As an IT consultant in Stamford, Raj Jalan confronted a frustrating reality.Whatever task his clients had hired him to perform, his first job was to unravel the maze of hardware and software running on the system. In case after case, the client had lost track of their own IT system.There had to be a better […]
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As an IT consultant in Stamford, Raj Jalan confronted a frustrating reality.
Whatever task his clients had hired him to perform, his first job was to unravel the maze of hardware and software running on the system. In case after case, the client had lost track of their own IT system.
There had to be a better way.
And the software he developed became that answer — Device 42.
Why Device 42?
According to the firm’s website, “In the ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ by Douglas Adams, the ‘Answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything’ is 42. We named the company as such: A single source of truth for everything IT & Cloud.”
What followed from Jalan’s initial software is a classic tale of bootstrap success.
He found his clients were willing to pay to discover what amounts to a map of their own IT system. The client base grew. The software became more sophisticated.
Then, in a bit of New Haven entrepreneurial magic, Jalan met Dr. Stephen Shwartz at the Grove coworking space. That was 2012. Shwartz, a serial entrepreneur and author of three books on artificial intelligence, recognized Jalan was on to something and came aboard as co-founder.
Some seed money from Connecticut Innovations and other small investors helped Jalan and Shwartz expand Device 42 into a multifaceted software that works on its own to discover all of the assets on a network.
A round of funding in 2019 brought in $34 million to supercharge growth, which included a partnership with Risk Based Security’s VulnDB. That deal added software vulnerability detection to Device 42’s product line.
In 2020, Device 42 acquired ArrayIQ and its storage discovery capabilities.
Today, Device 42 is serving 1,000 clients in 60 countries from Goldman Sachs and Harvard Medical School to Mercedes-Benz and Verizon. It has 200 corporate partners.
Jalan explains Device 42 has three pillars of value: modernization, IT service delivery and audit/compliance. Its sweet spot is enterprises with more than 500 employees.
The rush to cloud storage has put the focus on Device 42’s facility for easing the headaches of migration, but the recent SolarWinds software hack has highlighted the company’s ability to identify all software on a network and allow for quicker remediation.
Jalan says it's too early to think about an IPO or some sort of M&A deal, but he acknowledges that day will come soon enough. Device 42 is in growth mode, he explains, and his immediate challenge is to assure corporate culture values are maintained.
“We’re a new company every six months,” he says, pointing to recent hiring that has driven the firm’s headcount to 125.
The development team is mostly from Connecticut, he explains, but the firm has looked to Boston to fill many IT jobs.
Jalan says New Haven “is a pretty happening town” with projects like The District adding to the world-class entrepreneurial ecosystem that is an asset to all corporate citizens.
