Silicon Valley-based serial entrepreneur Gupta, who has founded four companies, recently sold his most recent SaaS business, Apptio, to IBM. Given that Big Blue was where Gupta started his career three decades ago, his life has come full circle.
Co-founder and CEO of Apptio Sunny Gupta is celebrating a kind of homecoming. On June 26, the technological juggernaut IBM revealed that it has signed a binding agreement to buy the software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup for a staggering $4.6 billion. With this agreement, Gupta will rejoin IBM, where he started his career in 1992.
Gupta, 53, a successful serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who founded four companies, has come a long way. He was born in Chandigarh; his mother came from an entrepreneurial family and his father was an IAS officer who served as the secretary of education in the Indian government.
He was seven or eight years old when he first became interested in entrepreneurship and believed it would give him the power to determine his own fate. He actually continued to do that. Gupta mentioned that he and his two brothers were all in charge of their own prosperous businesses in a 2013 interview with The New York Times.
He came to the US in 1989 to enrol in a course at the University of South Carolina with just $2,000 and an airline ticket. You can start from nothing and achieve something, everyone claimed, so I felt like I needed to move to the US. Though it has changed significantly since then, India wasn’t that way at the time, he told the New York Times.
Even with a partial scholarship, Gupta still needed to take on odd jobs to make ends meet. He cleaned dishes and even worked as a mover, but in the end he received a full scholarship since he worked hard in the classroom. After that, Gupta worked as an intern for the university president.
A rise in entrepreneurship
Gupta began working with IBM as a software developer in 1992. He found himself in a corporate employment rut as the years went by. He was tired of the bureaucratic, opaque workplace culture and the sluggish career advancement it delivered.
“I genuinely believed I could carry out the duties of my boss’s boss. You may not be aware of everything, but I simply had a deep conviction,” he remarked.
He founded Vigour Technology, an enterprise software-focused digital startup, as his first business in 1996. For the first six to nine months, Gupta didn’t receive any pay; this practise will continue in all of his subsequent ventures. A rise in entrepreneurship
Gupta began working with IBM as a software developer in 1992. He found himself in a corporate employment rut as the years went by. He was tired of the bureaucratic, opaque workplace culture and the sluggish career advancement it delivered.
“I genuinely believed I could carry out the duties of my boss’s boss. You may not be aware of everything, but I simply had a deep conviction,” he remarked.
He founded Vigour Technology, an enterprise software-focused digital startup, as his first business in 1996. For the first six to nine months, Gupta didn’t receive any pay; this practise will continue in all of his subsequent ventures. At the time, this business generated $2 million in revenue and was bought out for $70 million. In turn, HP purchased Opsware for $1.65 billion in the same year.
The Apptio requirement
Gupta revealed to YourStory in 2019 that the decision to leave iConclude had a significant influence on him as he deliberated about whether to sell the business. It felt like unfinished business, so when Gupta made the decision to launch Apptio in 2007, he resolved to either “go big or go home” and create something that would last.
He co-founded the cloud-based Technology Business Management (TBM) software company Apptio with Kurt Shintaffer. On the company’s LinkedIn profile, there are currently more than 1,400 employees, including those in India. With $136 million in capital secured by Apptio by 2016, the company decided to go public by being listed on the NASDAQ. The company was delisted and bought by private equity firm Vistas Equity Partners for $1.94 billion in less than two years.
Following the acquisition, Gupta and his management team remained at Apptio. He believed that returning to private ownership would accelerate the company’s growth. According to Gupta, “We get to go private and we get to accelerate growth in the private markets, which sometimes can be harder to do in the public markets because of the fickleness or whatever may happen in the public market,” during a conversation with GeekWire in 2018.
The biggest achievement for the business was when IBM agreed to buy it this year for $4.6 billion, more than double what Vistas paid only four years earlier. Today, Apptio serves more than half of the Fortune 100 companies and has over 1,500 clients.
In a challenging macro climate, IBM believes the acquisition would strengthen its IT automation capabilities and benefit clients by helping them make the most of their technology budgets and spending. “Apptio will bring to IBM $450 billion of anonymized IT spend data, unlocking new insights for clients and partners,” the company stated in a statement. Given his past success, Gupta and his team may soon set out on a new voyage, on yet another startup experience, even if they currently look to be staying at IBM.
