We’re all being asked to do more with less. Today, Gtmhub CMO JeremyEpstein shares his unique perspectives on being a CMO at early-stage startups. We talk about how building communities of like-minded people can help you break out of the pack, and the magic of micro-experience moments that can enhance your brand.
Energy Transition Meets Digital Transformation – SAP Innovation Strategy for Utilities
The IPCC reports that limiting the global mean temperature increase to 1.5° C will require CO2 emissions to reach net zero by 2050[1]. This analysis is the foundation for policies like the New Green Deal in the EU, which also aims for climate neutrality by 2050[2]. Decarbonization of the energy sector is the major pillar for this because about 73% of global greenhouse gas emissions are directly related to the use of energy[3] for industry, buildings, and transport.
It is therefore no surprise that Renewable Energies are the fastest growing source of energy, contributing half of the growth in global energy supplies and becoming the largest source of power by 2040[4]. In most regions, wind and solar are also the cheapest source of electricity generation, even without subsidies[5].
This shift to renewables also fosters the growing number of Decentralized Energy Resources (DER). Renewables like solar, wind, or bioenergy are to a large extent generated by small local generation assets, which feed directly into the distribution grid. The intermittent nature of solar and wind causes challenges for the balancing of demand and supply in the power grids.
Also the demand side is changing with industrial, commercial, and household customers more and more generating their own energy and becoming Energy Prosumers. This causes a shift in utilities’ business models from pure selling of energy and water to becoming a full-service provider for energy prosumers.
LiveEO, a German-based Earth Observation asset monitoring technology start-up, has secured €5.25 million ($6.35 million) in funding to expand its operations globally.
The Series A investment has been secured from venture capital firms btov Partners, Helen Ventures, DvH Ventures, and Motu Ventures as well as from deep technology investor Andreas Kupke.
Daniel Seidel, co-founder of LiveEO, said: “This funding round is a huge milestone for LiveEO. Over the last 3 years we’ve built up a unique technology stack to analyze earth observation data at scale and we now can realize many new revolutionary features on the basis of this tech backbone.”
LiveEO combines data acquired from satellite imagery and from other sources and then uses artificial intelligence to analyse the data to monitor critical infrastructures such as railways, electricity grids and pipelines.
The startup has plans to introduce their technology in other sectors including construction, mining, insurance, forestry, agriculture and finance.
The Cardano foundation has announced a partnership with Scantrust, a supply chain traceability solution, in order to streamline the supply chain management process, as well as optimising security.
Scantrust is a company that uses QR codes to bring products online, and aims to turn products and packaging into a “direct connection with consumers”. The company provides protection from counterfeiting, supply chain awareness, and consumer engagement, using blockchain technology to secure, track, and create consumer interactivity with a QR code.
Current Scantrust partners include HP Indigo, Hyperledger, and SAP, and the company has worked with Fortune 500 companies and SMEs across 168 countries.
One of the areas that blockchain technology has revolutionised is the supply chain. Blockchain solutions have allowed companies to trace, track, and empower the producer and consumer. A number of traceability companies have emerged in recent years, covering industries from food, textiles and high-end consumer products. What they share in common is the ability to create true transparency from the start of the supply chain all the way through to the consumer.
Advancing innovation in blockchain technology has allowed companies to promote their ethical approach to consumer goods, increase transparency, and secure against counterfeiting. Frederik Gregaard, CEO of the Cardano Foundation, commented on the partnership with Scantrust:
“Empowering trust and transparency across all industries and digital agreements is at the heart of the Cardano Foundation’s missions. I am proud of our Integrations team, who have worked tirelessly with Scantrust to deliver the first solution of its kind to leverage metadata on the Cardano blockchain. Together with Scantrust, we are helping brands to reconnect with their consumers, increase transparency in their supply chain, and fight counterfeit activity.”
NET2GRID announced that its Ynni Energy Engagement & Personalised Services solution is now available on SAP® Store. Built on SAP Business Technology Platform, the solution delivers energy insight and user engagement services to utility customers.
“We are proud to be an SAP partner and we are excited that our Ynni Energy Engagement & Personalised Services solution is now available on SAP Store,” says Bert Lutje Berenbroek, NET2GRID’s founder and CEO. “We have a vision of creating an intelligent, transparent, and cleaner energy value chain by translating energy consumption data into smart, personalized services. With our solution now available on SAP Store, we can benefit from SAP’s global reach, enabling the solution to be readily available for businesses that use SAP technologies with only minimal set-up efforts. Take the billing service, as an example. With Time of Use (ToU) tariffs becoming more and more available, NET2GRID can offer a bill split per activity, aggregated over different ToU tariffs and periods in a very cost-effective way.”
The core functionality of Ynni Energy Engagement & Personalised Services include:
SetSail, the AI-powered micro-incentives platform for sales, will unveiled multiple new product features on at the company’s first annual SetSail Voyage virtual conference. New SetSail features include a signal-based coaching app; smart milestone signals to help reps accelerate revenue; and data automation tailored to the way reps use their CRM.
The world of work has changed in the past year, and the ‘new normal’ requires a new way of selling,” said Haggai Levi, CEO of SetSail. “To be successful today, sales teams must embrace data, signals and storytelling. This is where SetSail comes in – providing sales teams with the information they need to take the small steps that lead to closing big deals.”
Founded in 2018 by former Google machine learning experts, SetSail uses AI to identify the buying signals needed to close a deal. The platform then converts these signals into recommendations for sales reps and presents them with micro-rewards (e.g. monetary rewards and recognitions) for following the best path of action and building good selling habits.
Digital mental health platform SilverCloud Health, with headquarters in Boston, Dublin and London is making its services available to users nationwide through Ireland’s Health Service Executive (HSE).
In 2018, the company partnered with the HSE on a pilot programme to offer online psychological tools for depression and anxiety to primary care psychological services and now plans to expand these services in Ireland.
WHY IT MATTERS
The platform provides evidence-based clinical content, programmes and support for users struggling with their mental health and chronic illness.
A study by the NHS into SilverCloud showed a 50% reduction in symptoms following eight weeks of sessions and improvement in 27% of cases.
The service will also open up referrals from a larger pool of sources, including GPs and Jigsaw, the national centre for youth mental health. SilverCloud’s mental health services are used by 650,000 people globally, acquiring 30,000 new users every month and providing more than 40% of all NHS mental health services.
This surge is in part due to an increase of people seeking support with their mental health during the COVID-19 crisis.
SilverCloud has raised more than €25.5 million from investors to date. In April 2020, the company raised $16 million (€13.6m) in Series B funding to expand into all 50 US states.
Meanwhile, London-based AI digital therapy service HelloSelf raised £5.5 million in Series A funding to expand mental health provisions for post-pandemic Britain.
Future Grid recently announced that its Future Grid Platform is now available on SAP® Store, which recently merged with SAP App Center as the single digital marketplace for SAP and partner offerings. The Future Grid Platform integrates with SAP Predictive Asset Insights and delivers real-time grid insights previously invisible to electric utilities.
“Now that the Future Grid Platform is available on SAP Store and integrated with SAP Predictive Asset Insights, the generated insights are even more powerful,” said Chris Law, CEO and co-founder of Future Grid. “We are excited to partner with SAP after participating in the SAP.iO Foundries program that was focused on accelerating utilities startups. This will make our solution even more accessible for electric utilities around the world.”
With Future Grid, businesses that use utility solutions from SAP can save time and money with increased reliability of supply and streamlined automated work orders and processes. Electric utilities will also have the ability to manage asset health issues directly and proactively plan and respond accordingly. Future Grid’s software turns smart meter data into improved grid reliability, asset management and customer safety, enabling electric utilities to integrate renewable energy at scale using their existing network assets.
Future Grid creates visibility into the health of critical yet ‘invisible’ electricity assets such as wires, transformers and fuses. Once its software analyzes and converts smart meter and other IoT data in real time, Future Grid creates a secure feedback loop by analyzing data from the grid edge and integrating grid recommendations back into distribution systems so that networks can be operated in real time. A wide range of use cases are currently being trialed, including dynamic voltage control, safety fault detection and constraint management. The Future Grid Platform is available for a trial on SAP Store.
The Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) has announced the Top 10 Innovative Technology Companies in Georgia.
The Top 10 companies were selected from the Top 40 Innovative Technology Companies competition, sponsored by Comcast Businessand Cherry Bekaert, and will present at the 2021 Georgia Technology Summit on April 28 – 29.
“These companies demonstrate the amazing talent and innovation in Georgia’s technology industry today,” said Dennis Zakas, Georgia’s Top 40 Innovative Company Awards Chair. “We are eager to watch them continue to grow and contribute to Georgia’s economy.”
The 2021 Top 10 Innovative Companies are:
Consumer fashion may be among the most unpredictable markets on the planet, but one startup in India has created an AI-based demand sensing platform that combines the brilliance of data scientists with seasoned industry experts to ferret out trends with uncanny accuracy. The idea is to close the gap between supply and demand.
“We help companies create demand-driven fashion forecasts from consumer data across a holistic value chain,” Ganesh Subramanian, founder and CEO at Stylumia. “Our demand sensing engine collects and analyzes publicly available global data to rank product trends, providing fashion designers, retail buyers, and merchandisers with a much deeper understanding of real-time consumer demand signals.”
More profitable and sustainable business
Forecasting fickle consumer appetites for unseen products has long stymied the most experienced minds in the fashion world. Stylumia can reveal breaking trends, allowing people to make design and merchandising decisions perfectly in synch. This can reduce underbuying and overbuying.
According to Subramanian, the typical Stylumia customer has improved the prediction accuracy of style and color levels by up to 30 percent, and increased sales and revenue between 25 to 50 percent, compared to the performance of products not designed and merchandized using the platform. Customers have also reduced excess inventory and carbon footprint levels by an aggregated average of up to 40 percent.
“When products are selling well, companies have less stock and are able to lower their carbon footprint because they’re using fewer resources, while generating the same amount of revenue,” he said. “Since our founding, we have reduced the number of garments that our customers have produced by over 60 million, while their sales and profits have grown.”
Consumer intelligence research on steroids
From its headquarters in India, to hubs in Australia, the United States, and the UK, Stylumia’s teams work with fashion, sports, and lifestyle brands that represent companies of all sizes worldwide.
Instead of brainstorming solely by intuition, designers and buyers log into their personalized portal to storyboard ideas using Stylumia’s AI-fueled algorithm or their own images for design inspiration. As they select colors, materials, patterns, and other product features, Stylumia instantly surfaces trending demands against the designer’s ideas. They can view similar products, see where selling levels are highest, and save and share their ideas with colleagues.
Through a global partnership with French transportation visibility specialist Shippeo, Krone Telematics can now accurately predict the estimated time of arrival (ETA) for every shipment. The collaboration is expected to yield further innovations.
Up to twelve hours in advance, the Krone Telematics technical monitoring system can accurately predict the arrival time of a truck. A cooperation with the European leader in real-time transportation visibility Shippeo makes this precise information possible. The estimated time of arrival (ETA) for a truck is much more difficult to calculate than for private parcel shipments, for example. This is because, in addition to traffic and weather conditions, it is influenced by many other parameters such as the duration of loading and unloading. Shippeo achieves the most accurate prediction of ETA on the market with machine learning and an algorithm that takes over 200 parameters into account. For Krone’s customers, this means they get reliable information about their shipments that they can use for planning and increasing efficiency.
SAP.iO kicked off a global sustainability-focused accelerator program alongside Accenture at SAP.iO Foundries Berlin and Munich. The Sustainable Future program aims to help early-stage B2B startups get up and running quickly to enable companies across multiple industries to address sustainability challenges and create a positive impact on both industry and society.
Sustainable Future is the largest SAP.iO cohort to date. Thirteen startups have been selected to work with SAP.iO Foundries Berlin and Munich, in tandem with Accenture experts and leading companies in various industries.
“To address global challenges such as climate change, businesses must partner on all levels and across organizations, industries and regions,” said Daniel Schmid, SAP chief sustainability officer. “Teaming up with Accenture to accelerate early-stage startups is part of our holistic innovation approach to integrate new solutions in our portfolio that help our customers understand and improve their environmental and societal impact.”
Sustainable Future is an equity-free program that seeks to propel digital transformation and corporate-startup innovation in four target areas including carbon tracking and trading, resource efficiency, climate risk tracking and mitigation, and circular economy. The program builds upon SAP and Accenture’s long-standing partnership and shared commitment to using technology to help the world build a more sustainable future.
“Our clients are increasingly turning to technology to enable sustainability agendas across their business and deliver on their purpose-based missions to drive value for their stakeholders,” said Caspar Borggreve, global lead for the Accenture SAP Business Group. “Together with SAP, we are helping startups bring innovation to life with solutions and services that allow companies to raise the bar by integrating sustainability into their core processes, strategies and operating models.”
The startups in this cohort will receive curated mentorship, access to SAP technology and application programming interfaces (APIs), and exposure to SAP and Accenture customers to develop high-impact proofs of concept. The accelerator program will run for three months and conclude with a demo day on July 8, 2021.
The Sustainable Future cohort includes the following startups:
Meet Stockly, a French startup that keeps the inventory of various e-commerce websites in sync. When you see an out-of-stock item on an e-commerce website, chances are you leave that website and try to find the same item on another site.
If you operate an e-commerce website, Stockly lets you sell items even when they’re currently out of stock. The startup automatically finds a third-party Stockly supplier with that specific item.
The order will go through and be sent by that supplier directly. Stockly tells its partners to use neutral packaging so that the end consumer isn’t confused.
This could be particularly useful for small-scale e-commerce companies that don’t have a healthy marketplace of third-party retailers. For instance, Amazon can already sell you an out-of-stock item if a supplier has listed that specific item on Amazon’s own marketplace. But that’s not the case for most e-commerce websites.
The main challenge for Stockly is that it has to sort through various catalog formats and match the different inventories of different retailers. It is focusing on clothing items at first. When an order is routed through Stockly, it selects a specific supplier based on different criteria, such as logistics, delivery time and historical data.
The integration of SAP Transportation Management System (TMS) with Sedna Systems’ team collaboration and email management solution will allow shippers using both products to gain a whole new level of control over transportation management-related data.
Logistics operations have evolved significantly in recent years and the industry is now seeing more companies embracing digitalisation to ensure efficiency in their businesses. The newly announced partnership between SAP and Sedna Systems solidifies the software giant’s position as a leading provider of the latest technologies for the logistics industry.
In October 2020, SAP has released an enhanced SAP Logistics Business Network that enables companies to jointly manage logistics transactions and obtain valuable insights across the complete value chain. The addition of new capabilities within the cloud-based global logistics network aims to increase value chain visibility, traceability, collaboration, and reach.
Stefan Sauer, Global Solution Lead for Ports, Terminals, and Shipping Lines at SAP, said in an interview that the company developed a proof of concept to test and evaluate the idea of merging SAP TMS with Sedna’s capabilities.
The integration will allow data that is normally locked away in an isolated email or within a TMS to be more accessible based on Sedna’s smart tagging system that provides cross-company transparency.
Sedna Systems Founder and CEO Bill Dobie mentioned that the company has had several integrations with SAP across its customer base, allowing clients using SAP solutions to organise email and prioritise emerging relevant information. Additionally, Sedna’s integration with SAP TMS is designed to unify all logistics-related conversations and documentation in one place.
“Like bulk logistics, these transactions and customer communications are managed through emails and siloed inboxes. The ‘cc effect’ and unstructured chat creates endless threads, repetitive and redundant conversations, and context catch-up that needlessly bloats email volume,” Dobie further explained.
SAP’s TMS is designed for both shippers and logistics service providers. It manages all areas of transportation processes within a company such as transportation planning and optimisation, freight tendering, and change management.
On the other hand, Sedna connects to SAP systems to create tags and import customers’ transactional information. The solution, which also integrates with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, allows messages that come into the email platform to be automatically tagged to the appropriate transactions so clients can maintain a full audit trail of their projects.
Lakshmi Baskaran, Vice President of Engineering at Sedna Systems, said:
“A customer order that is created in SAP Transportation Management is automatically integrated with Sedna.”
She explained that users can refer to the SAP customer order and the relevant data from their platform with a single click, real-time information about the order. Using the same connections, inbound documents received via email can be linked to other directions including SAP’s TMS.
Despite the ongoing debate of whether it’s a fruit or a vegetable, the avocado has been an export hit around the globe. Avocados are grown in the southern hemisphere but are immensely popular in countries where they cannot be harvested. There is also growing consumer awareness that intensive avocado farming leads to environmental issues in the countries of origin.
‘Driving through the rural areas of Chile, you will notice how severely the country has been going through a major drought during the last five to seven years,’ Nikita Gulin says. ‘Part of it is due to climate change, but it cannot be denied that intensive farming is adding to the problem.’ Chile’s GDP relies heavily on agriculture. Apart from avocados, food crops include blueberries, cherries, and walnuts. ‘Water efficiency is a huge topic for Chilean farmers and the country as a whole.’
For Gulin, Aganimo’s Russian-born founder and CEO, and his Chilean co-founder, CTO Sergio Esteban, this was an obvious problem to tackle.
‘In Chile, everybody knows someone working in the agricultural sector, whether it’s an uncle or the friend of a friend,’ Esteban says. ‘When we looked at the problem and solutions already available, it became clear that there was much room for improvement by means of technology – and we had the skills to do that.’
To combine their technical knowledge with research on agriculture, they made contact with academia. ‘The University of Chile immediately wanted to collaborate,’ Gulin says. Agranimo has 10 employees located in Chile, Russia, and Germany with backgrounds in technology, research, and practical experience in agriculture.
‘Chile is not the only country with this problem,’ Gulin explains, ‘It’s really all over the world – water is rare. From our first application for water efficiency, our vision grew as we expanded to more climate-related issues. Water is still one of the key components, but we are now working with any information that can be derived from climate and soil data.’
