Today’s news of GE’s acquisition of ServiceMax for close to $1 billion marks the latest milestone in our journey of partnering with world-class entrepreneurs at Mayfield. I want to congratulate Dave Yarnold, Athani Krishnaprasad, Hari Subramanian and the rest of the ServiceMax team, along with my partner Rajeev Batra, for partnering with the ServiceMax team over 5 years ago.
ServiceMax is a leading industry provider of field service management software. The company continues to reimagine and create solutions for the 20 million people globally who install, maintain, and repair machines across dozens of industries as the leading provider of complete end-to-end mobile and cloud-based technology for the sector. ServiceMax goes to every length — from joining technicians on service calls to publishing the industry’s leading online publication — to help customers discover untapped innovation, unleash new revenue streams, drive efficiency, and most importantly delight their end-customer.
Servicemax’s successful outcome represents the latest milestone in our journey over the last decade at Mayfield. During that time, we have partnered with over 100 entrepreneurs, and have been involved in 28 successful outcomes – which included 9 IPOs and 19 acquisitions. Founders of our breakout enterprise companies leveraged the trends of cloud, SaaS, mobile, security, software-defined infrastructure, and energytech. In reverse chronological order, the entrepreneurs who architected our recent enterprise successes include:
- Dave Yarnold, Athani Krishnaprasad, and Hari Subramanian of ServiceMax, field service software leader, which was acquired by GE Digital today;
- Huang Xueliang of SMIT, security devices leader, which went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2016;
- Rehan Jalil of Elastica, cloud security pioneer, which was acquired by Blue Coat Systems in 2015, which in turn was acquired by Symantec in 2016;
- Frank Addante of The Rubicon Project, next-gen adtech platform, which went public on the NYSE in 2014;
- Amit Pandey and Waheed Qureshi of Zenprise, mobile data management leader, which was acquired by Citrix in 2013;
- Phil Fernandez and Jon Miller of Marketo, marketing automation software leader, which went public on NASDAQ in 2013;
- Ursheet Parikh and Guru Pangal of StorSimple, cloud storage provider, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2012;
- Lyndon and Peter Rive of Solarcity, the industry’s first solar utility provider, which went public on NASDAQ in 2012;
- Alan Masarek of QuickOffice, mobile productivity provider, which was acquired by Google in 2012;
- Young Sohn of Inphi, networking components provider, which went public on the NYSE in 2010;
- Gary Fromer of CPower, innovative energy management company, which was acquired by Constellation Energy in 2010;
- Rajan Raghavan and Prabakar Sundarrajan of Ankeena, new media infrastructure provider, which was acquired by Juniper Networks in 2010;
- Rehan Jalil of Wichorus, smart 4G mobile infrastructure provider, which was acquired by Tellabs in 2009;
- Jeff Irwin of Pure Networks, networking software and services provider, which was acquired by Cisco in 2008;
- David Scott of 3PAR Data, utility storage pioneer, which went public on the NYSE in 2007, and was acquired by Hewlett Packard in 2010;
- Jef Graham of Mobile365, mobile messaging provider, which was acquired by Sybase in 2006;
- Joe Kraus of JotSpot, wiki software pioneer, which was acquired by Google in 2006.
It is a time of great optimism for the technology industry. It is a well-known Silicon Valley belief that overnight successes take a long time. We salute the ServiceMax team on the latest milestone in their journey. We are excited by the opportunity to partner with great entrepreneurs to help build lasting companies.
Originally published on LinkedIn
