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In Awards, Foundries

Bidgely Selected as 2022 S&P Platts Global Energy Awards Finalist

Bidgely has been named a finalist in the 24th Annual Platts Global Energy Awards. The 2022 Finalists were announced by event host S&P Global Commodity Insights, the leading independent provider of information, analysis and benchmark prices for commodities, metals, petrochemicals, energy and energy transition markets. Often described as “the Oscars of the energy industry,” the Platts Global Energy Awards recognize corporate and individual innovation, leadership and exemplary performance in 19 categories spanning the entire energy and chemicals complex.

“We are honored to be named a finalist in the ‘Grid Edge’ category for the second consecutive year – recognized for our commitment to advancing today’s electric grid,” said Gautam Aggarwal, chief revenue officer for Bidgely. “We’re proud to support our utility partners with behind-the-meter intelligence that turns the impending wave of EVs into an opportunity for creating a more reliable, cleaner grid.”

Most notable in today’s evolving energy grid is the rise of electric vehicles (EV) and global clean energy commitments, with global EV sales expected to surge from 3.1 million in 2020 to 14 million in 2025. Bidgely’s EV Solution leverages applied artificial intelligence (AI) to first identify homes with EVs across entire service territories and then offer a personalized customer journey that educates consumers about their charging patterns and energy consumption. Bidgely EV Solution deployments with Avangrid’s United Illuminating and other leading utility providers are being recognized by S&P Global Commodity Insights for alleviating grid congestion, supporting high energy demands from EV charging and more.

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In New York, Funding Announcement, CRM & Customer Experience

EcoCart drives $14.5M of new funding into its sustainable shopping experience

With all the plastic and paper covering the things we buy, more and more consumers are seeking out companies that operate more sustainably.

EcoCart has built an infrastructure for e-commerce companies and works with them to make that shopping experience more transparent and sustainable. Here’s how it works: The three-year-old software company performs product life cycle audits for its customers to help them calculate, analyze and offset their carbon emissions.

Customers can then see how that company is doing in terms of protecting trees and using clean energy sources while companies can offer offsetting initiatives within its shopping experience — for example, providing a way for them to make carbon-neutral purchases or showing the number of trees saved from an order.

“Consumers are looking for ways to shop sustainably, but brands don’t have a great way of being able to communicate that to their customers or execute on that in an inexpensive, easy-to-understand way, and that’s all the things that we help with,” EcoCart co-founder Dane Baker told TechCrunch.

Baker and Peter Twomey started the company about three and a half years ago and launched its product about two years ago. When we last profiled the San Francisco–based company in 2021, it had raised $3 million in seed funding and was working with 500 customers.

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In Interview, CRM & Customer Experience

A new marketing metric: ELTV (Extended Lifetime Value) Webcast with Mention Me

In a webinar we recorded in Sep 2022, Lior Weizman of SAP.iO met with Kat Wray, Head of Partnerships at Mention Me (an SAP partner), and Nils Siméon, Key Account Executive at SAP Customer Experience, to discuss how brands should better evaluate the value of their customers and how they can even extend it.

It’s not a secret that brands today are facing real challenges with their customer acquisition. The main reasons as of now are:

1. The sunset of third-party data, with Apple iOS updates and recent regulation changes, is causing brands to take a step back in analyzing their acquisition channels.

2. Customer acquisition costs have increased dramatically and are not sustainable. With no or less past data, marketing channels must work a lot harder to get the same results.

3. On the customer side, there is a growing distrust amongst customers on how brands are using their data to target them.

For these main reasons, brands must diversify the acquisition channels they’re using, and prioritized channels that are trusted, authentic and such that capture first party data can used to scale growth. Referral marketing is a great example for such a channel. This is where customers recommend brands to their friends, and when you think about it, it’s the most trusted acquisition channel. According to Mention Me, referral marketing is now a $1 billion market, and will be a $50 billion market by 2040.

Watch Here…

In Tel Aviv, Supply Chain Management

Unlocking value from smart meter data with NET2GRID

There is no doubt that we are facing a harder winter than ever before. We hear more reports on the news about low-income families in Europe that simply can’t afford to pay they energy bill. With the current uncertainty in the international geopolitical arena, combined with the changing climate due to global warming, such situations will only repeat themselves more and more.

Smart meter data can actually be very valuable for energy suppliers and utilities in such times and can help them better adjust and expand their services. This is exactly why we partner with companies like NET2GRID. The NET2GRID solution will improve three capabilities:

1. Better customer experience, by giving insights to households about their energy consumption. NET2GRID delivers a white label app or an API which energy suppliers can integrate into their own energy app.

2. The second one is customer intelligence, by building profiles of customers and better knowing your customer. Thus, enabling energy retailers to give targeted advice and offers to their customers to become more energy efficient

3. Enabling better demand forecasting in their energy procurement and reduce imbalance costs by considering distributed energy resources like EV and Solar PV using disaggregated data.

Listen in as Lior Weizman from SAP.iO, Berend Olde Rikkert, Chief Commercial Officer at NET2GRID (an SAP partner), and Jörg Ferchow, Chief Solution Manager at SAP, discuss how energy suppliers and utilities can better leverage their smart meter data.

In Supply Chain Management

How Four Startups From SAP.iO Drive Supply Chain and Retail Innovation

The SAP.iO startup accelerator program is a rich source of innovation and startups taking on major business challenges. Acceleration Economy has previously chronicled more than a dozen of those companies, including Wisy, the Cloud Wars Startup of the Year for 2022.

A number of SAP.iO companies have recently provided significant business updates — from customer wins and deployments to new funding rounds — that are detailed below. In total, there are updates on four companies that are part of the program, including one we’ve profiled previously and three others that are new to Acceleration Economy readers.

Verusen: Supply Chain Gains

Atlanta-based Verusen makes supply chain software that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to help companies manage their materials more effectively, with the goal of harmonizing disparate data so that they have what they need, when they need it, and where they need it. Verusen calls that concept “Material Truth.”

Verusen officials said this week that they have now helped customers manage more than $2 billion of inventory and nearly 3 million SKUs. The company says its system has achieved more than $53 million in client-verified savings opportunities.

Verusen works with:

  • Manufacturers to optimize the way they manage inventory and collaborate with suppliers
  • Consumer packaged goods firms to better respond to the changing mix of products that customers buy
  • Energy and oil/gas firms to ensure the reliability and availability of their materials
  • Pulp and paper to build resiliency and transparency into supply chains

Today, roughly 80% of the company’s customer base uses SAP systems including ERP. Their customers are also users of Oracle and Infor ERP technology.

Officials note that one major advantage of Verusen’s software is the use of NLP, which allows the software to dramatically compress the normally time-consuming process of cleansing, categorizing, and governing data for analysis.

An official from an (unnamed) energy company in the U.S. said the following about its work with Verusen: “We had challenges reviewing the significant number of materials required on an annual basis, and the Verusen platform was able to help us automate the process.  In addition to solving some of our process challenges, Verusen has also helped us identify significant inventory savings across our supply network.”

Referencing the company’s progress and its business update, Verusen Founder and CEO Paul Noble said: “We are solving complex problems and reinventing how business gets done for global manufacturers and suppliers through materials intelligence — a proven, accelerated path to better productivity and reduced costs.”

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In Paris, Funding Announcement

French inventory-pooling platform Stockly raises €12 million

Stockly, the French digital platform that helps e-tailers pool and share inventory to avoid stock-outs, has announced it has raised €12 million in capital. Stockly will use the funding to expand across Europe. The funding round involved Eurazeo, the Daphni investment fund and a number of “world-class” business angels, as Stockly stated. Stockly was founded in 2018, and its solutions are already in use at Galeries Lafayette, Decathlon, Go Sport, Jonak and several hundred other partners.

Stockly is able to digitally share the inventory of the various e-tailers that use its tools, boosting stock depth for each of them. The solution is invisible to customers, as the various stakeholders request neutral packaging. If a product is available from a number of different inventories, Stockly’s algorithm will decide where to source it based on price, distance to customer and service quality.

Stockly was part of Foundry Paris Consumer Industry Program.

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In CRM & Customer Experience, Business Technology Platform, Paris

Global accelerators boost Swiss startups’ growth

From America to Europe: Five Swiss startups have been selected to join global acceleration programs to pursue their growth ambitions. Plug and Play has selected two startups for its food and its insurtech acceleration program. In Europe, ScanTrust, CollectID and Foodetective will get support from European Innovation Council and SAP program respectively.

The global plug and Play Accelerator provides selected startups worldwide with access to leading corporates to help catalyse their innovation, and give them access to financing and its network. The upcoming Plug and Play Silicon Valley Summit from November 15-17 will feature over 250 startups across 17 verticals. Batch 12 of the Food and Beverages vertical includes Cultivated Biosciences, the startup specialising in alternative dairy fat. The company is developing a fermented creamy ingredient from GMO-free yeast which offers the creaminess needed for plant-based dairies such as cheese, milk or ice cream.

Two Swiss startups made it into SAP’s new start-up equity-free accelerator program focused on the “Future of Retail and Consumer Products” at the SAP.iO Foundry Paris, which has already supported 65 companies in developing their solution. Over the next five months, the cohort of 12 international start-ups will get access to personalised mentoring from SAP France executives, exposure to SAP technology and application programming interfaces (APIs), as well as opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers around the world. St.Gallen-based CollectID is dedicated to fighting counterfeits through its encrypted NFC tags, which are embedded in products to guarantee authenticity, improve the phygital experience and establish a direct communication channel between brands. Foodetective is a management platform and infrastructure (API) for the F&B industry. Companies use Foodetective to automate operations, simplify administration, increase online revenues and accelerate new business opportunities.

Read More Here…

In HR & People Engagement, Announcements, Foundries, Berlin

SAP.iO selects seven startups to join its Future of Work program in Berlin

September 26, 2022 – SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) is about to launch its next startup program focused on the future of work at SAP.iO Foundry Berlin. After months of scouting and evaluating more than 90 startups from 22 countries with 25 experts from within and outside of SAP, seven startups made it into the program.

“As organizations navigate the post-pandemic world, the future of work continues to be a top priority,” said Meg Bear, President & Chief Product Officer at SAP SuccessFactors. “To make sure we continue to help customers put people at the center of every aspect of work, we constantly expand our ecosystem with new and exciting startup partners.”

During the program, the startups will receive mentorship from SAP executives and leading industry experts from Capgemini as well as access to SAP® technology, application programming interfaces (APIs), and opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers.

“Business today are looking for innovative solutions that help shape their future of work strategies. This includes solving complex business challenges around cloud, digital and platforms,” said Martin Schmidt, Head of People & Technology Consulting at Capgemini in Germany. “Understanding the skills that are needed to drive this transformation is crucial for them to stay ahead of the curve. We’re excited to work with the selected startups to foster innovation and deliver sustainable value to our joint clients.”

The selected startups represent and deliver innovation in four different categories: Talent Management, Core HR & Payroll, Human Experience Management and Workforce Planning & Analytics. The following are joining the program:

  1. Cobrainer addresses the war for talent from within by automatically profiling employees’ skills and ambitions and providing personalized internal growth recommendations in seconds.
  2. Fifty bridges the intention-action gap in trainings and business transformations. Fifty’s eDoing platform enables rapid and measurable adoption of new behaviors. It combines nudge and artificial intelligence for use at scale.
  3. gradar is the job grading system for the modern workplace. It’s the complete solution to design and manage a job architecture helping businesses perform consistent job evaluation that establishes fair and transparent pay structures.
  4. Onwards HR is a risk mitigation platform that streamlines employee separations and provides advanced analytics to help organizations support their DEI and talent strategies.
  5. Rolebot is the world’s first AI-powered ‘job board in reverse’ for top-tier passive talent, surfacing the other 75% of the skilled workforce who never apply. Its customers provenly land diverse, fresh talent in half the time and exceed their DEI goals.
  6. shyftplan is an AI-based solution for shift scheduling and focused on manufacturing customers. One of the key capabilities in shyftplan is the automation of the scheduling process. The solution is scalable to thousands of employees, even for complex cases.
  7. Workmotion enables companies to grow and expand their teams without regard to national borders. It digitizes and simplifies time-consuming onboarding processes, helping companies create employment contracts instantly and onboard talent from all over the world quickly, easily and with compliance.

With this announcement, SAP.iO Foundry Berlin goes into the next phase and is calling innovative businesses who run on SAP SuccessFactors and want to be the frontrunners in adopting and bringing new value to their workforce, leaders and HR teams.

SAP customers who want to support this cohort can expect to dive right into curated innovation and design thinking workshops, close collaboration on use case definitions, proof of concepts, and ready-to-implement integrations on SAP solutions at the end of the program.

If you want to learn more about how you can get involved and benefit from this cohort, check out the SAP.iO Foundry Berlin website.

If you want to dive deeper, get in touch with the team.

About SAP.iO
SAP.iO delivers new partnerships and products for SAP by accelerating and scaling startup innovation as well as incubating employee ventures. SAP.iO brings together innovators from every region, industry, and line of business to transform how businesses run. Since 2017, SAP.iO has helped 450+ external startups and internal ventures accelerate their growth while enabling thousands of SAP customers to access innovation. For more information, visit http://sap.io/.

 

 

In Inspiring Innovators, Berlin, Munich, Interview, Supply Chain Management

Inspiring Innovators: Chicko Sousa Founder of GreenPlat, On No Time for Waste

At SAP.iO, we work with innovative people and new technologies that positively impact our world every day, and we think it’s time to share their stories with you! In our series, “Inspiring Innovators,” we get to hear how leaders of cutting-edge startup technologies overcame, thrived, and pursued their goals. SAP.iO’s Alexa Gorman sat down to discuss the road to success and lessons learned with some of our most inspiring startup founders.

Meet Chicko Sousa

It has been said that Chico Sousa is a Mechanical Engineer by choice, but a specialist in the acceleration of clean production by nature aptly sums up his journey to entrepreneurship. Starting as a mechanical engineer working for Volvo, Chicko was assigned to projects that produced scrap materials needing to be recycled or reimagined. He left Volvo after successfully managing those projects to start a company that built recycling plants in Brazil, creating 13 new plants over 11 years before selling his company in 2013. He then came to Sao Paulo to help the municipality with public projects, generating environmental improvements in the fight against CO2 emissions and plastic use.

From there, Chicko created a YouTube series where he did interviews inside garbage trucks, much like Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee”, to raise recycling awareness. The wild success of this web series helped increase the municipality’s recycling rates significantly but created new issues. They started to see problems with permits as they began selling the recycled materials. At this time, Chicko realized a need to control and manage information to produce the proper flow of materials for licensed recycling and founded the company GreenPlat in 2016.

Working with recycling technologies for over 20 years and with software for almost ten years, Chicko created GreenPlat, a clean production SaaS, which today has more than 690,000 companies registered on the platform. Since 2018, GreenPlat has been a part of the World Economic Forum in the Pioneering Technology category, as they were the first company to use blockchain technology for waste traceability. So far, 1 million tons of waste have been managed through their software; all disposed of correctly without polluting the environment. This means a cleaner and healthier environment for all and for businesses, increased visibility into recycling, compliance, and traceability.

“I think this is a worldwide situation where people are done talking and ready to act. We can see this movement, and it is encouraging. We are ready for action; there is no time for waste.”

Read More…

In Foundries, Paris, Consumer Industries, CRM & Customer Experience, Announcements

SAP.iO Foundry Paris launches new startup program on “Future of Retail and Consumer Products”

September 21, 2022 – SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) has launched a new startup accelerator program focused on the “Future of Retail and Consumer Products” at SAP.iO Foundry Paris. 12 international startups were selected by a jury of SAP experts, partners, customers and investment funds to join the program. These startups were recognized as pioneers in this year’s chosen field, a theme that is more topical than ever with the upheavals in customer habits and the customer journey due to effects of the pandemic and the accelerated digitalization of all businesses.  

SAP.iO Foundry Paris, SAP’s equity-free startup accelerator in France, has already helped more than 65 growth businesses develop their business or their solution. The Foundry’s efforts helped meet France’s overall startup investment goal set at the #ChooseFrance summit, France’s flagship forum for economic attractiveness. 

“SAP.iO is committed to accelerating startups to help customers run at their best. For this program, our focus is on retail, addressing the traceability and authenticity of products as well as offering consumers an improved and differentiating purchasing experience”, said Odilia von Zitzewitz, Interim Lead at SAP.iO Foundry Paris. “We are very proud to accompany this new class of startups and help them scale their innovations.” 

Over the next five months, the startups will have access to personalized mentoring from SAP France executives, exposure to SAP® technology and application programming interfaces (APIs), as well as opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers around the world. 

The following startups are participating in the latest SAP.iO Foundry Paris program: 

  1. Sorga Technology supports retail brands in their digital innovation by offering a low-energy solution ensuring the transparency and traceability of their products.
  2. Arianee provides businesses with simple solutions for building direct relationships with consumers, respectful of user data and independent of large technology platforms.
  3. CollectID can be used to guarantee product authenticity, improve the physical experience and establish a direct communication channel between brands. The solution guarantees the authenticity and uniqueness of products while bringing brands closer to their customers.
  4. DIAKSE develops and markets a solution for creating virtual showrooms in the metaverse with one objective: to enable brands to better communicate about their products and thus help them increase their sales.
  5. Foodetective is a management platform and infrastructure (API) for the F&B industry. Companies use Foodetective to automate operations, simplify administration, increase online revenues and accelerate new business opportunities.
  6. LIVEBUY GmbH is an online shopping solution for leading retailers that provides both the technology and the right creators to build a successful content platform within online shops.
  7. Priceloop has developed an AI to facilitate and automate the pricing process, offering the best prices taking into account all the essential parameters.
  8. Replika Software is a turnkey social selling solution. It enables brands to activate a network of social sellers with a turnkey business to inspire on social media, sell online and connect with customers.
  9. Shopreme GmbH is developing a technology called “Scan & Go” that brings the benefits of online shopping to real shops including speed, ease of payment, personalized recommendations, shared shopping lists, and more.
  10. SmartPixels provides a 3D product configuration and visualization tool to help fashion and luxury brands create personalized and interactive experiences online and in-store.
  11. SMARTZER LTD’s platform is used by brands to transform their videos and live streams into interactive and actionable experiences, allowing them to get direct ROI from content and measure detailed data from video interactions.
  12. YZR automates and accelerates all of its customers’ text data projects with a powerful solution based on automatic language processing.

If you want to learn more about this program, check out the SAP.iO Foundry Paris website or get in touch with the team. 

About SAP.iO  
SAP.iO delivers new partnerships and products for SAP by accelerating and scaling startup innovation as well as incubating employee ventures. SAP.iO brings together innovators from every region, industry, and line of business to transform how businesses run. Since 2017, SAP.iO has helped 450+ external startups and internal ventures accelerate their growth while enabling thousands of SAP customers to access innovation. For more information, visit http://sap.io/.

In Singapore, HR & People Engagement

Skillnote Goes Global with Manufacturing Skills Management on SAP Store

When you fire up your laptop or switch on your car, you probably don’t think much about the manufacturing involved in these great inventions of modern life or the human skills required to produce them. Sure, automation and robotics and all manner of technology are employed; but it’s people with specialized capabilities that are the brains behind it. This is the domain of Skillnote, a popular app on SAP Store that helps manufacturers manage employee skills, qualifications, and certifications. Why is this such a big deal? In short, because precise skills and training management are necessary to meet customer requirements and international standards for quality assurance. That’s how manufacturers ensure that your indispensable devices work reliably as finely tuned machines.

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In Uncategorized, Blog, Global, Venture Studio

Did you catch all our latest SAP.iO Venture Studio highlights?

SAP.iO sign

July – September 2022 | Achievements & News from SAP.iO Venture Studio 

SAP.iO Venture Studio drives a new era of organic growth at SAP. It empowers entrepreneurial teams inside SAP to turn innovative ideas into profitable businesses and invests in these new employee-led ventures who are focused on solving some of the biggest problems in enterprise business processes. SAP.iO Venture Studio helps start and scale new ventures by providing design, development and sales support. Find out more on sap.io/studio. 

Encore by SAP 

As a secondary marketplace, the Encore by SAP solution is enabling regenerative business processes and empowering network members to close the loops and make circular economy a reality. The demand-driven enterprise trading platform provides a simplified way to offer and discover secondary materials and components with integration into back-end procurement or asset management solutions. The platform enables trading of aftermarket components, such as alternators or batteries, and is looking to expand into further areas, such as secondary materials — from aluminium to polyurethane — or production waste and scrap.  

  • Earlier this year, SAP.iO Venture Studio welcomed two new ventures: Encore by SAP received investment to work on enabling the circular economy. Read more about the venture here and watch this intro video with Co-Founder and General Manager Edward Kosec here.  
  • As a matter of fact, Encore is already working with the consortium Catena-X. They kicked off testing Encore’s marketplace to help the German automotive industry become more sustainable. Get more information and impressions of the launch on LinkedIn here.  

Discover more on this venture on https://encorebysap.io/ 

Feather by SAP  

Feather by SAP is an end-to-end recommerce solution that support brands and retailers that want to accelerate the shift from linear to circular business by taking ownership over their recommerce activities. Facilitate the in-house business processes, capture data, engage with the shopper, and own the end-to-end product life cycle. 

  • Feather recently collaborated with students from the Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam on machine learning applications for resale. Check out some impressions via Feather’s social media presence.  

Discover more on this venture on https://www.getfeather.io/  

GreenToken by SAP 

GreenToken by SAP is a supply chain solution that offers companies new levels of transparency through reliable, blockchain-based information. Gain visibility into where raw materials came from and produce products with knowledge about where and how the materials were produced, even in complex, non-batch supply chains. 

  • GreenToken received funding in 2019 and quickly became a major growth opportunity, enabling customers to trace raw material supply chains for informed purchasing decisions. Let alone in the last quarter they managed to 
    • Announce a pilot with Japanese chemicals company DIC Corporation 
    • Collaborate with automotive consortium Catena-X on creating transparency of emission information from business partners across the entire automotive value chain 
    • Won in the category “Technology, Media & Telecommunication” for the the Australian Financial Review’s Sustainability Leaders for 2022 awards 
    • Featured in Canada’s second biggest daily newspaper, The Globe and Mail, sharing their journey and business idea 
  • Having gained traction among customers and proving their business value, this employee-led venture now graduated from the SAP.iO Venture Studio portfolio and joined SAP’s Sustainability growth area on September 1. With the early support of our inhouse venture program, they have become the latest example of having turned an innovative business idea by SAP employees into a profitable business and product. They will now further scale within the bigger organization. 

Discover more on this venture on https://www.green-token.io/  

Paid Promptly by SAP  

Paid Promptly by SAP drives cash into your business faster by automating receivable processes. Deliver a seamless, personalized, customer experience through Paid Promptly’s automated communication solution, beginning when an invoice is first released until payment is received. 

  • This venture is making invoice communication more convenient. Their solution is now available for all SAP customers on the SAP Store  
  • You can meet Paid Promptly at SAP Spend Connect Live from October 24 to 26 in Dallas, Texas. Register for the event here.  

Discover more on this venture on https://www.paidpromptly.io/  

Source Agent by SAP  

Great sourcing shouldn’t be a secret. Source Agent by SAP gives you the insights and strategies to address spend intelligently and wow your stakeholders. Identify sourcing opportunities by aligning your spend to current market intelligence. Receive a targeted sourcing strategy and supplier recommendations based on your data and requirements for each spend category. Quickly convert strategies and plans into eSourcing event prep and execution. 

  • As the team is preparing for giving customers direct access to their tool, they are offering strategic sourcing for free! Their rapid test program is a quick and free way to help businesses see spend classified and aligned to their scoping framework. Read more about this opportunity here. 
  • You can meet Source Agent at SAP Spend Connect Live from October 24 to 26 in Dallas, Texas. Keep yourself updated by following the venture’s social media presence and register for the event here.  

Discover more on this venture on https://www.sourceagent.io/  

Tax Eye by SAP  

Tax Eye by SAP is a virtual digital assistant technology that improves and powers tax business processes. Tax Eye allows tax professionals to focus on higher value add activities using human centered artificial intelligence and reduce corporate tax burden. 

  • Earlier this year, SAP.iO Venture Studio welcomed two new ventures: Tax Eye by SAP simplifies access to tax intelligence. Find out more in this announcement. 

Discover more on this venture on https://taxeyebysap.io/ 

In San Francisco, Funding Announcement, CRM & Customer Experience

FindMine Closes New Venture Round

FindMine, the leader in AI-powered dynamic content creation for brands, announced that it has closed a new venture capital funding round. Led by XSeed Capital and Underscore VC, this investment supplements a previous seed round and brings total capital investment in FindMine to $9.9 million.

Proceeds from the investment will be used to accelerate go-to-market activities and advance development of FindMine’s AI-powered content engine. Driven by predictive intelligence and merchant sales data, FindMine helps brands articulate their unique points of view to increase revenue and inventory performance across multiple sales channels – including e-commerce, email campaigns and targeted messaging, advertising and social media campaigns, and in-store applications such as kiosks, personal shopper programs and sales associates platforms.

By focusing on the content bottleneck, FindMine has created an entirely new category that addresses current shortcomings in the personalization and customer data platform (CDP) markets. The current personalization landscape has done a great job at carving out one-to-one communication channels with consumers based on their personal data. But it puts the onus on the brand to come up with content to share, resulting in the same small amount of assets being sent to every consumer/segment because marketing teams cannot create bespoke editorial content for every consumer. FindMine’s technology allows marketers to showcase unique, curated shoppable assets to every single segment and customer to improve top-line revenue with larger shopping carts and longer, more profitable customer lifecycles. Merchants use FindMine to improve bottom-line profitability and increase gross margins thanks to more effective inventory and logistics management.

“The current personalization process is broken, and one-to-one, persona-based marketing simply does not scale, because the industry forgot about one big piece of the equation: the content. We’re changing the game with AI-powered automation that can create visual, shoppable assets in milliseconds,” commented FindMine CEO Michelle Bacharach. “We’re excited about this investment because it means that we can continue to grow our platform’s ability to create highly-produced and differentiated editorial content out of thin air – empowering brands and retailers to maintain visibility with customers and other key audiences while driving both revenue and loyalty.”

Read More…

In New York, HR & People Engagement

Remote And Hybrid Workers Have Higher Degree Of Psychological Safety At Work Than On-Site Employees, Says New MeQuilibrium Study

Remote employees have enjoyed better work-life balance, no commute, and the ability to work anywhere, however, a new meQuilibrium survey of 3,900 employees sheds new light on why people are reluctant to return to office — remote and hybrid employees have a higher degree of psychological safety at work than on-site employees. On-site employees said they are 66% more likely to feel like mistakes are held against them, they are 57% more likely to say that people are rejected for being different, and 36% more likely to find it difficult to ask teammates for help.

There is a real difference in psychological safety among work settings,” said Brad Smith, PhD., Chief Science Officer, meQuilibrium. “In many remote-for-the-first-time environments where everybody is the same size square on the video call, it’s often easier to speak up and be heard.”

The survey found that those working on-site are less likely to feel at ease discussing difficult topics, less likely to feel safe taking risks and less likely to feel that the team respects and values each other. Nearly half (44.5%) of the employees surveyed said they would quit if there was a requirement to work on site without a remote or hybrid option.

A lack of psychological safety at work can have repercussions on a business. Teams where members don’t feel comfortable taking a risk to raise a new idea or suggest a new approach will have difficulty innovating. In order for organizations to be successful, its people need to feel comfortable speaking up, asking questions, and disagreeing with team members and managers.

Considering psychological safety across different levels of resilience, the study found that 60% of employees with low resilience and low psychological safety feel burned out and 34% are thinking about quitting their job. Just 5% of highly resilient employees who feel psychologically safe reported feeling burned out and just 3% were thinking about quitting.

Read More…