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In Blog, Global, Venture Studio

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

April — June 2021 | Achievements & News from SAP.iO Venture Studio

SAP.iO Venture Studio drives a new era of organic growth at SAP. It invests in new ventures founded by small, entrepreneurial teams inside of SAP who are focused on building the future of enterprise business processes. SAP.iO Venture Studio provides design, development, and sales support to help these ventures launch. Find more on sap.io/studio.

It’s been a busy three months recently! SAP employees haven taken charge of their venture, pursued the freedom to shape their own strategy and taken their own decisions, also accelerating their own personal growth. Find the highlights of recent events and developments below:

 

Brilliant Hire by SAP

Brilliant Hire by SAP intelligently matches candidates with a personalized shortlist of jobs on your careers page based on what really matters to them, using Artificial Intelligence (AI).

  • Brilliant Hire has a new General Manager! Jeanine LeFlore already shared some insights on “Busting Product Myths” in this blogpost.
  • Head of Marketing at Brilliant Hire, Katya Pokrovskaya, also shared her tips for successful startup marketing in this blogpost.
  • Did you know that 90% of candidates leave career pages without applying? Their new product video and this article explain more on how they help customers with this challenge and elevate the candidate experience.
  • Brilliant Hire’s offer to their early access program was also announced during SAPPHIRE NOW 2021. Read more in the event’s Innovation News Guide and watch their customer talk in this session on how companies can build their future together with SAP.

More on this venture on https://www.brillianthire.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.

  • The venture turned one on April 1! Walk down memory lane with them in this blog post.
  • GreenToken was featured in the global CEO keynote of SAP’s flagship event SAPPHIRE NOW 2021. Watch their segment here. Their early access program was also announced during the event. Read more in the event’s Innovation News Guide.
  • Eastman published a press release on their collaboration with the venture to track recycled content. Together they also joined the SAP Sustainability Summit. Find the replay to their session “Material Return Loops — Accelerating Sustainability Outcomes” here.

More on this venture on http://www.green-token.io/

OwnID by SAP

OwnID by SAP enables your customers to use their phone as a key to instantly access their accounts on your website. This password–less method of login and verification grants a subtle and streamlined user experience, ensuring the highest security standards and complete privacy of every account.

More on this venture on https://www.ownid.com/

Paid Pronto by SAP

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

  • General Manager Erin Dierker featured on Femventure’s podcast episode on “Founding your own business”. Listen on Apple podcasts or openSAP.
  • Team member Andrew Blum also laid out in this blogpost why receivables teams might need to look across the hall to their procurement and payables counterparts for a transformation roadmap.

More on this venture on https://www.paidpronto.io/

EverLoop by SAP

EverLoop by SAP (formerly ReLoop by SAP) aims to empower every business on the planet to achieve zero waste by being a sustainability solution that connects stakeholders across the waste value chain to enable the circular economy, with transparency and traceability.

  • EverLoop joined the SAP Sustainability Summit. Find the replay to their session ““Growth of Recommerce to Better Manage our Waste” here.
  • The venture is one out of two helping SAP and SAP customers achieve their sustainability goals. Read blog post here.
  • They also have a new website ready for you!

More on this venture on www.ever-loop.io!

SourceAgent 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.

  • The venture is actively looking for customers interested in sourcing opportunity assessments (free of charge) right now. Contact them here.
  • And why not check out their new website as well?

More on this venture on https://www.sourceagent.io/

In Munich, Funding Announcement, CRM & Customer Experience

parcelLab secures $112M to help global brands deliver a seamless experience

The leading Operations Experience Management platform, parcelLab, announced today that it has secured US$112 million in Series C funding led by global venture capital and private equity firm, Insight Partners. Endeit Capital joined as a co-investor as well as existing investors Capnamic Ventures and coparion. The funding will enable the Operations Experience category leader to accelerate its mission of bringing people and brands closer together.

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In HR & People Engagement

SAP Startup Spotlight: Gapsquare

Dr. Zara Nanu is the CEO of Gapsquare, offering diversity and equality data intelligence through innovative technology. Zara sits on the Global Future Council on New Agenda for Equity and Social Justice at World Economic Forum, has spoken and written for various global equity strategy organizations, and leads Gapsquare as part of the UN Global Compact Network UK (GCN UK).

Zara Nanu has long been a powerful advocate for workplace equality and wider fair pay. Starting her career combating human trafficking and campaigning on women’s rights issues, Zara is now at the forefront of the push for technology to build more inclusive workplaces. In this interview, she explains what Gapsquare has to offer and what’s next for the startup.

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In CRM & Customer Experience

Zippin and AiFi Announce New Cashierless Checkout Store Locations

It’s not even noon pacific time as I write this and it’s already been a day packed full of cashierless checkout news. Things kicked off when Amazon announced a new full-sized grocery store using its Just Walk Out technology, and that was quickly followed up by Zippin and AiFi talking about newly launched cashierless checkout stores. All of these moves show that momentum for the cashierless checkout space that began earlier this year seems to be continuing unabated.

First let’s start off with Zippin, which said today it has opened up a new autonomous store in the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, home of the Brooklyn Nets (the news was first reported by the Sports Business Journal earlier this month). What makes this store a little different from the ones Zippin previously opened in venues like Mile High Stadium and Golden 1 Center is the exclusive partnership with American Express. According to the Zippin blog post, the new store, which will sell an assortment of beverages, snacks and merchandise, is only open to American Express cardholders.

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In Press Release, Portfolio News, Business Technology Platform

MANTA Launches Latest Version of its Data Lineage Platform with Industry-First Active Tags Feature

Data lineage platform MANTA today announced a list of enhancements to its platform that provides customers with deeper visibility into their complex data environments. Among these updates includes an industry-first active tags feature, which allows users to easily highlight any asset in the context of their data pipelines. By attributing fully customized icons to individual nodes, teams working on data privacy and data quality issues will significantly improve collaboration and accelerate issue resolution.

“Organizations are increasingly becoming aware of data quality and privacy issues but cannot see how these issues are affecting their data pipeline,” said Ernie Ostic, SVP of products at MANTA. “Without this context, it’s impossible to know how critical an issue is or what else within the business it might be disrupting. With active tags, users will now be able to flag, identify and draw attention to these issues within the data pipeline, enabling them to better visualize the issues and prioritize which need to be addressed first.”

In addition to active tags, the latest version of MANTA’s data lineage platform boasts various new features for the platform’s available scanners, including improvements to StreamSets, Google BigQuery, Talend, and Snowflake, as well as an expanded PostgreSQL portfolio with Yellowbrick and Amazon Relational Database Services now accounted for. This version of MANTA also includes a simpler configuration of MANTA Perspectives, that allows users to organize their lineage metadata into their own folders and hierarchies faster and easier.

Further, users leveraging MANTA in hybrid environments will benefit from updates to Open MANTA—the solution that allows users to build their own metadata ingestion process for MANTA flow without a formal scanner. The platform brings independent inclusion of Dictionary metadata for Open MANTA Integration Export, and in addition to supporting Docker container technology, now supports container orchestration system Kubernetes.

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In Portfolio News, Business Technology Platform

Meet PXL Vision founder Michael Born and find out how he helps customers build trust in digital onboarding

Michael Born founded PXL Vision, a Venture Leader Mobile that provides fully automated AI-based identity verification technology. The Zurich-based startup helps companies simplify and optimize customer onboarding and reliably verify identities to increase conversion rates, reduce costs and effort, and create trust in online services. Learn more about Michael’s expectations for the Venture Leaders Mobile experience, and find out what advice he would give to his teenage self.

The Venture Leaders Mobile 2021 will accelerate their expansion into the global market and strengthen their business network by attending the Mobile World Congress 2021 in Barcelona, Spain, to meet with top-notch investors and industry leaders. To introduce you to the members of the Swiss National Startup Team, we asked each entrepreneur to complete a short profile and choose six questions from a questionnaire about their personal and professional life.

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In Business Technology Platform

Tech disrupts the €2tn construction market | Sifted

There is huge waste and inefficiency on today’s construction sites that software, data and devices are well-suited to eliminate.

French startup Hiboo — which provides a platform to help companies manage heavy equipment, trucks and vehicles — found that across 15k pieces of equipment that it tracks, there’s on average a 40% rate of ‘idling’: meaning engines are on but the equipment is not being used.

“That’s a huge amount of time spent doing nothing,” says Charles Bénard, Hiboo’s cofounder. “At the end of the year if you take a fleet of 50, it’s a million dollars saved and hundreds of tons of CO₂ avoided.”

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In Portfolio News, Supply Chain Management, Press Release

Rheaply Closes $2.2 Million Inter-series Funding Round with Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund and MIT Solve

Rheaply, a climate tech company that combines a resource-sharing network with a user-friendly asset management platform, today announced that it has raised a $2.2 million inter-series funding round led by Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, with additional investments made by MIT Solve’s investment arm, Solve Innovation Future. The investments will be directed toward building carbon-based reporting into the platform, so companies can measure carbon emissions reductions as they utilize the platform.

Rheaply’s unique platform, Asset Exchange Manager (AxM)TM, maximizes the reuse, remanufacturing, and exchange of resources within and across organizations. The platform tracks inventory and depreciation, allowing users to better visualize, quantify, and utilize surplus assets, or to dispose of them properly. The transparent asset management system also offers facilitated peer-to-peer asset exchange, a gamified online marketplace, and sustainability metrics—enabling less waste and more cost-effective reuse.

Now, Rheaply will implement a multi-phase carbon product roadmap to align with key milestones and objectives defined in partnership with Microsoft. This will help organizations tie material reuse to carbon accounting and credit opportunities. Rheaply’s platform will be the first to bring this metric to the B2B asset exchange technology market.

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In Blog, Global, Venture Studio

Elevating the Candidate Experience with Brilliant Hire’s Smart Job Matching

Between searching through job postings, refining and revising resumes and cover letters, and prepping for interviews, applying for a job can feel like a full-time job in and of itself. There’s also the additional stressor of potentially falling through the cracks of a company’s applicant tracking system (ATS).

Not only that, but because there are so many open roles to choose from, prospective candidates can be overwhelmed by job sites. So overwhelmed that they end up exiting the page all together. According to a report, 91% of candidates leave career pages without ever applying to a single job.

The numbers are even more grim when diving into applicant demographics. A frequently cited Hewlett-Packard study found that men will apply for a job when they meet just 60 percent of the qualifications, while women will only apply if they meet 100 percent of the qualifications. What’s more, a LinkedIn Business’s Gender Insights Report also found that women were 16 percent less likely than men to apply to a job after viewing it and apply to 20 percent less jobs than men in the first place.

This isn’t what the team at Brilliant Hire by SAP envisions when they think of the future of inclusive recruiting.

“For us, the future of recruiting is one where candidates can easily find the best roles for their skillsets and companies can find the most qualified and diverse talent for their open roles,” said Jeanine LeFlore, General Manager of Brilliant Hire. “We believe that job applicants and companies alike benefit from a personalized candidate experience and we’re making that a reality with Smart Job Matching.”

Launched last fall, Brilliant Hire Smart Job Matching leverages artificial intelligence to deliver a curated list of best matched roles to each candidate. This bespoke experience doesn’t just help candidates, but also helps companies increase their visitor-to-applicant ratio. It also gives recruiting teams valuable insights on where candidates are dropping off as well as the types of positions and skills job seekers are searching.

How Smart Job Matching works

When a candidate visits an SAP SuccessFactors careers page that has been integrated with Smart Job Matching, the Skill Matcher will ask a few short questions about their professional background and skills. The answers will be analyzed to match them with top jobs based on their experience while also ensuring candidate privacy by not collecting any personally identifiable information.

In doing so, Brilliant Hire can recommend a tailored list of opportunities to each candidate, pointing out jobs that are strong match for their unique background and thus encouraging them to apply. The hypothesis is that this personalized experience can also boost applicant pool diversity by enabling minority groups of candidates that have traditionally been outnumbered (such as females) to send in their resume for the top recommended jobs.

“My personal experience as a woman of color navigating a tech career across various sized companies and industries has shown me that the playing field is not always level when it comes to the recruitment and hiring process,” LeFlore said, adding that Smart Job Matching enables candidates to apply to the roles that fit their skillsets with confidence which in turn helps make recruitment more inclusive.

SAP launched Smart Job Matching capabilities on its own careers site late last year and saw an 11 percent increase in the visitor-to-applicant ratio in just a few weeks because applicants were able to find a matching job more quickly. Another early adopter of Smart Job Matching is leading global supplier of specialty chemicals, W.R. Grace, who will be participating in a session during this year’s virtual SAPPHIRE NOW conference.

“Brilliant Hire by SAP integrates with SuccessFactors and helps us achieve our recruitment goals by attracting more qualified candidates to our open jobs.” said Stephanie Wheeler, Head of Global Talent Acquisition at W.R. Grace.

With goals of optimizing hiring by providing a personalized experience for candidates through Smart Job Matching, Brilliant Hire aims to further inclusive recruiting practices for customers.

“A great candidate experience should be at the center of the hiring process in a way that could also help make recruitment more inclusive for all applicants,” LeFlore said. “And we’re making that happen at Brilliant Hire.”

About Brilliant Hire by SAP

Founded in 2018 within the SAP.iO Venture Studio, Brilliant Hire by SAP believes that everyone deserves a fair chance at landing their dream job. Built to unlock diversity and inclusion in the workforce, Brilliant Hire continues to innovate.

To learn more about Brilliant Hire by SAP, visit www.brillianthire.io/

About SAP.iO Venture Studio

The SAP.iO Venture Studio drives a new era of organic growth at SAP. It invests in new ventures founded by small, entrepreneurial teams inside of SAP who are focused on building the future of enterprise business processes. SAP.iO Venture Studio provides design, development, and sales support to help these ventures launch.

To learn more about SAP.iO, visit www.sap.io/studio

In Portfolio News, CRM & Customer Experience

Virtual shopping startup Hero launches short-form video feature

Hero, a virtual shopping platform, has introduced a “Stories” feature, the company announced on Thursday. The tool allows brands to create short-form, shoppable videos highlighting their products that can be shared within their online store.

According to the company survey of about 1,500 consumers, the company found that shoppers wanted short, relevant videos, more product experts than influencers and the ability to visualize products in an authentic way. Hero’s survey showed that 64% found the inability to see products up close as they would in person was their least favorite aspect of online shopping.

“Static product images and boring text descriptions simply aren’t cutting it,” the company wrote in its announcement. “Today’s shoppers want to see real video content about their favorite products, from experts who know them best.”

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In Article, Portfolio News, CRM & Customer Experience

A Quick Dive into Retail Tech Startups In Europe

Statistics say that since 2015, nearly $130 bn has been invested across the continent in nearly 23,600 equity deals to tech startups in the European continent alone. It is interesting to note that despite the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact of the same on the global supply chains, 2020 still managed to produce major tech breakthroughs along with some profound startup launches and growth stories.

From shelf monitoring to increasing brand engagement, retail tech startups in Europe have developed amazing solutions for the global market. European Retail Tech Startups have driven $26 trillion revolution and the retail tech landscape in the continent seems to be at its peak.

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In Portfolio News, Business Technology Platform

EY Announces Dimitri Sirota Of BigID As An Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2021 New York Award Finalist

Ernst & Young LLP (EY US) today announced that Dimitri Sirota, CEO and Co-Founder of BigID was named an Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2021 New York Award finalist. Now in its 35th year, the Entrepreneur Of The Year program honors unstoppable business leaders whose ambition, ingenuity and courage in the face of adversity help catapult us from the now to next and beyond.

Award winners will be announced during a special virtual celebration on August 3rd and will become lifetime members of an esteemed community of Entrepreneur Of The Year alumni from around the world.

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In Press Release, Portfolio News, Supply Chain Management

Roambee’s Real-Time Demand Signal Is Transforming Interstate Batteries’ Fulfilment Logistics

Roambee‘s real-time demand-signal solution for Interstate Batteries has earned the Top Supply Chain Project Award 2021 from Supply & Demand Chain Executive (SDCE) . The ~$1.5B Interstate Batteries, the largest independent battery distributor in North America, boasts a network of 250+ distributors and more than 250K+ dealer locations. Interstate Batteries is deploying Roambee in upgrading its fulfillment logistics to a demand-based dynamic model. The company’s transformation journey is designed to move it away from a milk-run consignment model.

A demand-driven dynamic logistics model requires live insight into batteries sold and stocked at every dealer location through either a centralized ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)/POS (Point of Sale) system or physically tracking the inventory. Standardizing POS machines or ERP systems across such a vast network of multi-brand retail dealers — many of which are small automotive service shops — was deemed impractical.

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In Venture Studio, CRM & Customer Experience

Explorium advises enterprises on improving and speeding up analytical machine learning

The key to successful artificial intelligence-based advanced analytical training is augmenting internal data with external, according to data science platform startup Explorium Inc.

The process is not easy, though. Problems include getting a hold of and managing that mass of external material.

“The key to any analytical problem is having the right data,” said Zach Booth, director of global partnerships and channels at Explorium.

Models are only as strong as the data they train on, but getting that needed, external data is challenging. “It’s manual, it’s tedious and it’s extremely time consuming,” he said.

Explorium claims it has a solution that includes a curated, data-source catalog coupled with a platform to integrate everything within an organization’s existing, internal material.

Booth spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Startup Showcase: The Next Big Things in AI, Security & Life Sciences. They discussed how external data source platforms — taking advantage of the massive amounts of data being generated in the world — could improve and speed up analytical machine learning for individual organizations.

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In Portfolio News, Business Technology Platform

BigID Is A Finalist Of The Ventana Research 14th Digital Innovations Awards

BigID, a leader in data discovery and intelligence for privacy, protection and perspective, today announced it is a finalist in the Data category for this year’s annual Ventana Research Digital Innovation Awards.

The annual Ventana Research Digital Innovation Awards recognize vendors that have introduced noteworthy innovations in technology that advance business and IT. The Digital Innovation Awards showcase advances in the productivity and potential of business applications as well as technology that contributes significantly to improved efficiency, productivity and the performance of an organization.

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