History
QlikTech was established in Sweden in 1993. The company was founded by Björn Berg and Staffan Gestrelius to create software that mimics the way the brain works, ensuring an intuitive user experience. Their PC-based desktop tool was called QuikView. “Quik” stood for “Quality, Understanding, Interaction, Knowledge.”
QuikView accessed information from standard database applications and displayed data associatively. Berg developed a color-coding system using highlighting: selected values are highlighted green, linked values are highlighted in white, and excluded values are highlighted in grey. Lead software engineer Håkan Wolgé and Berg believed that this software could run entirely in memory. In 1996, the application was named QlikView to emphasize its ability to provide detailed data analysis with a single click. Jonas Nachmanson, QlikTech’s CTO who served as its technology and R&D lead in the early days, played a significant role in mapping customer and prospect requirements to the application and ensuring it integrated into their systems. By 1999, QlikView was successfully deployed at various companies, among them Tetra Pak and AstraZeneca.
Måns Hultman became CEO in 2000 and Lars Bjork became CFO. The company focused on the area of Business Intelligence (BI), growing from 35 employees in 1999 to 70 in 2003. At that point, QlikTech needed more capital and a broader vision to continue its growth. To that end, QlikTech selected a syndicate consisting of venture capital firms Accel Partners and Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), and raised $12.5 million in capital Alex Ott of Accel and Erel Margalit of JVP devised a growth strategy that resulted in a 35% annual growth rate and $13 million in revenue by 2004.
By 2005, the software evolved from a single-user desktop tool to a server- and Java-based Web tool. Its calculation engine was now able to handle larger data sets. QlikTech went on to establish partnerships with Intel and HP, and incorporated advanced charts and colors in their UI. All of these factors contributed to QlikTech gaining larger customers including global shipping and logistics management leader DB Schenker, Life Sciences CRM company Dendrite, telecommunications giant Ericsson, and the Swedish Post.
QlikView’s analytical capacities and speed were bolstered by major advances in its core technologies. QlikView developed to the point where it could handle billions of rows of data. Today, companies such as Best Buy, Campbell’s Soup, Canon, ING, Gen-Probe, National Health service, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Blue Star Infotech limited, SLL and Shell are QlikView customers.
In 2007, Lars Bjork became QlikTech’s CEO. Revenue increased to 157 million in 2009 and the company employs over 650 people in 24 countries. It has over 1,100 partners worldwide. Its user base has expanded to 22,000 customers in 100 countries. The company held an Initial Public Offering in July 2010.
As of April 2011, the company was valued at over $2 billion.
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