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In Foundries, Singapore, Portfolio News, Financial Services

SAP.iO Foundry Singapore Launches FinTech and COVID-19 Recovery Acceleration Program

 SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today kicked off the SAP.iO Foundry Singapore Fall 2020 acceleration program focused on COVID-19 recovery, FinTech and spend management. The selected business-to-business startups will help SAP’s customers extend the value of their investments in SAP Concur solutions for travel and expense management.

“By helping these enterprising startups in the SAP.iO program scale, we enable our customers to benefit from the value of some of these unique solutions and emerging technologies when they become available in SAP Concur App Center,” said Andy Watson, SAP Concur senior vice president and general manager, Asia Pacific Japan and Greater China.

The selected startups will have access to curated mentorship from SAP executives, exposure to SAP technology and application programming interfaces (APIs) and opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers. The program will culminate at the SAP.iO Cohort Demo Day in December 2020.

“COVID-19 is pushing many businesses to go digital in search of growth,” Singapore Economic Development Board Vice President Ang Chin Tah said. “The Singapore Economic Development Board is glad to support the SAP.iO Foundry Singapore Fall 2020 acceleration program, which will bring startups from all around the world to Singapore to develop products that meet the needs of the new operating environment. Singapore’s established base of industry leaders in finance and digital, as well as connectedness to regional markets, make us a great testing ground for their ideas. It is a wonderful new addition to our thriving ecosystem.”

In line with the SAP.iO No Boundaries initiative, the cohort includes several startups founded or led by female entrepreneurs, a testament to SAP’s belief that a healthy ecosystem includes entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds.

The following startups are part of the SAP.iO Foundry Singapore Fall 2020 program:

  • CardUp offers a credit card enablement platform, enabling the payment or collection of big expenses using credit cards, where cards are not accepted today.
  • LuggAgent creates a standardized international luggage delivery and tracking platform by widely applying radio frequency identification (RFID) while working with logistics services providers in varying countries.
  • MatchMove makes it easy for users to move digital cash securely, allowing easy spending, sending and lending.
  • Railsbank’s open banking platform and APIs empower financial innovators to create financial services products and experiences for their customers.
  • Staple offers cognitive technology that can read, interpret and extract data from business documents faster, more affordably and more precisely than humans, at scale and in any language.
  • Timeshifter is the world’s first platform for circadian (body rhythm) shifting and helps businesses empower their traveling employees to create their own jet lag plans.
In Foundries, Portfolio News

The 2020 Fosway 9-Grid™ for Cloud HR is now live! Featuring Andjaro

Andjaro now listed in the Fosway 9 matrix, the only market analysis model that is used to understand the relative position of solutions and providers in the learning and talent systems market. 9-Grid™ has been in evolution since 2008 and is driven by demand for analysis and insight designed for European-based companies. Too often, organisations have had to rely on a US-centric view.

We created 9-Grid™ based on Fosway’s unrivalled, independent research in the Next Generation HR, Talent and Learning markets over 20 years, and with the insights and experience of our Corporate Research Network. This comprises over 150 leading global companies; typically enterprise-scale organisations with a large European presence.

A key difference of the 9-Grid™ to other analyst models, is that all of the nine zones have value and a set of actions to maximise that value. 9-Grid™ explicitly prompts real conversations around the trade-off between customer performance, solution sophistication and total cost of ownership.

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In Tel Aviv, Portfolio News, COVID-19, Foundries

Pandemic Accelerates Consumer Demand for Personalized Free Sample Boxes

Consumers are eager to discover new brands and have never been more open to trying free samples from the safety of their own homes. These were among the recent findings from a consumer shopping behavior survey conducted by startup Sampler.

Ninety-eight percent of respondents reported being more open to new brands, while just two percent said they were sticking to familiar products. What’s more, 98 percent of people were more likely to try new products if they had samples delivered to their homes compared to picking them up in store. Marie Chevrier, Sampler’s founder and chief executive officer (CEO), said these findings reflected why product sampling is full speed ahead on a digital makeover.

“Being able to digitally target consumers who have an interest in your specific products is light years ahead of traditional in-store sampling approaches,” Chevrier said. “Brand managers at consumer packaged goods companies and retailers are amazed at how targeted and measurable they can be, reaching more people who really want their products and staying close to them. Every consumer brand needs this higher level of targeting, and the COVID-19 pandemic just accelerated that demand.”

Relationships Built on Personalized Samples

Headquartered in Canada, Sampler has helped more than 500 of the world’s leading and emerging consumer packaged goods brands send samples to consumers who are interested in their products and build lasting relationships that stoke demand for more.

Sampler customers hail from 24 countries, primarily in North America and Western Europe. The brands cut across beauty, food, beverage, household, baby, personal care supplements, and vitamins, and have one common characteristic: they want to target, track, and measure product sampling programs with greater effectiveness. Like online advertising, brands decide which consumers they want to target. Except, in this case, they are shipping actual sample products to Sampler’s warehouses located worldwide.

Consumers looking for free samples can opt in to receive personalized boxes of product samples by completing a profile. Sampler has a total of approximately 60 million insights from a database of 2 million consumers. The company targets consumers against a filter of 700 segments, such as eating habits, fashion tastes, ingredient preferences, and historical activity with Sampler itself. The relationship building comes in when Sampler asks consumers how they feel about the products they received and if they were likely to purchase them. Follow-up also encourages consumers to leave reviews or ratings with feedback and take advantage of additional offers to make a purchase.

Digital Heralds New Age of Product Sampling

According to Chevrier, half of Sampler consumers who try a product sign up to receive a brand’s newsletter, and one-third rate and review sampled products. Depending on the product category, she said that companies can expect to convert between one to 10 percent of products sampled to a purchase within 90 days.

Many companies incorporate Sampler into social media advertising promotions on their own websites or others, serving up free sample offers targeted toward consumers who have opted in for certain product categories. Sampler also works with various partners, such as online magazines and retailers, with offers for their audiences.

“Companies can easily embed their free offer in an online influencer’s video review, allowing viewers to click on a link and claim their samples,” Chevrier explained. “When consumers leave reviews and ratings, the company can bring that feedback directly into their own platforms and marketing campaigns.”

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In Portfolio News, Announcements

Shippeo Acquires oPhone and Grows Market Share in Europe

Shippeo, the European leader in Real-Time Transportation Visibility solutions, has acquired oPhone, a Real-Time Transportation Visibility specialist headquartered in Lyon, France. As part of the acquisition, oPhone’s team will join Shippeo, with the Lyon-based office becoming Shippeo’s eighth in Europe.

The acquisition will see Shippeo welcome some major customers in retail into its community, including Casino, Monoprix, E.Leclerc, Système-U (U Log) as well as manufacturing customers including Panzani and transport companies including STEF. Shippeo now tracks more than 10 million shipments per year and connects 700 telematics and TMS in 70 countries.

“We are thrilled to announce this acquisition and welcome the oPhone team and customers within the Shippeo community,” said Pierre Khoury, Shippeo’s CEO. “Bruno Marchal and his team have done incredible work in the last few years to significantly grow their business. We are excited to have them joining forces to continue our mission to help facilitate the most seamlessly operated and automated supply chains in the world.”

“We’ve worked very hard over the past 5 years to provide an unprecedented transportation visibility experience for some of Europe’s top retailers,” said Bruno Marchal, CEO of oPhone. “Our team of transport experts is thrilled to combine with Shippeo, which will give us the opportunity to reach a broader audience more quickly and offer new solutions to Shippeo customers.”

The addition of oPhone’s team will see the number of Shippeo employees in research and development roles increase by 20%. Shippeo’s total workforce has more than doubled in the last 12 months, now totalling 135 employees.

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In Portfolio News, Foundries, Press, Berlin

Helping Startups Turn Untapped Data into New Business Opportunities for SAP Customers

 SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) announced its first data and analytics-focused SAP.iO Foundry Berlin startup accelerator program.

Seven startups have been chosen to participate in the virtual fall cohort held in collaboration with the SAP HANA and Analytics team with focus on the unique opportunities of data and analytics in the business-to-business space.

“Businesses are faced today with massive amounts of data coming into their lines of business practically from everywhere, just like a running faucet,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, president, SAP HANA and Analytics. “Our mission is to turn this untapped resource into a superpower that provides business value for everyone. It’s truly important to think about how we can connect people to data so they can use it for the benefit of their customers. Data is vast. We need to tackle it with lots of imagination.”

SAP.iO Foundry Berlin is part of SAP’s strategic business unit designed to accelerate innovation and drive new business models for SAP. The SAP.iO Foundries program is a global network of equity-free accelerator programs located in strategic startup hubs. It provides startups with access to mentorship, exposure to SAP technologies, and opportunities to meet and collaborate with SAP customers.

The selected startups will work closely with mentors from SAP, to develop proofs-of-concept, access SAP technology and application programming interfaces (APIs), and identify opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers. At the program’s core are the interactions with SAP’s customers who provide invaluable insights and guidance to the startups throughout their time in-program and beyond. The program will run for three months and conclude with a demo day in early January.

The cohort consists of the following startups:

  • C2RO is a Canada-based artificial intelligence (AI) company offering privacy-aware AI video analytics for physical spaces. It leverages the existing surveillance cameras and uses GDPR-compliant and proprietary edge-cloud AI to accurately analyze the behavior, demographics and journey of people. The same way Google Analytics revolutionized the digital world, C2RO is revolutionizing the physical world.
  • datazeit reveals information hidden in web and social media and delivers end-to-end data intelligence to accelerate digital business transformation.
  • Teamcore identifies on-shelf availability and lost sales opportunities. It prioritizes tasks after processing stores sales, stock and in-store data on machine learning (ML) algorithms. The platform enables a structured sales methodology by creating a problem-solving workflow across the entire retail sales and operations team, empowering consumer product companies to better store execution.
  • nwo.ai is an intelligence amplification platform that harnesses ML techniques and human metadata to identify global cultural shifts early and throughout the lifecycle of trends across various sectors.
  • Stylumia solves the problems of fashion, lifestyle, sports and home validation, prediction, and design generation. Its data-driven approach combines consumer demand sensing with the client’s own data for context-relevant validation, prediction and generation.
  • Ubermetrics’ new enterprise intelligence solution provides highly actionable signals on business-critical events. Using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Ubermetrics distills public information from millions of sources down to meaningful events, such as strikes at suppliers, competitor product launches and over 50 other categories.
  • ZEPL delivers an enterprise software-as-a-service data science and governance solution that supports enterprises as they are looking to deliver AI-driven applications to help solve business challenges where massive sets of data are in play.
In Foundries, Press, Tokyo, Portfolio News

SAP.iO Foundry Tokyo Kicks Off Accelerator Program Focused on Consumer Products

 SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) announced its first consumer-products-focused business-to-business technology accelerator program at SAP.iO Foundry Tokyo. The cohort will comprise four early-stage startups in the retail, consumer goods and distribution industries.

“COVID-19 has led consumers to adopt new habits and behaviors, which will continue in the long term,” said Hirofumi Suzuki, SAP Japan president and representative director. “This program will allow us to offer our customers new digital technologies to connect with consumers.”

The SAP.iO zero-equity-ask program is designed to accelerate innovation and drive new business models for SAP’s customers. During the 13-week virtual program, the startups will have access to curated mentorship, exposure to SAP technology and application programming interfaces (APIs), and collaboration opportunities with SAP customers.

The SAP.iO Foundry Tokyo Fall 2020 program includes the following startups:

  • ChatBook provides marketing automation solutions to generate leads and deliver personalized experiences across the entire customer journey through instant communications platforms.
  • True Data provides Big Data marketing services and advanced analysis technology at scale by integrating the gender, behavior and other ID data with product-trend point-of-sale data.
  • Vox Japan provides a connected reusable boxing service with remotely operated smart delivery carts that authenticates and tracks delivery and pickup information by smartphone.
In Foundries, Press, Article, San Francisco, Portfolio News

SAP Kicks Off SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco for “Future of Work” Startups

SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) earlier last week kicked off its virtual accelerator program focused on human resources (HR) technology and the future of work, at SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco. The program is offered in conjunction with SAP SuccessFactors solutions, providing world-leading cloud-based, people-focused HR technology.

Over the next 12 weeks, SAP will accelerate six early-stage HR technology startups that are focused on recruiting, talent and team management, well-being and collaborative learning for human resources.

The selected startups will have access to curated mentorship from SAP executives, exposure to SAP technology and application programming interfaces (APIs), and opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers. The program will culminate at the SAP.iO Cohort Demo Day in December 2020.

“With digital transformation changing the way people work in real time, and a much greater number of employees performing their jobs remotely, we see a trend with our customers to embrace new technologies to ensure employees have the necessary tools to succeed and remain attractive for their employers,” SAP SuccessFactors President Jill Popelka said. “We are looking forward to working with these companies to provide our customers with their innovations as part of the SAP SuccessFactors ecosystem.”

With five out of six startups founded or led by underrepresented entrepreneurs, SAP.iO continues to follow its 2019 SAP.iO No Boundaries initiative and fulfil its commitment to accelerate more than 200 startups around the world.

The SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco program includes the following startups:

  • Cloverleaf uses behavioral tools to provide ongoing insights into team effectiveness and provide customized, contextually relevant coaching to improve performance.
  • Crosschq has pioneered Human Intelligence Hiring, the next essential cloud software category, which includes reference checking and robust talent analytics to help build diverse teams.
  • Cuéntame is the first online mental health platform for Spanish-speaking employees. Cuéntame provides employees access to digital content, meditations and video therapy with certified psychologists, promoting daily mental health care and emotional well-being.
  • Knockri is an AI skills–based assessment tool that reduces bias and scientifically shortlists top-performing candidates to interview.
  • Landit is a personalized career pathing technology that increases the success and engagement of women and diverse groups in the workplace. The platform offers a turnkey solution to enable companies to attract, develop and retain their talent.
  • Mathison is a diversity talent marketplace that uses AI to help employers find candidates for their most important roles. It centralizes the talent network of hundreds of organizations serving underrepresented communities.
In Funding Announcement, Foundries, Portfolio News

MANTA Raises $13M for Its Unified Lineage Platform with Bessemer Venture Partners, SAP.iO, Senovo VC, and Credo Ventures

MANTA, a unified data lineage platform provider, has announced the close of a $13 million funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, accompanied by SAP.iO Fund, German VC fund Senovo, and Czech VC fund Credo Ventures.

MANTA’s platform pioneers the data management market, providing users with a fully automated lineage solution that helps them understand journeys and dependencies between data assets across the company’s entire system. Thanks to automation, the platform augments an organization’s data management and gives its users immediate and in-depth visibility into the state of their environment by drawing a clear, yet detailed map of all of their data flows and connections. This enables users to assign context to the assets that they are working with, accelerate development, speed up modernization processes, ensure data quality and security, and boosts governance efforts. The detailed and accurate visual presentation of the sources that data comes from, where it is flowing in the environment, and what happens to it along the way is being generated by connecting to the technology sources, downloading the programming code from there, and analyzing it in an automated way.

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In Foundries, Portfolio News, Funding Announcement

MANTA Raises $13M for Its Unified Lineage Platform With Bessemer Venture Partners

MANTA, a unified data lineage platform provider, has announced the close of a $13 million Series A1 funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, accompanied by SAP.iO fund, German VC fund Senovo, and Czech VC fund Credo Ventures to redefine data management with automation.

MANTA’s platform pioneers the data management market, providing users with a fully automated lineage solution that helps them understand journeys and dependencies between data assets across the company’s entire system. Thanks to automation, the platform augments an organization’s data management and gives its users immediate and in-depth visibility into the state of their environment by drawing a clear, yet detailed, map of all of their data flows and connections. This enables users to assign context to the assets that they are working with, accelerate development, speed up modernization processes, ensure data quality and security, and boost governance efforts. The detailed and accurate visual presentation of the sources that data comes from, where it is flowing in the environment, and what happens to it along the way is being generated by connecting to the technology sources, downloading the programming code from there, and analyzing it in an automated way.

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In San Francisco, Foundries, Video

How Olivia by Paradox Improved BOK’s Recruiting Process

In a bid to modernise their recruiting process, BOK Financial needed to find a solution that could easily integrate with its existing SAP SuccessFactors tech stack. According to Maciel, the company needed an intelligent solution that could automate administrative work so that its recruiters—what BOK Financial refers to as talent advisors—can focus their time and efforts on more strategic, value-adding work.

The financial institution was experiencing several challenges within its recruitment process, namely:

  • manual administrative tasks were weighing recruiters down
  • candidate expectations were growing—the company needed to match these expectations to keep up with demands
  • candidate foot traffic was increasing and the company felt that its talent advisory team’s ability to keep up was lacking

More importantly, BOK Financial needed a flexible solution. Maciel said it was important for them that the solution can be customised to the way they do business and the way they acquire talent. The company wanted a solution that aligned with its relationship-based business model. Maciel explained,

“We were focused on shifting our time from transactional recruiting to what we call talent advisory. So with the increased traffic on our career site, as well as in our recruiter inboxes, we needed a seamless candidate experience that really aligned with the rest of our business model. The focus for us was engagement through real-time communications.”

Through the SAP App Center, the company found the solution they required. With Olivia by Paradox, Maciel said that BOK Financial was able to transform candidate experience and engagement. She said that the SAP-validated solution enabled them to mirror the positive experience BOK Financial’s customers had with the experiences of its candidates:

“Olivia really helped us transform the way talent explored our jobs, the way they engage with us—providing the same experience that our consumers have come to expect.”

Another positive outcome the company was able to achieve was the increase in the completion rates of candidates who come into BOK Financial’s career site and converse with Olivia—up to 10% according to Maciel. 

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In Foundries, Press, New York

Cogniac selected to join SAP’s Fall 2020 Accelerator Program

SAP.iO recently announced the launch of SAP.iO Foundry New York Fall 2020, SAP’s virtual accelerator program that supports startups led by diverse entrepreneurs.

“We are super excited to be part of SAP.iO Foundry NYC Cohort,” says Cogniac’s Co-Founder and VP of Systems, Amy Wang, PhD. “We look forward to introducing Cogniac’s Drag and Drop Visual AI Platform to SAP customers in automotive and manufacturing industries, to bring visibility, focus, and agility and enable them to lead in the new Industry 4.0 world.”

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In Foundries, Blog, Paris

Les relations simples : la nouvelle innovation venue des startups

Quelque part au cours de la vie économique du XXᵉ siècle, le monde de l’entreprise s’est peu à peu enfermé dans une conception froide, où le secret et l’opacité étaient devenues des notions fondamentales. La transparence fut alors souvent vue tantôt comme de la naïveté, tantôt comme un leurre. En centrant leur attention sur leur produit plutôt que sur leurs utilisateurs, les acteurs économiques, se positionnant en « sachants », se sont peu à peu coupés de leur client. Or ce monde a vécu. La transparence, l’expérience client, la conception collective et la réciprocité, incarnées par le nouveau souffle venu des startups, sont devenues des piliers de tout acteur économique contemporain. En d’autres termes, c’est l’avènement des relations simples. 

Lire la suite…

In Foundries, Article

How Startups Can Turn Innovation Into Strategic Value

Even though the term innovation remains a buzzword du jour, it can also unequivocally change lives in a split second. Case in point: The world pivoting to digital strategies sooner than planned due to COVID-19. Digital innovation is now influencing the employee and customer experience faster than ever before. But to remain resilient and agile during volatile times, B2B companies are leaning on the startup community to take innovation to the next level.

Working with entrepreneurs beyond the four walls of your business brings a different flavor of technology to the table which helps B2B sectors digitize. And that’s a real value driver for those considering how training employees, implementing internal policies, retaining talent, ensuring well-being, and creating successful customer experiences can more strategically optimize results throughout an employee’s workforce journey and the entire customer lifecycle.

Sure, building third-party application programming interfaces (APIs) on top of existing inventions has been around for 20 years. But the global volatility emerging from COVID-19 has shown corporate leaders their businesses need to be more nimble to create collaborative and inclusive work environments while also delivering optimal outcomes and experiences for customers.

Clearly, employees and consumers alike want real improvements to keep up with the accelerated pace of change the digital economy is mercilessly creating. This is likely why the use of third-party APIs from startups is on the rise. B2B companies simply can’t afford to overlook the power of startups to not only attract top talent and keep them, but also improve digital commerce experience capabilities. Startup innovation must be seen as a value driver and strategic engine of B2B growth.

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In Uncategorized, Press, Portfolio News

ClearMetal to Provide Integrated Global Ocean Tracking for SAP Logistics Business Network

 ClearMetal, a leader in Continuous Delivery Experience (CDX) for supply chain and logistics solutions, today announced that it has joined the SAP Logistics Business Network as an SAP partner for international shipment in-transit visibility data. Using ClearMetal’s platform, customers will be able to leverage the most trusted and accurate international freight data to improve on-time delivery, reduce logistics costs and optimize inventory.

The addition of ClearMetal’s international ocean visibility data allows customers to track event status, transportation route and estimated time of arrival using cleaned and enhanced data. By using proprietary machine learning to cross-reference inputs and enrich supply chain data, ClearMetal’s platform draws out hidden patterns, enabling users to make smart business decisions based on up-to-date, trustworthy information.

“We’re proud to partner with SAP to provide customers with high quality international freight data to help them simplify their complex supply chains and enable a superior digital B2B experience in the global transportation space,” said Christopher Mazza, Senior Vice President Customer Experience and Business Development, ClearMetal. “We’re looking forward to helping empower some of the world’s top companies to drive greater profitability in the supply chain using accurate data.”

Using artificial intelligence, ClearMetal reconciles data across hundreds of data partners, thousands of unique data feeds and millions of historical records. The data that ClearMetal provides SAP Logistics Business Network is based on a feedback loop that constantly learns, adjusts, and gets smarter to provide the most accurate data and the best possible customer experience. With the addition of ClearMetal’s international freight data for ocean shipment, customers are able to more accurately determine lead time, promise date and inventory level based on the freight transportation mode, carrier, routing and exceptions – resulting in reduced costs and improved reliability and cash flow.

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