Here (formerly OpenFin) is a company that has built intelligent workspaces and developer platforms to help teams work smarter, faster, and more effectively. The company is launching an enterprise browser called Here. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Here co-founder and CEO Mazy Dar to learn more about the company.
Mazy Dar’s Background
What is Dar’s background? Dar said:
“As a computer science graduate, my first job out of college was at the bank SBC Warburg which is now UBS. For about 2 years, I got to see how things work inside a bank and that has proved invaluable to me in my career. During the dot-com boom, I left UBS to become the first in-house engineer at a company called Creditex, a trading platform for credit default swaps which was backed by J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank.”
“At Creditex, I learned entrepreneurship and grew passionate about product development and ultimately became the company’s Chief Strategy Officer. I also experienced the pain points that we’re now solving at Here. Creditex was acquired by Intercontinental Exchange in 2008. Post the acquisition, I became part of ICE’s executive team and learned a lot. About a year and a half later, I had the startup itch and decided to leave with Chuck Doerr to start the company which is now Here.”
Formation Of Here
How did the idea for Here come together? Dar shared:
“It’s been an evolution with the core thesis that traditional web browsers aren’t the right tool for work. The original idea came from the problem we solved at Creditex. Our trading platform was browser-based which meant we could add features regularly, but we found that traders didn’t use the platform because of the constraints of the browser experience; they wanted a desktop app. But we knew that installing an app on bank desktops would mean we would get at most one upgrade a year. We wanted the best of both worlds – fast web deployment and the great user experience of native apps. That was the first version of our product at Here – a Chromium container that lets you build a web app that could run outside the web browser with the native desktop experience.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Dar explained:
“Our core product is the Here Enterprise Browser. Our view is that work should happen in a work browser and that Internet browsers like Chrome and Edge should be used for accessing everything else on the public internet. Others in this space are focused only on ‘security,’ but we’ve learned from our large bank customers and from our work in the government sector that ‘productivity’ is also critical.”
“The experience of working in the traditional browser interface is chaotic. All of us are familiar with tab overload and the time wasted toggling between tabs all day long. Harvard Business Review estimates that users toggle 1,200 times a day and lose up to 4 hours a week. It’s a huge productivity problem and also an employee experience problem. Here Enterprise Browser solves these problems with several unique capabilities not available in any other browser.”
“First we’ve created what we call ‘Supertabs’ that let you organize and combine multiple tabs into dedicated layouts so you can see information across apps at a glance and without toggling. Organizations can create and publish these for different personas and activities to speed onboarding and ensure that employees have all the tools they need at their fingertips. Within Supertabs, all the apps can share data and context so you don’t have to constantly rekey information from one app to the other. Customers absolutely love this kind of interoperability. We also dramatically simplify search. When you search in Here, we don’t search the public internet, we do a deep search inside all of your apps and we provide quick actions to drive workflow. Here has its own dedicated notification center that streamlines notification management and provides rich notifications you can action without toggling.”
“The entire environment is managed centrally by authorized administrators who approve apps and websites, manage fine-grained app permissions, and receive usage analytics to enable audit, compliance, and vendor management.”
Evolution Of Here’s Technology
How has Here’s technology evolved since launching? Dar noted:
“I mentioned earlier that the first version of our product was a Chromium container that let you build a web app that you could run outside a browser with desktop experience.”
“The first evolution of the product came from our customers at global banks and asset managers. We realized they were all building a visual interface on top of our Chromium container – essentially a different type of web browser. The idea was to unify all the apps being used by their traders to improve productivity and reduce operational risk. To make things easier for our customers, we introduced a visual interface that gave them all these capabilities so they didn’t have to build it themselves.”
“Our next evolution came last year, when we went from just providing a solution for desktop to also being able to provide customers with the same capabilities on mobile and also inside web browsers. Customers want to build their apps once and provide them in a unified experience across any channel – we call this our “Anywhere” offering.”
“The most recent evolution is the logical next step. Until now, our customers have been using our technology on the front end, but they have been building their own back-end services including authentication, managing entitlements, providing an app directory, and routing notifications. Many of our customers are now comfortable using the cloud and they’ve found that building these services is time-consuming and costly. So we just recently launched a fully hosted SaaS product – Here Enterprise Browser. There’s nothing to build on the front end or the back end – it just works. Being able to provide a SaaS product also makes its benefits available to companies of all sizes, including those who don’t have their own engineering resources.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Dar cited:
“Beyond product evolution, many of our significant milestones have been in customer acquisition. We now work with 90% of the largest global banks as well as large financial services platforms like CME and LSEG.”
“We’ve also had significant milestones in fundraising where we’ve received backing from VCs including Bain Capital Ventures, Pivot Investment Partners, and Nyca Partners and also from strategics including J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo, Barclays, and most recently Bank of America.”
“Finally, over the last couple of years, we’ve expanded beyond the financial sector to provide our technology in the government sector via our partnership with In-Q-Tel, the not-for-profit strategic investor serving the national security community of the U.S. and its allies. More recently, we’ve also been working with large organizations within the contact center space both inside and outside of finance.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Dar assessed:
“The TAM opportunity truly is enormous. Large enterprise sectors, including financial services, healthcare, and functional areas such as contact centers and business operations, represent a huge opportunity by themselves. All companies use browsers.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Here from its competition? Dar affirmed:
“We’re the only enterprise browser that solves both security and productivity. It’s that simple. You can’t solve the enterprise problem without solving both. What’s also unique about our approach is that we’ve built this browser working with and learning from hundreds of experts inside banks and more recently within the government. We’ve designed for and met their requirements for security, compliance, and performance.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Dar concluded:
“Ultimately, our goal is to become the world’s browser for work across industries. It’s ambitious, but, in many ways, working with the world’s largest banks means we’ve already solved many of the hardest problems.”
