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In Singapore, Supply Chain Management

H3 Dynamics Launches World’s Most Advanced Drone Charging Station

H3 Dynamics announces the launch of DBX-G7, a brand new vertiport system for autonomous drone operations. Smarter, faster, and multi-modal with 5G and 4G, DBX was designed to scale on-going digitization efforts in safety compliance, maintenance and crisis management.

Applications range from smart cities across Asia to various types of industrial sites worldwide.

Developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, DBX-G7 is a direct response to the new telepresence and remote work paradigm. DBX performs all the functions of an on-site drone pilot: navigation, docking, stowing, battery charging, data retrieval, transmission, and cloud-based processing. Autonomous systems such as DBX help reduce the need for on-site presence and can help alleviate rising labour shortage pressures.

“With accelerating digitization, the need for structural scans is also growing while pilot availability is limited. We are looking to close the gap with our DBX autonomous drone stations.” Says Samuel Chauffaille, head of H3 Dynamics’ robotics systems division.

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In Singapore, Funding Announcement, Supply Chain Management

NavVis Adds Fresh Funding To Fulfill Its Mission To Digitize Commercial Buildings And Assets

NavVis is a global leader in end-to-end solutions for reality capture and digital twins. The company is on a mission to bridge the gap between the physical and digital world by enabling immediate access to building information, anytime, anywhere. The NavVis product offering includes the world’s most advanced reality capture solution, which allows for rapid digitization of buildings and assets, and cloud-based digital twin software for the manufacturing and construction sector.

NavVis announced that they have received 25€m of fresh equity funding that complements the recent 20€m debt funding from the European Investment Bank (EIB), raising the total investment to 85€m. The round was led by Cipio Partners, with additional capital from previous investors, BayBG, MIG, Target Partners, Digital+ Partners, and Kozo Keikaku Engineering, making NavVis one of the best-funded deep tech startups in Europe.

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In Business Technology Platform

Unlocking The Next Growth Frontier By Using Alternative Data Sources

The holiday gift-giving season is just around the corner, and businesses are hopeful for a strong year-end due to the opening of the economy and the expected lift of the U.S. travel ban. Adobe Analytics forecasts a record-breaking online shopping season, which could top $200 billion.

Factoring in the ongoing challenges around Covid-19, the flu season and the growing adoption of models like buy-now-pay-later and curbside pickup — as well as recent supply issues — in order to avoid empty shelves, companies will need to tap into new data sources to anticipate and meet rising consumer demand.

Buy-Now-Pay-Later (And Hopefully Deliver)

Supply chains and stockouts remain the main issue in front of most businesses ahead of the holiday season. According to Adobe’s holiday forecast referenced earlier, out-of-stock messages are up 172% from the pre-pandemic period. These messages are primarily driven by supply chain factors, including forecasted inaccuracies and strained logistics networks. Ever since the start of the pandemic, we’ve witnessed sudden spikes in demand for unforeseen categories — from toilet paper to thermometers. While the reasons for most of them are clear in hindsight, companies must adapt quickly to stay close to consumer trends.

During the pandemic, we’ve also witnessed reformed consumer behavior and habits when it comes to health, ethics and sustainability. Additionally, they now demand the same commitment from brands and are ready to act and boycott to drive that change.

In this new market dynamic, narrative is king, and a brand’s story has become overwhelmingly shaped by consumers through their reviews, blogs and social media posts. A McKinsey survey reports that 33% of Gen Z consumers and about 12% of boomers choose to buy from companies that align with their values. Businesses must recognize that this will not be a one-time adjustment of strategy but a new competitive factor to consider.

Some of the key questions that need to be addressed immediately include: How quickly can brands embrace change in consumer values, preferences and habits, and to what extent (if at all) can they spot the early signals?

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In Foundries, Shanghai

SAP Launches First SAP.iO Program in China

SAP.iO has launched its first program in China focused on intelligent manufacturing. Five Chinese startups have been selected to join the cohort at the new SAP.iO Foundry Shanghai.

The SAP.iO program is designed to accelerate early-stage business-to-business startups that can extend the SAP portfolio and deliver additional innovation to customers.

“Intelligent manufacturing is not only the national policy of the Chinese government but also the only way forward for China’s economic growth and the transformation of manufacturing enterprises,” said Dr. Chenhong Huang, Global Executive Vice President, SAP SE, and President, SAP Greater China. “Engaging with partners such as startups is critical to succeed in the rapidly growing enterprise software market. SAP.iO complements intelligent manufacturing software from SAP with startup innovation.”

The new Shanghai location reflects SAP’s continued commitment to the vibrant Chinese ecosystem. It extends SAP’s global network of equity-free startup accelerators in the Asia Pacific Japan, North America and Europe, Middle East, and Africa regions as its tenth SAP.iO Foundries location. During the 12-week program, the selected startups will have access to curated mentorship from SAP executives, exposure to SAP technology and application programming interfaces (APIs) and opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers.

“We will be working hand in hand with these amazing startups over the next three months to help them integrate with SAP technology and deliver high value to our customers,” said Lalitha Bhaskara, Vice President, SAP.iO Foundries for Asia Pacific Japan & China, SAP.

The cohort of startups at SAP.iO Foundry Shanghai include:

  • AI-LINK Network Co. Ltd. is a mobile edge computing platform that provides 5G services, including terminals, base stations and cloud platforms. It enables industrial automation for customers in manufacturing, logistics and energy industries.
  • TPSON is a fire protection prewarning system provider. It uses artificial intelligence (AI), fingerprint technology, cloud computing and operation services to integrate organically and provide comprehensive fire AI alerts, energy demand management and efficiency improvements for smart factories.
  • SunwayLand provides Internet of Things gateway SCADA and automation software for the multilevel control needs of digital workshops and smart factories.
  • HiScene develops augmented reality products and services that use AI core technologies, such as computer vision, deep learning and intelligent interaction.
  • Geekplus Technology Co. Ltd. uses AI and advanced robotics technologies to create efficient, flexible and reliable logistics robot solutions that help businesses improve efficiency and realize the intelligent and flexible transformation of their supply chain.

To learn more about how SAP.iO is helping innovators start up and scale with SAP, please visit https://sap.io.

In CRM & Customer Experience, San Francisco, Funding Announcement

Breinify Accelerates Momentum in Second Half of 2021 for funding

Breinify, the leading lightweight personalization platform, is pleased to announce continued momentum following a $11 million round of seed funding in April 2021. The company has seen strong continued growth, meeting key milestones set for 2021 including tripling its headcount and 4.3x revenue, adding four new customers, and experiencing zero product downtime, among other drivers of operational success.

“It’s incredible to see how Breinify has grown,” says Diane Keng, co-founder and CEO of Breinify. “We’ve done an amazing job setting the foundations for scaling as we raised $11M in unheard of speeds. Our ‘crawl, walk, run’ approach really resonates with our customers and we’re beyond ecstatic to see how we’ve jump started their personalization journeys.”

New Notable Customers & Partnerships

In the last few years, retail/CPG brands have made quite a shift to become more digital-centric and data-driven. To successfully move the needle for these industries, these brands have to find ways to implement smart personalization. Unfortunately, unless you are Amazon, Google, or the top one or two brands in your industry, these companies face several challenges to enable even the most basic personalization capabilities. Breinify is democratizing data science by finding ways to make predictive capabilities accessible to non-technical, yet data-driven marketing teams. The company’s AI solution enables enterprise marketers to deliver predictive personalization at scale.

“2021 has shown us that brands are hungrier than ever for predictive personalization,” says Keng. “More of the brands we see in our kitchen pantries or bathroom cabinets embrace the importance of relevant personalization, but struggle to get effective experiences up and running. Through word of mouth, we organically quadrupled our customer base and expanded our partnership with more than 80 percent of our existing customers. The time to access data science powered personalization is now.”

Breinify customers include BevMo!, Duraflame, Sally Beauty, and many more to drive $125M in new revenue, 20x results (between split testing) for page visits, and +105% in CRM growth.

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In Business Technology Platform, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Portfolio News

Pulkit Jaiswal and Imogen Low from nwo.ai named to Forbes 30 Under 30 2022

Using machine learning and human metadata to identify global shifts early and throughout the trend lifecycle, nwo.ai enables corporations and governments to get insights on sectors ranging from consumer products to global war. Low, a Westpac Bank Trust Scholar, ran SAP’s Machine Learning efforts in APAC at age 17. Jaiswal, a drone pioneer and serial entrepreneur, developed geopolitical trading signals for hedge funds. The company has $3.5 million in seed funding.

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In San Francisco, Funding Announcement, HR & People Engagement

Sounding Board lands Series B to move coaching beyond services and into SaaS

Sounding Board, which started as a platform to connect leaders to coaches through a marketplace, realized early in the pandemic that mentorship needs a refresh.

“We’ve always delivered coaching in this traditional services format,” said Christine Tao, Sounding Board CEO and co-founder. “Well, we’re not in the office anymore so we actually have to speak differently about how we’re developing our talent and our leaders.” The insight led to the launch of a software platform that let users not only connect with coaches, but also track goals on an ongoing basis.

Now, nearly a year after landing a Series A with this vision, Sounding Board has closed a $30 million Series B led by Jazz Venture Partners and joined by Gaingels as well as angel investors such as theBoardlist’s Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Ancestry.com’s Deb Liu, Udemy’s Yvonne Chen and DocuSign’s Tammy Aguillon. Previous investors in the company include Canaan Partner and Precursor Ventures.

The round also saw JAZZ Venture Partners’ John Spinale join the board, an addition to Sounding Boards’ all-female team (and all-female board). “The joke is that we actually had to add diversity to our board … a man,” Tao laughed.

The fundraise comes off of solid growth for Sounding Board, which touts that it has had sequential growth for the past seven quarters. While Tao wouldn’t share specifics on revenues, the company said revenue was in the “multimillions” in the past and annual bookings have increased more than 350% year over year. Looking at stickiness, Sounding Board claims that net revenue retention is over 200%, meaning that existing customers continue to pay for the platform as time goes on.

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In New York, CRM & Customer Experience

Mercaux Named a Top Retail Tech Startup for 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic put retailers in a challenging and unchartered situation to navigate. Businesses everywhere have had to learn how to stay afloat while keeping up to date with government guidelines – taking care of both customer safety and satisfaction with the service provided.

In many ways, retail tech has become crucial in fostering retailers’ relationships with their customers, helping businesses to operate in innovative, socially-distanced ways throughout 2020-2021. Celebrating this area of tech, TechRound have created our list of the top retail tech startups for 2021.

Top Retail Tech Startups 2021:

  • Stint – Founded by Sam and Sol Schlagman
  • Mercaux – Founded by Olga Kotsur and Alexey Petrov
  • Futr – Founded by Andrew Wilkins and Lee Skyrme
  • Tire Agent – Founded by Jared Kugel
  • AfterShip – Founded by Andrew Chan, Dante Tsang and Teddy Chan
  • SellersFunding – Founded by Alessandro Rodrigues Novaes, Fabio D. Knijnik and Ricardo Pero
  • JTB Custom – Founded by Jud Barr
  • SharpEnd – Founded by Cameron Worth
  • SalesDuo – Founded by Arjun Narayan
  • Perfitly – Founded by Dave Sharma and Raghav Sharma
  • Oriient – Founded by Mickey Balter & Amiram Frish
  • Loyalize – Founded by David John
  • Edgify – Founded by Ofri Ben-Porat and Nadav Israel
  • Wevat – Founded by Raphael Chow
  • Soundtrack Your Brand – Founded by Ola Sars
  • eDesk – Founded by Ray Nolan
  • Farly – Founded by Farleigh Hungerford
  • Swift – Founded by Lorenzo Alessi
  • Swapi – Founded by Pete Howroyd

Mercaux, an SAP.iO startup participant, is on a mission to help re-invent physical retail stores by connecting them to the digital world. It’s new generation modular in-store platform connects stores to all the backend systems that ecommerce currently benefits from (such as order management, customer relationship management, product information management and payments), in addition to ecommerce itself. It then surfaces all this rich information into the hands of store associates through the Mercaux app, which is displayed on tablet or smartphone devices. This then allows the store associate to facilitate a much improved shopping experience by using assisted selling, digital styling, and mobile payment solutions to serve the customer.

Original article found here…

In Paris, Funding Announcement, Business Technology Platform

Milk Moovement Bags $1.5M From SDTC

Milk Moovement, which makes supply chain management software for the dairy industry, now controls about 10 percent of United States milk production and has bagged a $1.5 million grant from federal agency Sustainable Development Technology Canada.

CEO Robert Forsythe said in an interview that, in the wake of a United States expansion that saw the company move its sales office to Minnesota, Milk Moovement has inked deals with three of the country’s largest dairy cooperatives — including California Dairies, which includes more than 300 farms.

He said Milk Moovement’s revenue has grown about 350 percent on the back of the American deals, with annual recurring revenue set to hit $2 million by the end of this year.

In addition to a $4 million equity funding round last Spring, the money from SDTC follows a smaller, $100,000 grant from 2020.

“From there, they really looked at, ‘Okay, who’s high-performing and who’s growing really quickly, and who could benefit from further investment?” said Forsythe.

“They were just seeing traction and an ability to really double down on what we pitched for the $100K.”

Milk Moovement’s software is now used in the production of 23 billion pounds of milk annually — about a tenth of the 223 billion pounds produced every year in the United States. The technology is used by about 800 farms and Forsythe expects that number to double by early next year.

But he said $2 million of revenue from 10 percent of the market does not mean Milk Movement’s annual revenue from the U.S. will top out at $20 million. Dairy co-operatives are the company’s beachhead market, but next year, he expects to begin making inroads into the tenfold larger dairy processing industry.

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In San Francisco, Tel Aviv, CRM & Customer Experience, Business Technology Platform

SAP Startup Spotlight: Wisy

SAP invests in a lot of promising startups, and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of all of them. E-3 Magazine has selected the most interesting companies to showcase in our SAP Startup Spotlight Series. In this article, we will take a look at Wisy.

Min Chen is the CEO of Wisy, a startup that solves a $1.9T problem in the CPG and retail industry by optimizing operations, reducing out-of-stocks and waste with artificial intelligence. She is an award-winning serial entrepreneur and software engineer with 20 years of experience. In this interview, Min Chen will explain what problem Wisy is trying to solve, what makes her company different, and what’s next for the startup.

E-3 Magazine: What problem is Wisy trying to solve?

Min Chen: Wisy is solving a problem that affects everybody who shops at a store. All of us have had the inconvenience of not finding the product we want to buy, and this problem causes a $1.9T annual loss in the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) industry due to stockouts and waste. While stockouts can happen for several reasons, one of the most common causes is the lack of actionable data at the point-of-sale for CPG and retailer personnel to take timely, correct actions and prevent the problem in the future. Stockouts lead to losses in sales and waste as products are not sold before their expiry date because they are not being restocked on shelves in a timely manner.

Why is this such a difficult problem to solve?

Chen: Imagine a dairy company with over 100 different products sold at thousands of stores or the dairy department in a grocery store with thousands of products to choose from. Keeping track of product rotation, inventory, planogram compliance, assortments, and pricing of every product and every store is a daunting task that is still done manually. Manual retail execution processes rely on the memory and eyeballing capabilities of employees. It is no surprise that error margins are high, data are inaccurate and not actionable. High personnel turnover adds more challenges as new employees take longer to execute the same tasks and could make more mistakes due to their unfamiliarity with the company’s myriad of products.

How is Wisy helping to solve this problem?

Chen: Wisy has developed an artificial-intelligence solution that works in any mobile device to empower field employees to quickly identify retail execution issues and perform corrective actions quickly and consistently. Instead of verifying out-of-stocks manually, employees just have to snap a picture of the shelf and Wisy will identify issues such as out-of-stocks, planogram compliance, unauthorized products, and pricing issues. Employees won’t have to rely on memorizing the hundreds of products and their right quantities for each store to identify issues. Wisy will do that for them in a matter of seconds. It is likely to increase efficiency by at least 25 percent and accuracy to 90 percent, leading to potential combined benefit of 3 to 10 percent of revenue.

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In San Francisco, HR & People Engagement

Sacramento Region Innovation Awards: Humanly.io develops software to make the hiring process more efficient

Humanly.io is the winner in the Software and Hardware category of the Sacramento Region Innovation Awards. CREtelligent Inc. is the runner-up.

Humanly.io has developed artificial intelligence software that helps companies get beyond bias in screening job candidates.

The company’s software also helps automate screening and scheduling of hiring for companies and recruiters, but the special sauce is a suite of software that helps recruiters and hiring managers be more efficient during job candidate interviews and virtual interviews over teleconferencing. In essence, the software helps the interviewer get out of the way of the interviewee.

Humanly.io is headquartered in Seattle and Sacramento, and it raised a $4.2 million seed funding round in September from investors including Moneta Ventures of Folsom and Growth Factory Capital in Rocklin.

Humanly.io was the first funding announced from Rocklin entrepreneur and investor Mark Haney’s Growth Factory Capital fund. Humanly.io is also in the first cohort of companies in the 16-week Growth Factory accelerator program that started in September.

The September funding was led by Zeal Capital Partners in Washington, D.C., and also included Spark Growth Ventures, Basecamp Fund and Y Combinator. According to venture capital tracking website Crunchbase, Humanly.io has raised a total of $5.3 million since its launch in 2019.

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In New York, Supply Chain Management

Stephanie Benedetto of Queen of Raw named a B2G 2021 Global Woman Supply Chain Leader in Sustainability

Stephanie Benedetto of Queen of Raw named a B2G 2021 Global Woman Supply Chain Leader in Sustainability alongside leaders from IBM, McDonalds, and Southwest Airlines.

An annual event, The Global Women Supply Chain Leaders Awards 2021 is here again. It is a celebration of women and achievement, honouring supply chain’s most accomplished female executives and next generational leaders. Women have worked hard to steadily carve their niche in the traditionally male-dominated supply chain industry.

Do not miss this opportunity to engage in new insights, participate in a wide-ranging and thought-provoking panel discussion, keynote & live Q&As, networking with peers and experts to further inspire and drive on key supply chain topics and themes related to women’s empowerment, equality, and excellence.

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In Paris, ERP & Finance

How a mobile-friendly platform can increase quality control of fresh produce

Companies that deal in fresh produce and are looking for more advanced quality control of their fruits and vegetables throughout the supply chain might want to check out Clarifruit’s mobile-friendly platform.

By simply taking a photo from a smartphone of their product, Clarifruit’s intuitive app can then autogenerate a report with data for more refined inspections and analysis. Officials say it can provide both reassurance and times savings for marketing teams, wholesalers, retailers and distribution centres.

“Clarifruit has built the only end-to-end automatic QC platform in the market, offering both automated, mobile data collection for the QC inspector as well as QC analytics for the sales and operational departments”, CEO Avi Schwartzer said. “Additional key differentiators are our proprietary technologies, including a patent-protected, deep-learning computer-vision engine as well as a rating algorithm that leverages an ever-growing database of produce photos and attributes.”

Clarifrut leaders say its platform can produce quality reports on nearly a dozen different categories, including apples, bananas, blueberries, cherries, grapes, lemons, mangoes, melons, oranges, peaches pineapples and plums as well as easy-peelers. More items may be added in the future as the business grows.

The cloud-based startup from Israel which had been in the works for several years, received a £4.5 million infusion prior to the pandemic, including a nearly £1.9 million investment from the European Innovation Council Accelerator.

So how does is work?

After downloading the Clarifrut app, users can take a picture that they want analyzed. That photo then goes through a process aided by “computer-vision technology” that assesses its surface, size, stem, colour and imperfections. Those photos are then compared against Clarifruit’s Big Data library which contains millions of produce images. Clarifruit says “this information can be configured ahead of time to take the inspection type and your specific list of inspected attributes into account.”

As for getting beyond the skin or peel to the heart of the product, Clarifruit says its platform can be configured to work with any ERP solution and “intelligent integrations with third-party hardware devices” to provide more defined qualities such as Brix or firmness.

Users can track their products and reports and get real-time information through the app and their own management dashboard. That dashboard contains data on each inspection, include date, time and location. Reports can be uploaded and converted into Excel spreadsheet if users desire.

Among the applications Clarifruit supports are pre-harvest and final products, inbound and outbound distribution centers, coolers, intake, and front of stores.

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In Tokyo, Portfolio News, Supply Chain Management

Beamo wins Best Enterprise Solution at the AWE 2021 Auggie Awards

3i Inc.’s Beamo, an enterprise-grade digital twin solution for mission-critical facilities and a member of Born2Global Centre, took home the trophy for Best Enterprise Solution at the AWE 2021 12th Auggie Awards in Santa Clara, CA. The Auggie Awards is an annual award ceremony that showcases the best of the best in augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. The Best Enterprise Solution award was presented by Christine Perey, Board Member and Founder of AR for Enterprise Alliance.

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