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Ms. Vani Kola is on a sensational visit to the city
Its pay back time for the lady
entrepreneur of Hyderabad
Ms. Vani Kola, Founder & Chief Executive Officer of the $1.25 billion RightWorks Corporation was here in the city after a gap of 16 years and her visit has been the most talked about event of the
city." A $Billion Dollar$ Dream" An amazing saga of dreams, vision, and action is the story of
RIGHT WORKS Corporation which she founded just four years back and when the most talked about CEO
of the Silicon valley lands in Cyberabad, its indeed an event for Hyderabadis. She was
facilitated by her teachers at the Department of Electrical Engineering, University
College of engineering, OU from where she passed out in 1984.On that occasion
she has announced to set up a million dollar trust for the benefit of Osmania
University with the help of a group of NRI's in the US-all
of them are alumni of the Osmania University.
She started the company in 1996 with a vision to provide B2B solutions that enable customers to derive maximum value from the Internet. Ms.Kola continues to focus the company on developing the B2B exchange technology, services, and strategic industry alliances that bring the best-of-breed offerings to corporations and market makers who are creating digital marketplaces across the Internet. The notion of a digital marketplace is to enable multiple suppliers to interact with
multiple buyers in a single virtual market.
In early 2000, Ms. Kola secured significant financing for RightWorks from the Internet Capital Group, which acquired a majority interest in the company in a transaction valued at $657 million in a deal that put company's value at $1.25 billion. Prior to that, she acquired major funding from venture capitalist Sequoia Capital Group and significant angel investment from TiE members.
Before founding RightWorks, Ms. Kola held senior engineering and technical management positions at Consilium, Inc. and Empros, a division of Control Data Corporation. She holds a Masters degree in Engineering from Arizona State University and earned her undergraduate degree in Engineering from Osmania University, Hyderabad, India.
Reachout was lucky to meet her on the
occasion of her interaction with TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) and one could observe from her talk that she has got that CEO mettle and she shared at length about how to build a billion dollar
company. Well Hyderabad for sure might have to wait for a long long time to hear of such successful stories that too from a Hyderabadi
lady. So far we have been hearing of Kanwal Rekhi's and Gururaj Desh
Pande's giving back to IIT's,now Osmania University is getting the first wave of its Alumi on a similar
mission. Of course there are too many Hyderabadis spread all over the world and if they all come
together, then Osmania University for sure can be transformed into a world class University.
-MK
-9th Sep '00
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