Imperium:From Bangalore to California
What is it that connects Bill Gates, ( I don’t need to introduce him), Mark Zuckerberg (his creation is open in the form of a tab while you read this), Narayana Murthy (Executive chairman of the Infosys group) and Roman Abramovich ( the maverick owner of Chelsea FC)? The one thread that connects them is that all of them were college dropouts who made it big on their own. In short, they were entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is often a career choice for those who love to take up challenges and live life on their own terms. Every year, thousands of start-ups are launched by people ranging from college going students to seasoned corporate executives in the hopes of becoming the next ‘Facebook’ or ‘Apple’ (gradually). One such start-up started by two Indians three years ago was recently in the headlines after it was bought by Google. This start up is “Imperium”. Imperium was started about 3 years ago by two Indians, Vish Ramarao and Naveen Jamal with Mark Risher as the third co-founder. Imperium was started on a capital sum of $ 9 million after being funded by a host of venture firms like Accel Partners, AOL Ventures to name a few. The seed idea for the startup came when all of them working together at Yahoo Mail! . Here, they faced a lot of issues regarding mail spam, fraudulent accounts and suspicious activities online. On realizing, that this issue was faced not only by Yahoo! But also by many other companies, they saw a potential client base and thus “Imperium” was born. Imperium provided a host of services that worked as systems to determine the potential risk by taking into account parameters like where the account was being accessed , the device being used and the pattern of usage. All these statistics combined together to provide a risk assessment and determine whether an account had been compromised or not. Imperium had a very client base and provided services to over 300 clients like Tumblr, Pinterest, CNN, Washington Post , ESPN to name a few. Tech start-ups out of India have been not been very successful of late and I believe Imperium may provide encouragement and courage to a lot of young budding entrepreneurs to pursue their dreams to owning their own company one day. And it is the entrepreneurs who later turn into job providers and help the nation building.