With part of the 11 million euros raised with the last investment in early August, the founders of Italian-American startup Entando have decided to carry out an ambitious project: to make Cagliari the research and development center of the technology most used by companies to build their applications.
Walter Ambu and Paul Hinz conceived Entando, which is more or less in Sardinian halfway between the American The next big thing and the Italian Look to the future, in 2014 during a walk in the mountains and a year later the company was included in the list of cool vendors in web computing by Gartner. The two met via LinkedIn and spent the entire excursion discussing how the technology would respond to the growing demand for reducing the time and cost of enterprise application development in an ever-changing world. Today it is estimated that by 2026 65% of business applications will be built on platforms such as the one developed by Entando: “We chose Cagliari because Sardinia offers a much higher quality of life than Silicon Valley – the founders of Entando explained to us – This allows us to aggregate highly motivated people who, like us, want to change the history of industrial software. We are a new generation startup, one of those who don’t want to stay in the Valley. We do not think about exits or quotations, but we want to change the market “.
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The company now has 50 employees and expects to exceed 100 by the end of the year: “We do not have a central office, although we are legally based in San Diego. Our team is fully distributed ”. Entando develops a platform based on Kubertenes, an open-source software developed by Google that allows you to automate the process of releasing applications and updates, control their scalability and manage the containers of the microservices with which modern applications are created. The platform allows the system integrator come Adecco to create catalogs of components which are then combined with each other to develop the application necessary for the end customer.
The market of the so-called intelligent composable business came alive with its introduction among the top strategic technology trends for 2021 by Gartner. Entando’s main competitors are Novulo and Code Architechts, who first developed a proprietary catalog and then the platform: “Two years ago we started thinking about a new platform as an evolution of our initial product and we released it in January of this year. We were lucky because Gartner defined this new market at the end of 2020 one of the top strategic technology trends of 2021 and we found ourselves among the first operators ”. According to Gartner, in the near future companies will have to be able to adapt and reorganize quickly according to contingencies and this requires a modular structure, also from a technological point of view. In this scenario, Entando aims to become the largest platform for Kubertenes-based components, in the belief that providing companies with the ability to build cloud-native applications with reusable and modular components is the answer to the demand of an ever more rapidly evolving market.
Despite being an Italian-American company, Entando has no US venture capital investors: the last round was led by United Ventures and participated by Vertis, who had previously invested by joining Gellify, iStarter and TechItalia: Lab. Italy was immediately the place to do product-market fit and develop the product. Today Entando has about fifty customers including the Italian Army, Job, the Ministry of Justice, Octotelematics and international companies such as Red Hat and Sharemine. In the last year it has grown by 100%, and it intends to do the same in the course of this: “Salespeople in Italy have much more technological skills than in other countries – explained Hinz, who in the past has also worked for Red Hat – This allows us to talk about technology, and for us it is a great advantage ”.
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To conquer the market it will be necessary to expand even more e Ambu and Hinz are already thinking about a round C with international investors, without forgetting the Italians who helped them take their first steps: “It was an advantage to have Italian investors, and if I started a new company I would start from here – Hinz told us – Italy is an excellent market for a startup that has to do product-market fit. There are very competent people, an excellent community of investors and it is still a young market where companies are starting to look at technology with a lot of interest and there is still no competition found in America, England or Germany ”.
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