Y Soft Corporation is a multinational software and electronic hardware company founded in 2000 operating in 17 countries. The company's headquarters are in Brno, Czech Republic, with other offices in France, Hungary, Israel, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, United States, Japan, Singapore, Australia, and China. Y Soft Ventures, the company's in-house venture arm, was established in 2014 as a way for the two co-founders to assist other Central European entrepreneurs looking to start their own companies with business and financial support. The company's main product is the YSoft SafeQ platform which manages 2D and 3D printing. It does pull printing, paper copying, faxing, scan workflows and other tasks.
History
Y Soft was co-founded in 2000 by Václav Muchna, CEO and Chairman of the Board, and Martin de Martini, now Chief Information Officer and Board Member, as part of a student project with Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Muchna left university and started Y Soft a month after his 20th birthday. Y Soft's first expansion was the opening of an office in Hungary. In 2008, Y Soft acquired XpertImage, resulting in the establishment of Y Soft North America in Grapevine, Texas, and new offices in Japan and Israel.
In 2012, Y Soft filed and received a US patent for a "System for scalable processing of files in the cloud". The following year, the company expanded into Australia with the acquisition of Equitrac Systems, and also established an office in Dubai. In 2014, Y Soft created an in-house venture capital fund, Y Soft Ventures, to invest in Central European startups. Convinced that 3D printing would become as ubiquitous as 2D printing and with no 3D printers available with open APIs, in late 2014 Y Soft invested a stake in, and later fully acquired, the Czech 3D printer company be3D. Soon after, YSoft SafeQ was integrated with the be3D printers to create a new product, YSoft be3D eDee, a 3D printer integrated with YSoft SafeQ providing print management, workflow and an accounting system. In 2015, Y Soft started offering print management and document capture as software as a service by subscription. In 2016 the company established YSoft Labs, an internal innovation center focusing on artificial intelligence, robotics, business processes and future developments in 3D printing. In July 2016 the YSoft SafeQ version 6 was introduced as a platform. In Autumn 2016 YSoft released its Global Operational Excellence Framework, a set of processes and tools that facilitates deployment of YSoft SafeQ for large international customers. In 2016, Y Soft joined the Mopria Alliance. In 2017 YSoft SafeQ became the de facto Mopria certified enterprise print server for printing from Android mobile apps. The company also opened offices in the UK. In 2017 Y Soft opened an office in China and moved its manufacturing facility to larger premises. In 2019 Y Soft launched be3D Academy, part of its YSoft be3D eDee 3D printing education platform, containing resources related to 3D printing for use by teachers.
Awards
In 2006 Václav Muchna received the "Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year" award from Ernst & Young. In 2011 he also received the "Technology Entrepreneur of the Year for 2010" award for the Czech Republic and "Entrepreneur of the Year" for the South Moravian Region. In 2014 Y Soft won the CzechInvest "Investor of the Year" award in IT & Share Services for 2013. In 2016 Muchna received the "Difference Maker" award from ENX magazine. Y Soft was named in the European Business Awards' "Ones to Watch" Innovation category in 2017. In 2018 Vaclav Muchna received the Centennial Award from the U.S. Embassy in the Czech Republic. In 2019 Václav Muchna was named a Difference Maker in Office Technology by ENX Magazine. In 2019 YSoft SafeQ 6 was chosen by Buyers Lab as 2020 Outstanding Enterprise Print & Workflow Management Platform.
