When I sat down recently with the CEO of Boston startup Yottaa, Vick Viren Vaishnavi, he was wearing a fleece bearing the name of an earlier company he helped lead, BladeLogic.
He only started as CEO there in September; maybe he just hadn’t been issued his Yottaa apparel yet. But wearing it was certainly no mistake. Vaishnavi told me he sees Yottaa as a new incarnation of his previous success with BladeLogic, a Waltham-based company where he was CMO, which went public and was later acquired by BMC for $800 million. The third incarnation, in fact; Vaishnavi was most recently CEO of Aveksa, which had also included a number of people from the BladeLogic team. The Waltham-based company ended up being acquired by EMC for $300 million in mid-2013 in a major win for investors.
The move comes at a time when a number of local tech companies have pulled out of the suburbs and relocated to Boston.
Rockin’ the suburbs?
Yottaa is a specialist in software for speeding up company websites, with the aim of going beyond what Akamai Technologies can do for you. The startup is currently based in Boston’s Financial District, a neighborhood that has become a hub for startup activity over the last year or two. But the company is about to take the opposite route of many local tech companies, with plans to leave the city for the suburbs in mid-February. Yottaa, which employs 50 locally, will be headed to a larger new headquarters in Waltham, the place Vaishnavi and crew have found to work out so well in the past.
The move comes at a time when a number of local tech companies have pulled out of the suburbs and relocated to Boston, such as LogMeIn, VMTurbo and, soon, Acquia.
His pick of companies
Vaishnavi said he landed at Yottaa after considering posts at 17 different Boston-area companies. Yottaa was the only one that had technology that was compelling enough (with 15 patents to show for it), that had a large-enough market and that, overall, was “extremely disruptive,” he said.
Yottaa was the only company Vaishnavi looked at that he considered “extremely disruptive."
“We basically allow companies to manage their users’ experience on the Internet, regardless of whether that’s from a desktop or mobile device,” Vaishnavi said. “We give you the maximum positive experience you can get interacting with the Web-based apps they have … We’re giving the horsepower, the torque, when you need it.”
And that can translate into more sales—particularly for the e-commerce companies that make up many of Yottaa’s customers.
Yottaa’s software can work alongside content delivery networks like Akamai and Limelight. Or, if a customer wants, Yottaa can replace those CDNs entirely. “That’s a decision the customer makes,” Vaishnavi said. “You don’t have to rip out everything before bringing us in.”
Expansion
Yottaa has 75 employees overall, including some at an office in Beijing. With the move to the larger new headquarters, the company expects to pick up its hiring pace and could grow to a staff of 125 to 150 by the end of this year, executives said.
A focus for Vaishnavi’s first few months at Yottaa were spent bringing on executives from the “BladeLogic Mafia.” They have included CFO Timothy O'Toole, VP of products Tim Fessenden and communications chief Tedd Rodman, who all held notable roles at BladeLogic. In addition, John McMahon, who was COO at BladeLogic and a board member at Aveksa, joined the board at Yottaa after Vaishnavi’s arrival.
Yottaa has raised $30 million in funding since its launch in 2009 by chief product officer Coach Wei (who’d preceded Vaishnavi as CEO) and CTO Bob Buffone. Investors include General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Intel Capital. Yotaa may raise a growth-equity round toward the end of this year; “we don’t need money, but it’s best to go for funding when you don’t need it,” Vaishnavi said.
