The story
The company was founded in Lund, Sweden in 1993, by Björn Berg and Staffan Gestrelius. Its Swedish headquarters are still in Lund. The company's first product, QuikView (now called QlikView), was built to enable users to retrieve detailed data analysis from various systems. Måns Hultman became CEO in 2000, and Lars Björk became CFO.
The first version of the product came out in 1994, and a patent application was made in 1995. QUIK, in the original name of the product, stood for Quality, Understanding, Interaction, and Knowledge.
QlikView 2 came out in 1996, QlikView 3 in 1997, and QlikView 4 in 1999. In 1998, the company received funding from Swedish investors Handelsbanken and Industrifonden
The company focused on the area of business intelligence, growing from 35 employees in 1999 to 70 in 2003. In 2004, the firm decided to expand internationally and moved the company headquarters to the U.S., while development stayed in Lund. That year, it secured $12.5 million in venture capital funding from equity firms Accel Partners and Jerusalem Venture Partners.
QlikView 7 was released in 2005, and the single-user desktop tool was replaced with a server-based web tool. In 2006, the company had $44 million in revenue.
In 2007, Lars Björk became CEO.
As of April 2011, the company had a market capitalization over $2 billion. In 2012, Forbes listed it as one of America's top three fastest-growing tech companies.
In 2012, Qlik acquired Expressor Software for metadata management.
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In 2013, the company opened an office in Perth, Australia, due to its large consumer base in that country. In August 2015, the company expanded its research and development operations by opening an office in Ottawa, Ontario.
In 2015 Qlik acquired Vizubi and its NPrinting product.
In 2016, private equity firms Bain Capital, Permira, and Thoma Bravo submitted offers to buy Qlik. In June, the firm announced that it agreed to sell itself to Thoma Bravo for about $3 billion. In 2017, CEO Lars Bjork transitioned his responsibilities to David Murphy as interim CEO; Mike Capone was named CEO in January 2018.
In 2017, Qlik started working with Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health. The two worked together to use data to identify situations where healthcare officials could prescribe fewer opioids, helping to combat the opioid epidemic in Philadelphia.
In 2017 Idevio (Geo Analytics) was acquired by Qlik, and data catalog company Podium Data in 2018. In 2019, the company acquired an AI, natural language bot company, Crunch Data, who it had partnered with for 4 years prior to the acquisition. Crunch Data was integrated into its Insight Advisor product.
In 2019, the company acquired data integration company Attunity for $560M which expanded its footprint in the Boston area.
In 2020, the company acquired Knarr Analytic for its real-time collaboration and insight capture capabilities. The same year, the company acquired RoxAI for its Ping Alerting and intelligent automation software, and Blendr.io for its data integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) to allow for data integration and automation to hundreds of SaaS-based business applications.
Qlik was used by the Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust NHS patient data during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom.
In 2021, the company introduced Qlik Application Automation, which automates tasks and data workflows between Qlik Cloud and SaaS applications. The same year, the company acquired Salt Lake City-based Big Squid, a leading provider of no-code automated machine learning. The company also went on to acquire NodeGraph, a customizable metadata management solution, to help expand its analytics data pipeline capabilities.
In 2022, Qlik confidentially filed papers for IPO with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to go public.
In 2023, Qlik acquired Talend combining its data integration solutions with Talend’s data transformation, quality, and governance Capabilities.
In December 2023, Qlik acquired Mozaic Data, which introduced a Data Product Catalog to streamline data management.
In January 2024, Qlik acquired Kyndi, which focused on natural language processing and generative AI to ameliorate the processing of unstructured data.
From Wikipedia’s article on Qlik, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4