A founder-friendly session where we hear from SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv mentors Amit Lavi & Ran Matoki. Amit Lavi covers “Are We Having Fun Yet? B2B Marketing in Crisis Mode” & Ran Matoki presents on “Strategic Finance in Light of Global Uncertainties: Funding, Budgeting, Project Priorization.”
One perhaps unintended consequence of travel coming to a near halt due to COVID-19 is the return of clearer skies and fewer carbon emissions.
For the startup Jet-Set Offset, which is a donation-based carbon offsetting tool for air travel, this is temporary good news on the sustainability front, but the startup is now reevaluating how it can help its partners amid the travel slowdown.
With Jet-Set Offset, named one of PhocusWire’s Hot 25 Startups for 2020, travelers can offset carbon emissions from flying by automatically donating one cent per mile to environmental organizations working to reduce carbon emissions.
However, “as travel has slowed or even ceased, real-time mileage-based donations to our partners are also down,” says the company’s co-founder and CEO, Anna Ford.
“These nonprofits need our help now more than ever to continue their planet-saving projects,” she says, and to that end, Jet-Set Offset has pivoted its messaging and launched a month-long campaign to celebrate April as Earth Month and allow travelers to offset carbon emissions from past flights.
In the time many of us live in now, we all know our online media consumption is — to state the obvious — going through the roof. Subsequently, the amount of data pertaining to online marketing is, equally, reaching stratospheric heights and in recent years tech companies like Datorama and Funnel.io, SuperMetrics and Adverity have appeared to give marketeers a data intelligence platform to deal with the welter of spreadsheets and reports necessary to track everything.
Last year, Vienna HQ’d Adverity closed an €11 million Series B funding round for its AI-driven platform to produce actionable insights in real-time for marketers.
Today it’s announcing a Series C financing round of $30 million, bringing the total amount it has raised to $50 million. The latest funding round is led by Valley-based Sapphire Ventures . Also participating is Mangrove Capital Partners, Felix Capital, SAP.iO and aws Gründerfonds who have all re-invested in this latest round.
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Adverity, a data analytics startup targeting applications in media, marketing, and ecommerce, today announced that it raised $30 million in equity financing, bringing its total raised to $50 million.
By accelerating R&D and growth within Adverity’s offices domestic and abroad, the fresh capital could help the company’s customers — among them Ikea, Red Bull, Unilever, MediaCom, and IPG Mediabrands — address the challenges AI and machine learning present with respect to productization. According to Algorithmia, 50% of companies spend between 8 and 90 days deploying a single AI model, with 18% taking longer than 90 days
Learn how to bring a new product or service to market in the age of Coronavirus with our guest today, Vanessa Liu. Vanessa graduated from both Harvard University and Harvard Law before going on to help launch multiple media and telecom startups as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. She then went on two four two more startups herself before taking on her current role running SAP.io’s Foundries program (www.SAP.io/Foundries), a no-equity accelerator for startups with a current or planned integration with SAP, 40% or more of which have female or under-represented founders.
In this episode, we cover how still-growing organizations should pivot their product, service, and/or messaging to focus on potential clients’ pain-points, and not on simply how great their product is.
La startup Andjaro prend la première place du classement “Talent management”. Elle permet aux entreprises de gérer et d’optimiser en temps réel le staffing opérationnel interne des entreprises, en priorisant le recours à la main d’œuvre interne. A la clef, des économies considérables !
Bonin Bough is a marketing guru, investor and startup CEO. He says businesses must prioritize empathy, now more than ever. Learn how companies can create value during COVID-19 to help them stay relevant while protecting their brand.
As the coronavirus crisis escalated in March, Emil Mikhailov, CEO of the AI startup XIX, sent an email to his employees, warning them to prepare for a recession when their top priority will be to “to survive the storm.”
“It’s not clear what is going to happen,” he wrote.
Then he made a vow: “We as a team will not lose anyone. We will sacrifice short-term to make sure everyone is OK.”
The downturn has upended the world of startups, many of which are scrambling for ways to cut expenses, including layoffs. But some startups are stressing the need to protect their employees’ jobs as they figured out ways to survive the downturn.
Some CEOs and founders, like Mikhailov, have even promised not to cut anyone.
Every day the news features stories about how businesses are adapting to the COVID-19 crisis. Whether it’s small companies developing new revenue streams to stay afloat, or larger ones reorienting operations to provide critical support, one thing is clear: Businesses are pivoting quickly.
But there can be missteps too. COVID-19 related promotions fill my social feed and inbox. Buy a comfy work-from-home bra! Puzzles (that are sold out) to help entertain the family!
Bonin Bough is a digital marketing guru, startup investor, and author of “Txt Me: Your Phone Has Changed Your Life. Let’s Talk about It.” His latest venture, OpenMessage, creates dynamic, branded text messages to drive customer loyalty. The company was selected by SAP.iO Foundry (a global startup accelerator) to participate in its new cohort of customer experience and retail companies.
Cette assemblée générale a aussi été l’occasion de fixer les six grandes orientations stratégiques pour l’année à venir. La toute première est de continuer d’accompagner la transformation digitale des entreprises. « L’association est particulièrement attentive aux nouvelles solutions proposées par SAP dans ce domaine et souhaite renforcer ses liens avec les Labs SAP mais également avec la SAP.iO Foundry de Paris, l’accélérateur de startups B2B Tech de SAP France » précise l’USF. L’association tient à ne pas être un cordonnier mal-chaussé en assurant sa propre transformation numérique, comme par exemple en ayant implémenté un réseau social interne et en poursuivant, dans le contexte du confinement, le développement d’outils de téléréunions.
The pharmacy benefits manager (PBM) is offering digital therapeutics (DTx) vendor SilverCloud Health’s line of tech-enabled mental healthcare solutions to the consumers it serves free-of-charge during the coronavirus pandemic, FierceHealthcare reports.
For context, PBMs generally act as middlemen between drug makers, retailers, and insurers, and are largely responsible for setting the price of pharmaceuticals. But in the past year, Express Scripts and other leading players have branched into the digital health realm to craft lists of effective DTx tools that their payer clients can sift through, which can help them choose the solutions they’d like to offer their members.
SilverCloud Health, the world’s leading digital mental health platform for healthcare systems and providers, health plans, and employers, today announced a $16 million Series B funding round led by MemorialCare Innovation Fund, which included LRVHealth, OSF Ventures and UnityPoint Health Ventures, elevating the company’s total funding to more than $30 million. Existing investors Act Venture Capital and B Capital Group participated in the round as well.
Four of the Series B investors, MemorialCare Innovation Fund, UnityPoint Health Ventures, OSF Ventures and LRVHealth are associated with leading U.S. healthcare systems that currently use SilverCloud, a testament to the quality and results of the platform.
“We are committed to providing truly impactful mental health support to all those with need,” said Ken Cahill, CEO of SilverCloud. “The need has never been greater than during this unprecedented global crisis. SilverCloud enables easier, earlier access to clinically validated mental health care that shows results equivalent to face-to-face care for the 1 in 5 people with a diagnosable mental health condition. With millions of people being asked to stay home and health systems needing to prioritize care, we recognize the heightened need for virtual support as the world copes with the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, SilverCloud is providing its clients, free of charge, expanded access to its platform to even more healthcare professionals, their families and patients to help make a difference for those in need in the current crisis.”
No matter where you are in the world, times are chaotic. It can feel easy to be consumed by the latest headlines about the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic because information is moving and changing rapidly. In light of these circumstances, it’s important that everyone has a plan.
Whether you own a small business, run a nonprofit, are head of your household, or are just looking to keep yourself healthy, we believe everyone is important. We want to be a partner in enabling you to run your day-to-day operations and, therefore, have created two, free templates on Ruum by SAP that outline an interactive checklist for managing the risks of COVID-19. These custom templates were built as a solution for teams and individuals who want to have a plan in place, but don’t necessarily have the time or resources to build one from scratch.
We want to make it easy for you. Here are COVID-19 planning checklists for Ruum users:
All of the information in these checklists was based on the latest information from the CDC and was not created by SAP. We also recommend reviewing the latest CDC guidelines for businesses or the latest CDC guidelines for households.
Ruum is a lightweight tool that helps users collaborate in real-time. Within Ruum, users create a living document where they can distribute tasks, set deadlines, input comments, and provide feedback simultaneously. It reduces the time spent on administrative and coordination work, allowing teams, families, or individuals to focus more on tasks that really matter. Ruum by SAP operates within the New Ventures and Technologies unit at SAP, which is on a mission to future-proof SAP and our customers’ businesses through technology innovation and product incubation.
Our hope is that having a plan and checklist in place can eliminate some of the uncertainty and fear surrounding this pandemic. For us, it’s essential to put our employees, customers, and public health first in this challenging time.
About New Ventures & Technologies
To future-proof SAP and our customers’ businesses, SAP the New Ventures and Technologies (NVT) organization drives transformative innovation through technology innovation and product incubation. NVT identifies commercial opportunities in the SAP ecosystem, explores and pioneers the business impact of emerging technologies and makes them enterprise-ready. For more information, visit our website.
In the fast-paced times of digitization, the question of how companies are protecting our digital identities becomes increasingly significant. Almost every online service requires personalized data to identify users. Thus, while surfing on the internet we leave our marks by granting access to our data without the transparency of understanding where that data is being stored, and who can access it.
Many websites and online services claim that data is protected because each individual user must enter a login id and password. But for users, creating and remembering a personalized password for every site is cumbersome and often leads to weak passwords that are used across many platforms. This process is broken because it’s not only inconvenient but also can expose users to data breaches.
Two SAP employees, Dor Shany and Rooly Eliezerov, sought to solve this problem by building a web application, OwnID by SAP, to safeguard personal data on various platforms. Their venture is in the process of creating decentralized, portable identities that users can take with them wherever they go online through their phone. The controls implemented by OwnID will ensure that the user maintains and owns all their own information. After creating a basic profile, users can use their digital identity instead of a username and password on every website that supports the solution, just by scanning a QR code.
“A user will create an identity with basic profile information and will then be able to use it to log in to any website or app that supports this option by scanning a QR code,” Shany said.
The idea of this came to Rooly’s mind while researching for his book “The Digital Identity Crisis” where he came across the concept of self-sovereign identity (SSI) — a term which describes the ability to hold and control your identity-related features. The project lays the foundation for further advancement, eventually leading to data autonomy for end-users and various application scenarios in every sector.
OwnID was chosen as one of the 2019 winners of SAP’s internal accelerator program, resulting in the team joining the SAP.iO Venture Studio to focus on the venture full time. The Venture Studio is designed to invest in small, entrepreneurial SAP teams to build and launch products that create a meaningful impact for business and society. Financial support and business expertise help the candidates go from the articulation of their initial idea to its successful commercialization.
Both founders bring long-term experience in the field of identity management. In fact Rooly founded the SAP acquired customer data cloud Gigya (now SAP Customer Data Cloud) and Dor held leadership roles at Gigya for over a decade.
The team has big plans for OwnID’s integration into SAP. Through partnership with SAP Consumer Data Cloud, OwnID has the potential to serve a huge network of websites and log-in screens which would advance the security and user experience for millions of users. From a long-term perspective, the concept of identity management could also help solve bureaucratic problems requiring proof of credentials in many different contexts, e.g. offering a way of providing identification for people who are not in possession of haptic identity documents such as refugees.
The team joins other incubated ventures within the SAP.iO Venture Studio including Ruum by SAP, Brilliant Hire by SAP, Spotlight by SAP, and the newly appended startup GreenToken by SAP.
Visit our SAP.iO website for updates and connect with us on social media (LinkedIn and Twitter).
Vanessa Liu is the VP of SAP.iO, a global organization responsible for building an ecosystem of startups around SAP. In her role, she is overseeing SAP.iO’s North American Foundries in New York and San Francisco, including programs devoted to women and diverse-led B2B enterprise tech companies.
Vanessa was most recently the Chief Operating Officer at Trigger Media Group, a $22MM digital media incubator. In her role, she co-founded, incubated and oversaw business operations and strategic initiatives of Trigger’s portfolio companies: InsideHook (the essential digital lifestyle guide for adventurous and discerning men) and Fevo (SaaS technology bringing friends and networks together for group experiences at live events). Vanessa currently serves as a board observer of Fevo and is an advisor or investor in start-ups including Bounce Exchange, Grata Data, GroundSignal, Knotel and Narrativ. She mentors female founders through Declare’s Lead Program.
Previously, Vanessa was an Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company’s Media and Entertainment Practice, based in Amsterdam, London and New York. In this role, Vanessa was responsible for serving clients in a variety of media and high tech sectors including online advertising, magazine and newspaper publishing, television, video content production, and information services, particularly on issues of digital media strategy, emerging market strategy, growth and innovation. Vanessa graduated magna cum laude with an AB in psychology from Harvard University and cum laude with a JD from Harvard Law School. She was a Fulbright Scholar at Universiteit Utrecht in the Netherlands where she conducted independent research on the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice. She serves as Vice President, College Alumni Affairs, of the Harvard Alumni Association.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
Ihave always been inspired by innovation — from the age of 12 through my senior year in college, I actually wanted to be an astronaut and spent much of my adolescent life learning about science and innovation that way. In college, I switched gears and decided to go into law, doing research on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and going to law school. However, I realized very quickly that addressing atrocities years after the fact wasn’t satisfying. I wanted to be a part of the solution in terms of economic development and to prevent these atrocities from ever happening in the first place. So, I started working for McKinsey and went into management consulting. On my third project, I was staffed on a digital media project. I was tasked with helping my client launch a new free internet service provider for the Dutch market. We had 6 months to create a business plan and to launch the service. I was immediately hooked. While at McKinsey, I worked with media companies — newspaper and magazine publishers, broadcasters, information services companies — where I crafted their digital plans and launched new businesses for them.
After 8 years though, I realized I had outgrown my time at McKinsey. I didn’t want to give businesses back to clients to run; I wanted to continue running them myself. At a time when many would regard as least optimal to start a business — I had just moved back to NYC from London and delivered my second child — I teamed up with a business partner and we launched a venture startup studio, called Trigger Media. Over the course of 6 years, we co-founded two portfolio companies — InsideHook, a digital lifestyle publication for men 35–50; and Fevo, a platform that enables groups to purchase experiences together. As the co-founder and interim CEO of both companies at various moments, I realized firsthand how much more difficult it is for women and diverse entrepreneurs to get funding — not because they don’t have the ideas, but often because they don’t have access to the right networks. I joined SAP.iO because I wanted the opportunity to help other underrepresented founders gain the access they deserve to help propel their businesses forward.
