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In Munich, Funding Announcement, CRM & Customer Experience

Zippin Raises $30M to Drive Adoption of Frictionless Checkout

Checkout-free technology provider Zippin has closed a $30 million Series B funding round with participation from new and existing investors that include OurCrowd, Maven Ventures, Evolv Ventures and SAP. The new round brings Zippin’s total funding to more than $45 million.

This follows Zippin’s significant progress in recent months, including signing numerous new accounts, launching multiple new public checkout-free stores and further solidifying its leading technology within the future of retail, according to the company.

The company currently powers checkout-free stores across four continents in formats such as convenience stores, grocery stores, sports stadiums, hotels and residential buildings. With this funding round, Zippin expects to scale its checkout-free platform and power tens of thousands of stores by 2025.

“Zippin has seen increased demand and rapid adoption of checkout-free technology during the pandemic,” said Krishna Motukuri, Zippin co-founder and CEO. “Shoppers want contactless experiences everywhere they go. As retailers realize that frictionless checkout-free technology is also contactless by design, they see a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. With a checkout-free platform like Zippin, retailers can offer shoppers what they are looking for today, and future-proof their business, both at the same time.”

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In Foundries, Munich

MHP works together with SAP on cloud-based digital mobility solutions

MHP Management- und IT-Beratung GmbH (MHP) announced that it plans to expand its partnership with SAP. The aim is to accelerate the introduction of new digital mobility solutions based on SAP’s Industry Cloud. As part of the initiative, MHP and SAP are planning to explore co-innovations and joint go-to-market solutions based on SAP’s Industry Cloud for all aspects of mobility in a green field approach.

The intended partnership is intended to support customers in orienting themselves towards the megatrends connected mobility, autonomous driving, shared / serviced mobility and e-mobility – especially since these are still fundamentally changing and developing rapidly. In a first step, both partners want to discuss solutions for Fleet Management, Load Management, Battery Lifecycle Management and Mobility-as-a-Service. Co-innovation customers who can participate in the initiative include OEMs, utilities, and startups. MHP is therefore planning to support the SAP.iO Mobility Cohort in order to identify interesting start-ups in this technology and business area.

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In Foundries, Inclusiveness

Henkel : Idea Hackathon supports 100 early-stage female founders

The Henkel Xathon, an ideation hackathon for female founders, is taking place for the third time. The aim is to promote female entrepreneurs and talents in the technology industry, strengthen their business innovation and support them in building a relevant business network. The Xathon will take place in Berlin from November 12 to 14, 2021 as a hybrid event* in English. It is hosted by Henkel dx Ventures, Henkel’s platform for open innovation and collaboration, together with Global Digital Women.

 

One focus this year is on the rapidly accelerating D2C sector, influenced by changing consumer behaviors towards hyper-personalization across all channels.

 

At the Xathon, participants can take part in live workshops at four different locations in Berlin and digitally, watch keynotes, collaborate with top female experts, and further develop their business ideas. A total of 100 female talents will get the opportunity to participate in this year’s hackathon. Interested female founders can apply until October 10 at https://www.henkel.com/dx/xathon-2021. The main event partner of the Xathon 2021 is Global Digital Women. Further partners include SAP.iO and Microsoft.

 

Raising awareness for female empowerment

‘Diversity and gender equity are of strategic importance to us at Henkel. With the Xathon, we want to empower female entrepreneurship and support talented women in realizing their ideas and unfolding their full potential,’ says Sylvie Nicol, Chief Human Resources Officer at Henkel.

The Female Founder Monitor 2020 once again showed that targeted support for female founders is necessary: according to this, only 15.7 percent of all founders in Germany are female. Women entrepreneurs are particularly rare in the technology sector.

‘The figures show that the road to equality in the tech industry is still long. But there is much more than just figures: every year at our Xathon we see impressive and great ideas from female founders. For us, it is a privilege to experience and support this female entrepreneurial power in tech,’ says Michael Nilles, Chief Digital & Information Officer at Henkel. ‘I am truly convinced that innovation is built on diversity. That’s why we are very much looking forward to welcome 100 female founders and their early-stage business models.’

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In Tel Aviv, Interview, CRM & Customer Experience

Q&A: Andy Cockburn, CEO and Co-Founder, Mention Me

Andy Cockburn is CEO and Co-Founder of Mention Me, the Referral Engineering™  platform for growth-obsessed ecommerce brands. Since co-founding the business with Tim Boughton in 2013, he’s scaled it to employ more than 90 Referral Experts who have delivered more than 4 million referrals totalling £1bn in revenue for clients.

Prior to Mention Me, Andy was the UK Managing Director of HomeAway, the world’s largest market-place for holiday rentals (that floated on the NASDAQ for $3bn), and formerly the founder and CEO of Wigadoo, a technology start-up in the social payment space.

He has an MBA from INSEAD and MA from Cambridge University.

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In Video, New York, ERP & Finance

Jasmine Crowe: What Can We Do To Tackle Food Waste And Hunger?

Social entrepreneur Jasmine Crowe has one mission: feed more, waste less. Her company Goodr is tackling food waste and getting food to those who need it most.

Jasmine Crowe is a social entrepreneur and the founder of Goodr, a startup based in Atlanta, Georgia that is leveraging technology to combat hunger and food waste.

Goodr collects surplus food from organizations like Turner Broadcasting Systems, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, and others, and redirects that food to nonprofits who distribute the food to people experiencing food insecurity. The company also works directly with cities and governments to purchase quality food for certain communities.

Crowe has collected and donated more than two million food items worldwide and fed more than 80,000 people through the Sunday Soul Homeless feeding initiative as well. The initiative started out as formal pop-up dinners for the homeless community of Atlanta.

Click here to listen to Part 3 of TED Radio Hour episode The Food Connection

In Funding Announcement, Portfolio News

Love checkout-free stores? This S.F. company just landed $30M to compete with Amazon Go’s technology

San Francisco startup Zippin, which develops technology powering checkout-free retail stores in the style of Amazon Go, has tripled its funding with a new $30 million round to scale its platform across “tens of thousands of stores” by 2025.

The Series B trough — courtesy of new and existing investors OurCrowd, Maven Venture, Evolv Ventures and SAP — brings its total backing to more than $45 million. The company said the new money will fund further development of maintenance functions and time-to-deployment.

Zippin’s technology facilitates entry and purchases for customers via a smartphone app and utilizes overhead cameras and shelf sensors to monitor goods.

It is used by retailer clients such as Lawson, Japan’s ubiquitous and third-largest convenience store chain, Aramark Corp., Compass Group, and Brazil’s largest retailer, Americanas. The platform was operational in 29 stores in the U.S. and around the world as of June, per its website, and CEO and co-founder Krishna Motukuri said demand has increased during the pandemic as retail stores sought to limit physical touch points.

Investors said in a statement they were impressed by the technology’s performance in high-traffic settings such as sports venues, which might see 500 customers in one hour.

“Zippin’s continued growth in such challenging environments is evidence of their superior technology,” said Jon Medved, CEO and founder of OurCrowd, a Jerusalem-based platform for investments in early-stage startups. “(It’s) also a competitive advantage, allowing their AI to train on some of the richest datasets provided by those challenging environments.”

Zippin opened its own check-out free store and showcase for its technology in SoMa in 2018 but shuttered it in June after opting not to renew its lease June 30, the company said in a blog post this summer.

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In Munich, Funding Announcement, CRM & Customer Experience

Cashierless checkout company Zippin raises $30M

The cashierless technology shift continues apace with today’s news that Zippin has raised $30 million in a series B round of funding. The San Francisco-based company is one of several players in the space to gain traction for a technology that seeks to not only make supermarket queues obsolete, but also generate big data insights for retailers.

Founded in 2018, Zippin leverages AI, cameras, and smart shelf sensors to enable shoppers to place items in their cart and walk out without waiting. The company opened its first checkout-free store in San Francisco back in 2018, and it has since entered into partnerships with the likes of Aramark, Sberbank, and the Sacramento Kings’ Golden 1 Center to power cashierless stores globally.

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In San Francisco, HR & People Engagement

SAP Startup Spotlight: The Mom Project

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 The Mom Project.

The Mom Project is the leader in helping businesses attract and retain female talent. With a community of more than 500,000 talented professionals connecting to over 2,000 companies, the company is committed to building a better workplace by harnessing the oft-overlooked intellectual workplace power of moms. In this interview with founder and CEO Allison Robinson, we will explore what makes The Mom Project unique and what’s next for the startup.

E-3 Magazine: How does The Mom Project work?

Allison Robinson: On top of offering $500,000 in grants as part of the Stronger Together Fund, The Mom Project created programs to support community members during their time of need as we all continue to navigate the coronavirus pandemic that sent ripple effects through every aspect of life beginning in March 2020. RALLY, for example, is a peer-to-peer mentorship program giving community members the space to solicit and offer advice. Resume Rev, a no-cost program that helps moms put their best foot forward, saw more than 15,000 resumes created and downloaded within the first 90 days. RISE, the inaugural initiative from our not-for-profit MomProject.org, launched in September 2020 to elevate 10,000 women of color over the next three years through a new upskilling model that puts moms first with scholarships to highly sought-after technology certificate programs including Google and Salesforce.

As of July 2021, there are more than 500 women enrolled in RISE via one of six certification tracks including Salesforce Administration, Google IT Support, and Google IT Automation with Python, which can be completed in as little as six weeks. In Q2 of 2021, RISE also introduced additional certification tracks such as Project Management, Data Analysis, and UX Design to further accelerate the supply of qualified leaders of color to meet demand for diverse talent by committed employers and partners of The Mom Project.

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In New York, HR & People Engagement

SAP Startup Spotlight: Anthill

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 Anthill.

Muriel Clauson is the CEO and co-founder of Anthill. She is an active speaker, advisor, and thought leader on the future of work and artificial intelligence, and has authored scientific publications, was a scientific advisor for several governments and organizations around the world, and is an advisory board member for Humans for AI. Muriel is completing her doctorate in industrial-organizational psychology at the University of Georgia and conducted research at Emory University’s Goizueta School of Business and the Carl Vinson Institute of Government. In this interview, she explains how Anthill achieved its goals, how the company is connected to SAP, and what’s next for the startup.

E-3 Magazine: What exactly is Anthill?

Muriel Clauson: Anthill is the first talent management software for the deskless workforce, the 80 percent of the global workforce that does not work at a desk or computer. Anthill has broken the barriers to connecting with and understanding deskless employees in manufacturing, supply chain, and retail sectors, which exist in almost every large enterprise.

How does your solution work?

Clauson: Anthill is built upon a predictive relational model linking hundreds of assessments. Our backend technology allows us to ask employees a few questions on our mobile experience and learn a lot about them, because each answer helps us predict responses for the rest of the questions in our model. This is made possible by Anthill’s machine learning technology based on years of historical data, which is able to predict a wide range of people insights, like skills and turnover drivers, from limited responses and deliver a comprehensive map of the talent in an organization in an ongoing, rewarding way for employees. Anthill’s predictive model is complex but results in a seamless and fun user experience for workers. Anthill is available via app or SMS texting for employee users. Anthill’s dashboard capabilities focus on engagement and retention, internal mobility, and reskilling and development tools.

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In Tokyo, Supply Chain Management

3i’s AI technology creates digital twins using smartphone photos

Innovating industrial plants is often a difficult decision-making process for companies because changing a single piece of equipment requires a thorough on-site inspection from a team of experts in electricity, network, pipes, machines and structure.

But South Korea-based startup 3i Inc. helps remove such roadblocks through its digital twin solutions. The company operates Beamo, an artificial intelligence technology-based service that creates a 3D digital twin for companies.

A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical object or a service that shares real-time data with its counterpart.

“Maps and street views were used to digitalize outdoor space, which wasn’t the case for indoor space. But now an easy and speedy creation of a digital twin for indoor space is achievable via 3i’s AI technology,” said Ken Kim, the chief executive of 3i, in an interview with The Korea Economic Daily on Aug. 24.

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In HR & People Engagement, Portfolio News, Funding Announcement

On-Demand Coaching Platform Bravely Announces $15M Series A Funding Round

Brilliant Hire’s Smart Job Matching

Bravely, the technology platform connecting people to on-demand professional coaching and development, announced a $15 million funding round led by Telescope Partners. This funding round will further Bravely’s rapid growth and advance its mission to transform the way companies support inclusive, high-performing teams by providing universal access to coaching.

“The world of work is undergoing the biggest change we’ve seen in our lifetimes,” says Sarah Sheehan, Co-Founder and President of Bravely. “The competition for talent right now is unprecedented, and there’s more attention than ever on the tools companies offer to support their employees’ growth and development. The choice is: rise to meet the new standards, or lose your most valuable asset, which is your people.”

Bravely is the first coaching platform designed to scale whole-population support for companies of all sizes, and boasts the most highly-vetted coaching network in the industry. With this funding round, Bravely will both expand its global reach and develop powerful new data capabilities, allowing for an even deeper understanding of, and capacity to serve, diverse individual employee needs. In addition to new automation and personalization, this capital will also power research informing Bravely’s ethical, inclusion-focused use of data, as well as developing a People Science function at the company.

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In Berlin, ERP & Finance

How CPG Brands Are Keeping Up With Retail’s Fastest-Moving Consumer Demands

Nobody understands the frustration of consumers who can’t find the products they’re looking for more than the experts at Teamcore, an AI-based startup with operations in Latin America and the United States. Teamcore’s cloud-based software platform uses machine learning to power intelligent workflow automation that tells CPG companies and retailers why products aren’t selling and what they can do about it fast.

“We help CPG companies and retailers make sure products are available when their customers are ready to buy,” said Sergio Della Maggiora, founder and CEO of Teamcore. “Whether someone is shopping online or in a physical store, our retail execution platform based on intelligent workflows helps connect data across the supply chain from warehouse to shelf virtually or in-store, so companies don’t miss out on sales opportunities.”

Based on sales data analytics, Della Maggiora said that Teamcore’s machine learning algorithm detects when products aren’t selling as planned, and in over 94 percent of cases, finds the root cause of the problem before assigning a task. Unlike garden variety alerts, Teamcore’s intelligent workflow notifications keep going until they reach the people who solve the problem. If someone in replenishment can’t find the product in the warehouse to restock virtual or in-store shelves, the workflow automatically routes that task to the appropriate store sales representatives, all the way up to regional store and supply chain managers.

“Teamcore connects the whole CPG and retail team for opportunity detection sales, and doesn’t stop until someone actually fixes the problem,” said Della Maggiora. “Over time, the collected data trains the model, improving its accuracy and ability to make predictions about potential issues.”

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In Paris, Interview, Supply Chain Management

SAP Startup Spotlight: GrainChain

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 GrainChain.

Luis Macias, CEO of GrainChain, is an innovator and entrepreneur that has nearly 20 years of experience designing, inventing, and implementing technological solutions in the government, agriculture and insurance sectors. Since 2013, when he founded and implemented SiloSys and developed GrainChain’s transaction platform using smart contracts, he has been focused on viable agricultural solutions. In this interview, he explains his vision for GrainChain, how it is connected to SAP, and what’s next for the startup.

E-3 Magazine: What does GrainChain offer?

Luis Macias: GrainChain has developed a platform that is leveling the playing field for producers, buyers, storage operators, lenders, and all other participants on the global agricultural supply chain.

How does your solution work?

Macias: Our solution combines blockchain and IoT-driven technology to verify and auto-execute smart contracts, creating fully automated and digitized workflows at every stage. The GrainChain platform provides a central, single point of truth that brings all participants on the supply chain together with transparency, efficiency, and reliability of data.

Why do customers use your solution?

Macias: GrainChain has worked with customers using limited to no digital technologies all the way up to global conglomerates with the latest technology. Our products are customized based on our client’s requirements and their existing tools, which can be easily integrated with our platform. Our clients use these solutions to gain business efficiencies, reduce operating costs, reduce business risks, and to become more attractive to lenders. Customers also use our solution to meet traceability and transparency requirements for all participants along the supply chain.

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In Singapore, Supply Chain Management, Sustainability

SAP Startup Spotlight: Streamwise D.I.

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 Streamwise D.I.

Paul Hatten, CEO of Streamwise D.I., has over 25 years of experience driving corporate strategic international business management roles within the global water and wastewater sectors in high value Australian and U.S. companies. The companies he has managed include BioGill Group and Anue Water Technologies. He holds an Associate of Engineering Applied Science Construction Hydraulics from Technical and Further Education Queensland and is currently completing his Master of Business Administration from La Trobe University Melbourne. In this interview, Paul Hatten will talk about what Streamwise D.I. has to offer, how it is connected to SAP, and what’s next for the startup.

E-3 Magazine: What does Streamwise D.I. offer?

Paul Hatten: Streamwise D.I. is an enterprise-grade artificial intelligence (AI) software solution to drive digital transformation in industrial applications through data automation and decision intelligence. Our target market is the wastewater management of industrial operators across multiple verticals including food and beverage (F&B), mining, chemical distributors, and water authorities. Streamwise D.I. delivers value to enterprise customers by lowering operational costs, improving compliance, reducing operational risk, and increasing data transparency. On average, our solution reduces the operating expenses of wastewater operations by 60 percent through significant savings on chemical, asset management, compliance and energy costs.

How does your solution work?

Hatten: An industrial operator, such as a food and beverage manufacturer, with complex wastewater operations may have high operating costs, overuse of chemicals, and be out of compliance. They engage Streamwise D.I. to improve their operational efficiency and lower costs. The first step is to install sensors and probes on site at the wastewater treatment facility and install the ‘Monitor & Learn’ capability at the client site. The second step is an online analysis and deep dive into the operations data in order to identify inefficiencies and calculate the expected savings across asset management, energy, chemical use, and compliance. The third step is to fully utilize the power of Streamwise D.I.’s artificial intelligence capability to unlock decision intelligence and set optimization targets. The fourth step is reducing operating costs, often by around 60 percent, and to calculate the value-share pricing.

Why was Streamwise D.I. founded?

Hatten: Our founder and Chief Technology Officer, Alastair Lockey, has over 30 years of experience in technology innovation in wastewater management globally, with previous roles at global water giant Ecolab. Alastair saw opportunities to significantly improve data transparency and data analytics in wastewater operations through new software solutions with artificial intelligence capabilities to automate decision-making and reduce operating costs.

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