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In Fund, CRM & Customer Experience

A third Of CMOs Don’t Trust Their Marketing Data According To Adverity Research

Over one-third of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) don’t trust their marketing data according to the latest research from leading marketing data analytics platform Adverity. What’s more, there is a growing divide between data analysts and marketers when it comes to trusting their data.

A third (34%) of marketers don’t trust the data they are given to inform campaigns. A number that rises to 41% among their data analyst colleagues—posing a new challenge for the C-suite charged with driving marketing results. Yet, the very same divide deepens at the leadership level—with 51% of Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) & Chief Data Officers (CDOs) lacking trust in the data compared to 34% of CMOs.

The new “Marketing Analytics State of Play 2022: Challenges and Priorities” research commissioned by Adverity surveyed 964 marketers and data analysts across the U.S., U.K., and Germany, identifying the key strategic challenges faced by marketers and data analysts as well as their priorities for 2022.

For businesses, such a trust divide that becomes greater the more senior you go should cause significant alarm. Teams are failing to communicate mistrust, which results in key strategic decisions regarding spending, budget allocation, and campaign optimization being made without accuracy or confidence, potentially resulting in huge amounts of the marketing budget being misused or ultimately wasted.

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In Tel Aviv, CRM & Customer Experience

Jebbit Declared Data Platform Now Available on SAP® Store

Jebbit today announced that its Jebbit Declared Data Platform is now available on SAP® Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings. Jebbit’s platform integrates with SAP® Emarsys® Customer Engagement and SAP Customer Data Platform and delivers engaging and interactive experiences that collect first-party, declared data or zero-party data (ZPD) customer data that yields personalization through safe and transparent privacy practices.

This partnership platform addresses the urgent demand of brands needing to know their consumers and transform their digital experiences. With its availability on SAP Store, businesses that use SAP solutions can now use the Jebbit Declared Data Platform to create beautiful product match quizzes and many other forms of interactive engagement that improve lead capture, conversion, and help personalize every step of the customer journey, increasing sales and lifetime value. These quizzes can be deployed anywhere digitally, and offline via QR codes.

“Marketers using SAP solutions can now leverage the Jebbit Declared Data Platform to personalize all stages of the customer journey from engagement, education, and conversion and consistently beat benchmarks for onsite conversion rates and overall engagement rates,” said Tom Coburn, co-founder and CEO of Jebbit. “Now, more than ever, consumers are pushing for greater transparency and control over their data and demanding value is delivered in return.”

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In Tel Aviv, CRM & Customer Experience

Machine Learning Builds Customer Advocacy Beyond Black Friday Spike

Savvy CPG leaders this holiday season are firing up customer advocacy with an online referral marketing platform that rewards high-value shoppers and their trusted circles for growth long after Black Friday sales peak. Sure, there will always be one-off bargain hunters who disappear when the markdowns are over. But the experts behind Mention Me, a referral marketing platform, help brands understand who their best customer advocates are so they can treat them right.

“Encouraging your high-value customers to spread the word about your brand extends sales beyond the seasonal spike,” said Andy Cockburn, co-founder and CEO of Mention Me. “These are the customers who purchase the most over time, and they’re inviting friends and family who trust them. Thank you rewards incentivize everyone to buy again, increasing repeat customers, and growing the entire customer base.”

Shopping is easier with a little help from your friends

Instead of viewing referrals as a simple marketing tactic, Cockburn said that Mention Me’s customer-led strategy “cracks the referral code” to increase consumer advocacy and long-term growth.

“At the heart of the referral is a complex social interaction between friends. In a split second, the customer is asking will my friends value this product, and view me positively or negatively for sharing it?,” he said. “Our Referral Engineering approach applies data science to put the right message in front of the right customer at the right time. This helps companies turn existing relationships with customers into growth by extending their lifetime value. Rather than looking purely at how many purchases a customer has made, extended lifetime value, or ELTV, also looks at how many new customers they’ve introduced.”

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In Foundries

So, You Think SAP is the Right Partner for You. Here’s What You Need to Know.

Are you a part of SAP.iO’s startup portfolio? Maximize your partnership with SAP using these 3 tips from our latest conversation with Max Schmitt, Partner Manager at parcelLab.

It takes two. For SAP, partnerships and cultivating an impressive open innovative ecosystem are crucial to its success. For startups looking to partner with SAP, who find that a technical integration with SAP is critical in their strategic roadmap, joining SAP.iO Foundries is certainly the fastest way to get a foot in the door. After the 3-month Foundry program where the SAP.iO team is a hand to hold, what happens next? What makes up the secret sauce to SAP partner success post-Foundry?

We spoke to Max Schmitt, Partner Manager at parcelLab, a leading Operations Experience Management platform and SAP.iO startup, to find out.

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In Tel Aviv, Portfolio News, CRM & Customer Experience

SundaySky Announces 400% Increase in Customer Growth

SundaySky, the leading platform for video creation, distribution and optimization, announced incredible momentum following the company’s latest product release in the second quarter of 2021. Retail, healthcare, banking, telecom, financial services and other industries gained new self-service capabilities to easily create and scale videos without the extra costs or time demands of traditional video production.

Salesforce’s 7th annual State of Marketing report states that “Video is the star channel of 2021,” and will be the top digital marketing tactic with 94% of the 8,200+ marketers surveyed using video or planning to use video in the future. In addition to video creation, brands face many new challenges ahead, including the daunting maintenance of keeping content up-to-date. Organizations of all sizes also want to personalize content more and more for individuals as data becomes accessible from their customer data platforms, customer relationship management systems and other databases.

Highlights from this most recent quarter include:

  • 42% more new platform customers signed than in any other quarter in the company’s history, a 400% increase compared to the previous year
  • New customers testimonials from Anthem, REDCON1, Verizon, Merkle and Select Blinds
  • New product enhancements for self-service include: new creative themes and flexible scene templates; audio mixing and synthetic voice libraries for custom narrations; expanded music, font and media libraries; and the ability to create greater content relevance at scale with scene skipping and audience messaging
  • New partnership with SAP unlocked video for Commerce Cloud customers

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In Fund, Business Technology Platform

MANTA Recognized in 2021 Gartner® Market Guide for Active Metadata Management

Data lineage platform MANTA today announced its inclusion as a “Representative Vendor” in 2021 Gartner Market Guide for Active Metadata Management.

The report found that organizations are increasingly turning to metadata management solutions to address emerging data management challenges. While metadata management has been used in one form or another for decades, it is becoming more important as enterprises become more data-intensive. “Active metadata management is seen as a set of capabilities that enable continuous access and processing of metadata that support ongoing analysis over a different spectrum of maturity, use cases and vendor solutions.” The report identified that “increased demand for orchestrating exiting and new systems has rendered traditional metadata practices insufficient”, and that “organizations are demanding “active metadata” to assure augmented data management capabilities”.1

MANTA is a world-class data lineage platform that automatically scans your data environment to build a powerful map of all data flows and deliver it through a native UI and other channels to both technical and non-technical users. With MANTA, everyone—from data science teams, cloud architects, and compliance teams to business leaders at the highest level—gets full visibility and control of their data pipeline. MANTA’s extensive lineage capabilities, unique features, and advanced filtering options make the platform an unbeatable solution that allows users to finally understand how their data enters and flows across systems to make data a truly enterprise-wide asset.

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In CRM & Customer Experience, San Francisco

Constructor brings project management for software developers back to basics

Constructor is a new, user-friendly task tracking and collaboration tool designed specifically for software development teams.

The solution offers features for developers such as assignable comment threads, dashboard card highlighting, hideable backlogs, and project checklists, which they can use to collaborate on software projects remotely, the company told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview.

Additionally, the company also reported to VentureBeat that it has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding.

Constructor cofounder and CEO Seth Purcell explained, “The way software teams work has changed massively over the past decade, as teams have become more distributed, chosen lighter processes, and adopted new practices and new tools like GitHub, Slack, and Figma. Tracking tools haven’t kept up because what’s required isn’t new features; it’s a complete rethink.”

Constructor was built from the ground up to fit the way modern teams are building software, Purcell said. Constructor designed its offering to support asynchronous discussions and provides features like checklists to increase transparency over the status of active projects.

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In San Francisco, Supply Chain Management

Verusen Integration With SAP Solutions Simplifies Supply Chain Reliability With Intelligent Materials Management

Verusen, the Atlanta-based artificial intelligence (AI) supply chain innovator, today announced that its industry-proven Verusen Materials Management solution is now available on SAP  Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings. The AI-driven platform works with the materials management module of SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) and SAP S/4HANA® , enabling businesses to digitally transform their connected supply chain and materials management.

“Our always-on, always-learning platform now integrates with SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA, including procurement and inventory business applications to provide one of the simplest, fastest and most sustainable materials management solutions for businesses using SAP solutions across all verticals,” said Paul Noble, founder and CEO of Verusen. “Our integration with SAP technology will help accelerate the operational reliability of any enterprise’s digitally connected supply chain to ensure the right materials are in the right place, at the right time; reduce supply chain risk to build supply network resiliency and help lower overall operating costs.”

Verusen’s AI platform reduces data complexity and improves decision-making processes to execute a faster, more efficient, and issue-free supply chain without the need for a slow and costly data-cleanse process. The Verusen platform includes network inventory, procurement intelligence, and strategic supplier alignment. By implementing Verusen’s platform, companies can transform their materials management approach and supply chain to better understand their data and balance operational and supplier risk at the most cost-effective level possible to find their Material Truth (™ ).

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In Inclusiveness

In a League of their Own: How Female Leaders Help Power SAP Store

The COVID-19 pandemic has not been friendly to women in the workforce, setting gender parity efforts back by a generation or more, according to the World Economic Forum. However, while the pandemic has been punishing, it has helped bring attention to this widening disparity and caused us to acknowledge and celebrate the businesses, and especially the women, that are breaking gender barriers and striving for a more equitable working world.
For many years, SAP has been committed to eliminating gender inequality in support of our purpose – to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. SAP.iO – SAP’s strategic business unit to incubate, accelerate and scale startup innovation – is one of organizations working to establish equal opportunities for women. To do that, they launched the No Boundaries initiative, the first comprehensive inclusive entrepreneurship initiative in the business software industry. The program ensures that all innovators from all backgrounds are empowered to start-up with SAP. And it’s been a success: since 2019, 50% of the startups that have worked with SAP.iO have a female/underrepresented founder or CXO.

Celebrating Female-Founded Partner Companies on SAP Store

At SAP Store, we have had the privilege of seeing many of those women entrepreneurs launch their solutions on our online marketplace, including:
  • Ashley Crowder, CEO & Co-Founder, VNTANA: Ashley always loved engineering and art and 3D/AR/VR combined both of those interests. Her passion for the medium drove her to want to solve the most time-consuming problem: Automatic file optimization and management so creators could focus on creating amazing experiences. As a result, she launched VNTANA and the solution Automated 3D CMS, available on SAP Store.
  • Diane Keng, CEO & Co-Founder, Breinify: With her experience working at Apple and Symantec, Diane learned that technology and algorithms are a needed part of the business process in order to launch amazing consumer experiences. Additionally, personalization, especially with a pandemic, must continuously adapt and evolve. These insights drove her to launch Breinify and the solution Breinify AI for SAP Commerce Cloud, available on SAP Store.
  • Jan Bruce, CEO and Co-Founder, meQuilibrium: As a successful media executive, wife, and mother, Jan was having difficulty balancing her career with how exhausting and conflicting her life obligations were. With meQuilibrium, she created a tool that not only was useful to her but was also something that could help others – a behavior modification solution to help people manage how they think and react. The meQuilibrium solution, meQuilibrium Resilience Suite, is available on SAP Store.
Other amazing female founders and CXOs with solutions on SAP Store include:
These female entrepreneurs are not only visionaries in their industries but are also delivering innovative solutions that are bettering SAP Store. Yet they aren’t the only strong female leaders powering SAP’s digital marketplace.
In Berlin, Tel Aviv, Business Technology Platform

SAP Startup Spotlight: NWO.ai

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 NWO.ai. In this interview, co-founder and co-CEO Pulkit Jaiswal talks about what NWO.ai has to offer, how it is connected to SAP, and what’s next for the startup.

E-3 Magazine: Why did you start NWO.ai?

Pulkit Jaiswal: Prior to beginning my journey with NWO.ai, I was an entrepreneur in the drone industry. During this time, I understood the power of providing actionable insights as-a-service to large enterprises, powered by data that was previously untapped. Shortly after that, I started building signals that predicted geopolitical volatility for trading purposes, recognizing how global relations and natural disasters could disrupt standard patterns. After achieving a profitable run, I realized the asymmetry in data that exists between hedge funds and large companies – hedge funds often know more about specific industries than companies within them. Essentially, NWO.ai was born out of the realization that I could provide corporations with the same level of access to data and reveal actionable insights.

How could your solution potentially help customers navigate the COVID-19 pandemic?

Jaiswal: As we speak, global supply chains are crumbling while the cost of raw materials for most consumer goods has skyrocketed, in part due to rising inflation and a parabolic adoption of e-commerce. Moreover, geopolitical instability has reached an all-time high, and living with uncertainty is the new normal for businesses today. COVID-19 has created a new social, political, and economic world order – one that is increasingly driven by cultural narratives and online discourse. In fact, the online narrative is single-handedly driving demand for certain consumer goods and creating completely new product categories at an exponential pace. NWO.ai’s natural language processing engine enables clients to surface the fears, motivations, and demand drivers underlying various signals, providing them with unprecedented access to the Why behind a narrative. Whether it’s figuring out which new product categories are about to break out or finding anomalous interest in demand for certain products, NWO.ai has successfully helped clients stay ahead of the curve, enabling proactive rather than reactive decision-making processes.

How are you connected to SAP?

Jaiswal: We are thrilled that NWO.ai has premiered as one of the first data providers to join the SAP data marketplace. This new feature, part of the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, enables businesses and IT users to directly consume partner data offerings that are available on SAP Store. We also have former SAP executives at the helm of our company: our COO, Miroslav Dimitrov, directed the SAP.io Foundry in Berlin, and our CTO, Imogen Low, led machine learning efforts for SAP in Singapore.

How has SAP.io’s involvement impacted your journey?

Jaiswal: Besides our collaboration with SAP DWC, we are also lucky to have graduated from SAP.io’s Berlin Foundry Program. As part of the program, we had the chance to interact with and learn from various industry experts, stakeholders, and potential customers, which in turn helped us achieve a product-market fit.

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In Business Technology Platform, Berlin, Tel Aviv

NWO.ai Partners with SAP to Support the Consumer Goods Industry

NWO.ai is offering its Consumer Intelligence solution on the data marketplace for SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, enabling the tracking of cultural and consumer behavior shifts globally.

The data marketplace is a new feature of the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud solution which enables businesses and IT users to directly consume partner data offerings that are available on SAP Store.

NWO.ai provides clients with a significant competitive advantage and helps them stay close to their customers, according to the vendor.

Specifically, consumer product companies can now leverage Consumer Intelligence from NWO.ai to:

  • Analyze and identify potential demand growth drivers
  • Track global cultural shifts by analyzing billions of data points in under 60 seconds
  • Understand consumer sentiment and the leading indicators behind it
  • Deep dive on microtrends associated with products and categories
  • Identify the influential voices and brands that drive the consumer narrative

As a partner in the SAP PartnerEdge program, NWO.ai is empowered to build, market, and sell software applications that supplement and build on SAP software and technology.

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In Tel Aviv, Funding Announcement, Supply Chain Management

AI-Driven Routing Company Wise Systems Raises $50 Million

Wise Systems – a leading AI-driven routing and dispatching platform provider – announced it has raised $50 million in Series C financing led by Tiger Global Management with participation from new and existing investors that include Section 32, Valo Ventures, Gradient Ventures, and Prologis Ventures.

Wise Systems’ real-time, automated system enables delivery and service operations with drivers worldwide across the last-mile industry. And the company will use the financing to further accelerate product development, market expansion across key geographies, and to address the increasing global demand for the company’s dispatching and routing solutions.

Known as a leader in AI technology for last-mile delivery operations, Wise Systems saw significant growth over the two past years, growing 300% year-over-year, experiencing increased demand for the company’s autonomous dispatch and routing technology across a number of markets. And today’s announcement comes on the heels of other significant developments for Wise Systems this year, including the availability of its platform in the SAP App Store and its launch in Japan. In July, Wise Systems announced a partnership with Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Bus Corporation (MFTBC), under the umbrella of Daimler Trucks Asia (DTA), to offer the company’s AI-driven routing and dispatch software to MFTBC customers in Japan. This partnership extends Wise Systems’ reach to the commercial vehicle industry in Japan, one of the busiest last-mile markets in the world.

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In New York, Funding Announcement, Supply Chain Management

Computer vision platform Cogniac nabs $20M to bolster its customer acquisition efforts

Cogniac, a San Jose, California-based startup developing computer vision tech for task automation, today announced that it raised $20 million in a series B1 financing round led by National Grid Partners with participation from National Grid, Autotech Ventures, Cisco Investments, Energy Innovation Capital, London Technology Club, Vanedge Capital, and Wing Venture Capital. CEO Chuck Myers says that the proceeds will be put toward the expansion of Cogniac’s workforce and the ramp-up of R&D efforts to support the company’s approach to computer vision, data storage, and “human-AI interactivity.”

Computer vision is a type of AI technology that allows machines to understand, categorize, and differentiate between images. Using photos from cameras and videos as well as deep learning components, computer vision can identify and classify objects and then react to what it “sees.”

Investments in computer vision startups are on the rise as businesses embrace automation during the pandemic, which continues to place a strain on the worldwide labor market. Despite not having passed the “awareness phase,” as per one survey, the computer vision market could grow from $10.9 billion in 2019 to $17.4 billion by 2024. External investments in computer vision startups have already far exceeded the $3.5 billion McKinsey estimated in 2016.

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In New York, CRM & Customer Experience

Algramo Recognized by Fortune Impact 20 Award

This Chilean startup, whose name is Spanish for “by the gram,” was established in 2013 by then–engineering student José Manuel Moller. Moller launched Algramo with the goal of addressing the “poverty tax” on lower-income families, who tend to pay more per ounce for nonperishable staples sold in the smaller sizes that they can afford. Algramo established vending machines in neighborhood shops in the poorer outskirts of Santiago: The dispensers offer bulk purchasing, with reusable containers that enable consumers to buy exactly the amount they want. This helps drive down the cost of packaging, which can be as much as 40% of a product’s cost.

Algramo’s business model also helps address the issue of single-use plastic waste. Consumer giant Unilever noticed, and it partnered with Algramo to develop a mobile refill system for liquid laundry detergent. Consumers can place their orders via an app and get products delivered to their doorstep. Algramo uses radio-frequency identification (RFID) tagged containers and internet of things (IoT) technology to deliver the products. The reusable container has a unique ID which allows the consumer to attach it to their account and build a digital wallet to process discounts and credits for future purchases. Algramo now has partnerships in place with Nestlé’s Purina, Colgate-Palmolive, and Walmart, to help them drive the refill revolution for products including pet food and household-cleaning staples. The company today boasts over 2,000 locations in Chile and has expanded its services to Jakarta and New York City. In July, it secured $8.5 million in funding, led by Mexico’s Dalus Capital, to help expand its footprint and enter the beverage industry.

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In CRM & Customer Experience, Supply Chain Management, Sustainability, Berlin, New York

How Startups Are Monetizing the Booming Food Waste Business

Tech platforms Misfits Market, Too Good to Go and Goodr connect food companies with opportunities to divert their waste and improve their bottom lines at the same time.

Why it matters:

  • Nearly one-fourth of the food produced in the U.S. ends up going to waste, which also results in wasted resources spent by businesses to produce and transport food items.
  • Reducing food waste represents a tremendous opportunity for helping people in need and protecting the environment, while boosting food companies’ own profitability and sustainability.
  • Technology platforms such as Misfits Market, Too Good to Go and Goodr are successfully scaling up their operations as they tackle this challenge from different angles, seeking to provide benefits to both food businesses and consumers.

A handful of technology startups are seeking to tackle the challenge of reducing food waste at the grower, retailer, restaurant and consumer levels by matching surpluses with willing buyers.

Misfits Market, Too Good to Go and Goodr are leaning into the booming food waste management business, which generates an estimated $34.22 billion in global sales, and is on track to expand at a 5.4% compound annual growth rate over the next few years, according to Grand View Research.

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