waste any time getting started. Right out of college, he founded his first startup, then moved on to become a founder of a fintech startup, and continued on again as a founder of an influencer marketing platform. 

Today, he’s the co-founder and CEO of WhizAI, a system designed for life sciences that uses AI and natural language processing to deliver nearly any information requested, mostly in milliseconds.

On this edition of Founders Journey, Rohit walks us through the many ups and downs of his long career, and shares some insights he gained along the way on how and when to acquire funding, building the right team, and finding that first customer.

Hot dog stands, energy drink distribution, custom ping-pong balls—Enrico Palmerino has run about every kind of business you can imagine. His ventures attracted him to data analysis, which eventually led him to found his current tech startup, Botkeeper, an automatic bookkeeping solution for accounting firms, powered by AI and machine learning. 

On this edition of Founders Journey, Enrico tells us about his early beginnings and how he ended up creating a lighting company in college that pulled in over $8 million in revenue by his senior year.

Yoav Vilner’s first startup was a marketing firm for tech companies—and with 600 clients, it offered him an unparalleled education in the challenges startups face, and the methods to succeed.   

“I was very, very lucky to see the ins and outs of hundreds of startups, in different industries, trying to do different things with different budgets,” Yoav says. The education paid off. After that first startup, several others followed, all of them enjoying varying degrees of success.  

On this edition of Founders Journey, Yoav takes us through his career, including what he learned in that first marketing firm, his startup that helped save children from predators—and why he ultimately left that company to found his current startup, Walnut.io, which creates codeless software demos for sales and marketing teams.

As one of four co-founders at Kaltura, an enterprise video platform, Dr. Shay David focused a lot on the technology behind the product. But after time, he began to wonder what companies were actually using it for.   

He discovered many were turning to video as an important tool for training employees and developing new skills. It was this realization that eventually led him to turn his attention to the problem of the widening skills gap our world is facing at an alarming rate.   

So David founded retrain.ai a company that uses artificial intelligence to forecast and develop tomorrow’s workforce.   

On this edition of Founders Journey, Dr. David discusses how the changing job market became so important to him, and why he believes the key to success is an unwavering focus on the value we create for the customer.

Renji Bijoy only discovered his coding skills by accident. While studying to become a medical student, he was forced to take a course in Java programming, and he discovered he was good at it. He took to it so much, in fact, when all his med school applications came back, he threw them all in the trash—both the thin rejection letters and the thick acceptance packets. 

What followed was an insatiable desire to advance. Though he excelled in his jobs, he continuously sought something more. “I never asked for more money, I only asked for more responsibility,” he says. Eventually, it became clear he needed to set out on his own, and that’s when Immersed was born—a tech startup that allows people with VR headsets to work in a virtual office space, with features only possible in an artificial world. 

On this edition of Founders Journey, Renji tells us about his early experiences as the child of immigrants, how he eventually found his way to leading a tech startup with $12 million in funding—and why playing Halo was integral to the process.

Whether it’s baseball or bioengineering, data is everything now. We’re awash in dashboards showing us so much information from so many perspectives, it can sometimes make us wonder what we’re supposed to be looking at and why. 

But the goal has always been to get the information we need—and quickly. Rohit Vashisht wondered if there might be an easier way. His solution became Whiz.ai, a system designed for life sciences that uses AI and natural language processing to deliver nearly any information requested  in milliseconds. 

In this edition of UpTech Report, Rohit tells us where this idea originated, how it all works, why he chose to focus on life sciences, and the broader impact it could have on the industry.

New technologies, such as cloud computing, have made entrepreneurship more possible than ever. But as more and more people are becoming CEOs and developers, fewer and fewer are becoming accountants—services that are sorely needed to make operations function. Enrico Palmerino encountered this problem with his own startup. 

“Our accounting department just couldn't keep up with the growth or the complexities of the business,” Enrico says. He eventually discovered a large part of the problem was the lack of technology solutions in this field. 

This led him to found Botkeeper, an automated bookkeeping service for accounting firms powered by AI and machine learning. On this edition of UpTech Report, Enrico discusses how he’s using this advanced technology to give the accountants more time to focus on their clients.