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Profiles and Founders: Where Are They Now? Part II

This article is more than 9 years old.

We are on week two of Profile and Founders: Where Are They Now? As I mentioned in Part I, I’ve been contributing to Forbes for two and half years now and have had the opportunity to profile great companies and interview some interesting founders. Every once in a while a reader follows up via email asking how so and so company is doing. I thought it would be neat to do a “Where are they now?” series to check in on all the companies profiled in my column. This is the second of seven weeks of five company catch-ups. This week we check in with Scan, TeeSpring, Yesware, Taboola and ViewABill.

Scan

On December 6th 2012, I wrote about a SF-based startup called Scan. Scan was silently dominating the QR Code industry. Since writing about Scan, they had the incredible opportunity to showcase their startup on prime time television on the popular ABC TV show, SHARK TANK. Although they didn’t close any money from the sharks/investors, the exposure was very successful for their app downloads. On top of that, Scan raised a seed round of $1.7M from Google Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and others. And then they went on to raise a Series A of $7M from Entree Capital and others. At the time of my article the Scan app had 25 million downloads. Now, it has over 75 million. Scan continues to rise and just this week they announced that they are beginning to manufacture and support beacons.

Credit: Scan

Teespring

On January 3rd 2013, I wrote about a little known Rhode Island-based startup called Teespring. I really liked the concept of not having to front money, and crowdsourcing t-shirts. Teespring has exploded since my article. They were accepted to YCombinator, the most successful startup accelerator. They raised a massive round of funding $20M from mega-fund Andreessen Horowitz. Some fun stats, founder Walker Williams shared with me: 1) Teespring has shipped millions of products: 1 in 100 people in the USA ordered a Teespring product in the past year 2) The company now has 150 employees, and 3) According to Teespring: 9 out of 10 buyers say they would buy again and the average quality score is 9 out of 10.

Yesware

On January 17th 2013, I wrote about an up-and-coming startup, based in Boston, called Yesware. 3.5 million pageviews later here we are (this is by far my most popular post of all time). Since writing about Yesware they have experienced hockey-stick growth. They raised $14.7 million in Series B funding in the Fall of 2013, led by Battery Ventures, with continued support from Google Ventures, Foundry Group, IDG Ventures, and Golden Venture Partners. Their user base grew over 300% in 2013, and they now serve more than more than 450,000 registered users. Their list of enterprise clients now includes companies like Acquia, the fastest growing private company in the U.S. on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500, which Yesware helped drive over 20 percent in new sales growth, as well as many other great companies. When it comes to the size of their staff, today they’re 56 “Yetis” strong, with offices in both Boston and San Francisco. And they aren’t showing any signs of slowing down. They recently finished the best quarter in their existence, beating their revenue goals by 64% in June 2014.

Credit: Yesware

Taboola

On March 28th 2013, I wrote about Taboola, a big player in the AdSense for Content space. In the past 12 months, Taboola has established itself as the leader of the rapidly growing discovery market. The company’s 2014 estimated revenue run-rate is $250M, up from $100M in November 2013, and it now serves over 150B content recommendations to 400M+ unique users every month. It opened offices in Europe and Asia-Pacific, entered a strategic partnership with Yahoo! JAPAN, launched a mobile API, acquired programmatic tech vendor Perfect Market, and expanded its platform with a host of capabilities for both publishers and advertisers. Similar to Facebook dislike button capability, this will also be 12 months since Taboola launched Taboola-Choice, a vision and technology to enable consumers around the world to "have choice", and be able to curate content they like or not, and providing editors with that unique data.

Credit: Taboola

ViewABill

On March 14th 2013, I wrote about a recently launched startup called ViewABill. ViewABill built a way to improve the attorney-client relationship with transparency. At the time of the Forbes article, Viewabill was just getting started. The ViewABill product and team have come a long way since then. They have grown to over 100 law firms connected and are growing about 15% month to month. Their firms are predominantly in the AmLaw200, but they have firms as far away as China. They have 150+ corporate legal departments, including some of the largest financial institutions in the US, working with their firm. To date, they have been successful with about 90% of connections between clients and firms.