Skip to main content

Plum raises $4.2 million USD, shifts focus beyond recruitment

Plum, the Waterloo-based startup that uses AI to help organizations hire and retain talent, has raised a $4.2 million ($5.57 million CAD) seed round.
This raise comes as Plum has shifted focus within the last year from talent acquisition to now offering tools to help companies understand and make predictions about their entire workforce. Plum is also focused on offering those services exclusively for large enterprise customers, rather small-and-medium-businesses (SMBs).

The round was led by Real Ventures with participation from BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Fund, and SAP’s venture fund SAP.iO. The seed funding brings Plum’s total funding to date to $6.1 million USD ($8 million CAD), with the previous financing coming from Plum’s angel investor round.

Plum works closely with SAP and integrates with SAP SuccessFactors, the company’s cloud-based human resource management system. MacGregor explained that the shift in focus was directly related to that partnership, and becoming a SAP.io portfolio company. She noted that SAP encouraged Plum to use its predictive AI to help address the needs of current, as well as incoming, employees.

Read More…

How to Build an Entrepreneurial University

“In particular, aligning on expectations from each stakeholder – academia, start-ups, and corporations – is a key to establishing trust and long-term success,” said Ram Jambunathan, Managing Director, SAP.iO.

Universities and industry have a lot to learn from one another – and partnerships between the two can be mutually beneficial while especially serving the university’s entrepreneurial students.

It can be difficult to get these partnerships right, but with a structured collaborative framework on the part of the university, an eye to common values, flexibility and smart programmes for budding start-ups, these partnerships can benefit all involved.

Here’s how universities can better partner with industry and become more entrepreneurial.

Read More…

Talent Data Platform Plum Raises $4.2 Million in Seed Funding

Plum, a SaaS (software-as-a-service) firm specializing in providing enterprises with the data they need to quantify the potential of their employees, recently revealed that it had raised $4.2 Million in seed funding. Real Ventures, a Venture Capitalist company committed to future-focused startups led the funding for Plum. Adding in the funding it received in the Angel round, the total now moves up to $6.1Million.


The company made the announcement at SuccessConnect Las Vegas, the annual user conference from SAP SuccessFactors. The conference is aimed at helping HR professionals and Senior Business Leaders solve challenges relating to the workforce and predict future trends in order to take anticipatory actions. The other investors for Plum include SAP.iO and BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Venture Fund. Plum’s app integrates with SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting, which is a part of the HCM suite.

Read More…

The Fight Over “Employee Experience” is Finally Here

By: Stacia Garr, RedThread Research

The term “employee experience” has become increasingly popular in the last few years — so much so that we began an investigation into what it is and why it matters, which will publish in October. In the course of that research, we came across a wide range of perspectives on what it is, including from vendors like Medallia, Qualtrics, Service Now, and TI People.

But now, the heavy HR technology hitters are here to weigh in on the subject. Today, SAP SuccessFactors announced that their technology category, which we have long known as Human Capital Management, will now be known as Human Experience Management.

Along with this announcement comes a significant redesign of their user experience (UX) to offer a more integrated and holistic view of the information within the SAP SuccessFactors ecosystem in a more accessible format that intends to put individuals, teams, and organizations at the center of the experience. This new interface integrates into one location conversational AI, robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning, nudges, and predictions to try to get people higher quality information more efficiently. There is a lot we like in what the SuccessFactors team has done, and we applaud them for this holistic revamp of their product.

That said, the grand gesture of renaming the category begs us to take a closer look and to ask:

Is this, to borrow my friend and long-time SAPer Steve Hunt’s phrase, simply old wine in a new bottle? Maybe.
Employee experience, as we at RedThread understand it, is about two things:

  • Emotionally-laden events – These often include specific events in the employee life cycle such as the first day at work, a promotion, or returning from a job leave. During these events, employees are vulnerable because their expectations are high, which can suddenly impact their experience.
  • Commonplace exchanges – These are frequent interactions between employees, colleagues, and the organization. These interactions are often relationship-based and happen on an ongoing basis, instead of specific touchpoints, milestones, or moments that matter. During these commonplace exchanges, employees are not as vulnerable as during emotionally laden moments because their expectations are not as high. Yet, these exchanges have a cumulative effect on employee experience. The SAP SuccessFactors team certainly understands the value of emotionally laden events, also called “touchpoints” or “moments that matter”. However, we couldn’t fully tell how this significant user experience redesign will enable managers to better understand – and critically, to enable and improve – how employees experience those touchpoints or commonplace exchanges. It may be that the team is on the earlier parts of the journey or that we just need to see more. So why can’t we just call this new UX old wine in a shiny new bottle? Three reasons:
  1. The Qualtrics acquisition – The SAP SuccessFactors team seems to have a strong vision and appreciation of what Qualtrics, which has a focus on both employee and customer experience, can do (I sure hope so, for $8 billion). They just don’t seem to have turned that into a reality yet, which is reasonable given that the acquisition only closed in January. There are some early indications of their efforts and direction, though. For example, with the new UX, the SuccessFactors team has integrated simple one-question surveys (from Qualtrics) on the quality of manager check-ins into their continuous performance management solution. It sounds like this is just the beginning of what they have in mind.
  2. An ecosystem play – SAP SuccessFactors is making a big deal about it being an ecosystem player, meaning that they acknowledge that they don’t have a monopoly on great ideas and are trying to be better at playing well with others. As a result, the number of apps that can integrate with SuccessFactors has shot up from just 45 last year to more than 250 this year. The variety of these apps enable organizations to build a more customized employee experience that fits their unique needs.
  3. SAP.io – For those of you who don’t know it, SAP.io is SAP’s start-up accelerator, with a vision toward potentially integrating them into the SAP ecosystem. There are several start-ups within SAP.io that are focused on truly transforming the employee experience. One of them, Cultivate (which I have written about several times in other formats), shows significant promise at truly leveraging the existing data and delivering new insights to managers and employees that can help strengthen their relationships (which are so much at the heart of employee experience). We think some of these solutions will increasingly become integrated with this “Human Experience Management” platform.

In some ways, this announcement simply puts an exclamation point on the fact that we are moving away from an era of seeing people as cogs and more toward seeing them as unique humans, which is something we obviously strongly applaud.

From the perspective of being an HR technology market observer, though, we see this as something different. This announcement heralds the mainstreaming of the employee experience concept, which again, is a good thing. As SuccessFactors further refines how employee experience shows up in their platform, they will heighten awareness of the need to take an employee-first perspective.

However, this announcement does also mean that the fight over what “employee experience” really means – and what it should look like from a technological perspective – has really begun in earnest.

And what is a fight without a worthy opponent?

Look out for the good folks in Pleasanton to weigh in with their perspective very soon. I imagine announcements coming from this year’s Workday Rising event in October will carry at least a nugget or two on what they’re thinking.

5 milliards pour la French Tech

A l’occasion de l’ouverture de la conférence annuelle France Digitale Day, Emmanuel Macron a rappelé mardi soir ses ambitions pour la tech tricolore. Le chef de l’Etat a ainsi annoncé la mobilisation d’investisseurs à hauteur de cinq milliards dans les trois prochaines années pour accompagner le développement des startups françaises.

Lire la suite…

Cracking the Code: From Startup to Scaleup in Enterprise Software with Ram Jambunathan (SAP.iO), Lonnie Rae Kurlander (Medal), Caitlin MacGregor (Plum), and Dimitri Sirota (BigID)

The startup journey is hard. Data shows that 70% of upstart tech companies fail, while only 1% of these startups will go on to gain unicorn status. Success in enterprise software often requires deep industry experience, strong networks, brutally-efficient execution, and a bit of luck. This panel brings together three successful SAP.iO Fund-backed enterprise startups for an open discussion on lessons learned, challenges of scaling, and why the right strategic investors or partners can be beneficial even at early-stages

Watch Video

Talent Data Platform Plum Raises $4.2M to Prepare Organizations for the Future of Work

 Plum, a software-as-a-service company that provides enterprise organizations with the data they need to quantify the potential of their workforce, announced today that it has raised $4.2M in seed funding. In combination with their previous Angel round, Plum has raised a total of $6.1M to date.

The $4.2M round was led by Real Ventures, a Venture Capitalist firm dedicated to future-focused startups that create new categories. “Over the next decade, people will need to be assigned and trained for new jobs on a scale that has never been seen,” said Janet Bannister, Partner at Real Ventures. “McKinsey claims that 400 to 800 million jobs will disappear due to automation in the next 15 years. At the same time, 85% of jobs that will exist in 2030 do not exist today.”

Bannister went on to say, “Plum is the only provider of scientifically-validated, predictive data that can scale to get every person in the right job for the future of work – which is why we believe that Plum is posed to not only be a huge company, but also make a significant, positive impact on millions of lives.”

Other investors include SAP.iO and BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Venture Fund. Plum’s app integrates with SAP® SuccessFactors® Recruiting, which is a part of the human capital management suite.

“An employee’s success in a role depends not only on an employee’s hard skills but also their intangible characteristics,” said Dr. Ram Jambunathan, SVP & Managing Director of SAP.iO. “But today, businesses still rely on traditional measures and assessments that are often prone to subjective biases. The SAP.iO Fund invested in Plum so our customers could build the full picture of their employee’s capabilities. Through Plum’s integration with SAP® SuccessFactors®, businesses can now drive the complete talent management experience that employees want and need for long-term success.”

Read More…

BigID Launches Momentum Value Added Reseller Partner Program to Expand Reach Globally

BigID, the leader in data-centric personal data privacy and protection, today announced the BigID Momentum Value Added Reseller (VAR) Program. The program enables resellers to easily add BigID’s data discovery, intelligence and privacy automation products to their portfolio to capture new revenue streams as companies comply with global privacy regulations like California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The BigID VAR program will enhance the company’s market presence globally, accelerating sales growth in critical territories like Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

Inaugural VAR partners include Optiv, SHI, Navilogic, NextID, GDM Sweden, Optimitri Mexico and Dunlap, Bennett & Ludwig.

BigID will support VARs with a full enablement kit, facilitated by a dedicated portal. VARs will gain immediate access to deal registration program, training, sales management tools, and joint marketing program support for webinars, events, and related activities and collateral.

Read More…

Got Talent: Recruiting platform Brilliant Hire raises €1M from SAP.iO

SAP.iO Venture Studio makes a €1 million follow-on seed investment in Brilliant Hire, a bias-free, skill-based pre-screening platform that helps digitize recruiting to provide faster and greater insights

Brilliant Hire co-founders, Swetha and Hemant with Juergen Mueller, CTO of SAP

In most hiring processes, hitting the buzzer to catapult candidates to the next round does usually not occur as quickly as on prime television shows. Talent is nevertheless what both are looking for.

There’s a strong connection between achieving business objectives and hiring the right talent, hence increasing the quality of candidates within the hiring funnel is fundamental to success. Tech is promising a shortcut to identifying the best candidates for job offerings, by also eliminating (un-)conscious bias towards applicants, and improving hiring efficiency. Will software be the next recruiting manager you meet in an interview? Not quite, but it could make all the difference.

Brilliant Hire offers skills-based job applicant screening, providing faster and greater insights without bias. The latest funding allows the venture to proceed with the recently released Brilliant Expert Network. Brilliant Experts is a complimentary service to Brilliant Hire, providing experts who evaluate candidates at any skill level and any discipline. With this service, recruiters simply send candidates the Brilliant Hire link and subsequently receive a full breakdown of a candidate’s skills from the expert. On the backend, the Brilliant Hire teamensures the quality and availability of the evaluating expertsremains high. The platform is unique across the screening industry by combining both machine learning with human evaluators.

Brilliant Experts has been used at SAP by the Silicon Valley Next Talent program over the past few months. With the addition of Brilliant Experts, Brilliant Hire removed the burden of assessment evaluation and decreased the wait time of applying candidates by more than 50 percent:

“We went from a one to two weeks response time to just two days. This resulted in over 400 candidates screened and only 100 qualifying ones to be interviewed – all without burdening recruiters or managers.”

Caitie Sullivan, program manager, Silicon Valley Next Talent Program, SAP

The team has shown early successes, including helping software company SAP SuccessFactors hit their ambitious 2019 hiring targets. This includes hiring over 100 engineers across the San Francisco and Bangalore offices. Beyond SAP, Brilliant Hire has been used by Mercedes-Benz R&D and the Second Harvest Food Bank.

Today, Brilliant Hire is offering a 3-month trial allowing companies to screen up to 300 candidates evaluations for just $1. Simply head over to the SAP Store to start your trial today.

To continue delivering their vision of screening-as-a-service, the new funding enables the team to grow in key areas. During the second half of 2019, Brilliant Hire will add Go-To-Market experts, designers and various engineering resources across San Francisco and Bangalore — hence hiring themselves! If you believe in the team’s mission and are interested in joining, reach out to their General Manager, Ryan Phillips, at ryan@brillianthire.io or check out the team’s career page.


About Brilliant Hire

Your hiring process is biased, we can help you fix it. Be brilliant in the way you hire. Try Brilliant Hire via the SAP Store and find more information on brillianthire.io.

About SAP.iO Venture Studio

The SAP.iO Venture Studio invests in small, entrepreneurial teams inside SAP and helps them build and launch successful products that attack some of the biggest problems in enterprise software. More information on sap.io/studio.

HBCU National BrainTrust

Vanessa Liu, VP of SAP.iO Foundries North America, joined an industry panel with leaders powering Black innovation through corporate venture capital efforts in this year’s HBCU Braintrust.

Powerful partnerships with SAP, T-Mobile, IBM, Intel, and Amazon all investing in women, URM businesses, and academic programs help pave the way in making a difference in how these groups are empowered and funded.

SAP Launches New Accelerator Program in Munich

SAP announced the first SAP.iO Foundry program in Munich with seven business-to-business technology startups creating innovative software that integrates with SAP’s marketing and commerce cloud solutions.

SAP.iO Foundry Munich is part of SAP’s innovation strategy and is designed to provide the startups with access to curated mentorship, exposure to SAP technology and application programmable interfaces (APIs), and opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers.

The startups in the Munich cohort were selected based on their ability to:

  • Enhance customer experiences in commerce and marketing
  • Apply emerging technologies, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT) and augmented reality, that unlock enterprise data and drive outsized outcomes
  • Acquire customers and show readiness to scale

“The SAP.iO expansion to Munich is a signature commitment to the German startup ecosystem,” said Deepak Krishnamurthy, SAP chief strategy and transformation officer. “We will empower the startups to deliver value to our customers and, at the same time, build a compelling ecosystem around SAP C/4HANA and customer experience solutions.”

The SAP.iO Foundry Munich cohort includes the following startups:

  • ViewAR offers a platform-independent system for easy and robust creation of augmented reality apps for web and mobile use.
  • presize.ai provides mobile body scanning software for fashion e-commerce, creating a more enjoyable experience by matching the best-fitting clothes with shoppers’ unique body reality apps for web.
  • parcelLab is a cloud-based service that helps brands provide a personalized and branded customer experience during checkout, shipping and return processes.
  • 8select is a plug-and-play software solution offering a curated shopping engine (CSE) to online retailers enabling them to personalize product recommendations for end consumers. It allows retailers to cross-sell by publishing automatically curated product sets (such as outfits) along the customer journey.
  • Dotaki takes conversion rates to the next level for online merchants by using artificial intelligence to personalize digital content and experience according to each individual visitor’s method of making purchasing decisions.
  • rapitag is a leading provider of secure mobile checkout and unique customer experiences in retail. rapitag offers the world’s first patented antitheft IoT security tags for one-click buying, helping retailers to connect and digitalize their physical stores.
  • Expivi is an interactive and visual e-commerce platform that generates an immersive shopping experience with instant 3D configurations and artificial reality. Businesses are able to upgrade their online stores by using Expivi on their own existing marketplace.

Read More…

How to Build an Entrepreneurial University

Building a robust relationship between stakeholders from the get-go is essential. Relationships require a foundation of trust and an understanding of the interests of each party – and nurturing these relationships throughout the partnership is equally critical. As leadership change takes place at different rates in academia, start-ups and large corporations, it can be challenging to re-establish trust and re-align on the goals in the face of change. It’s important to have a strategic consensus to sustain the essence of mutual goals and reinforce the relationship to maintain a solid relationship throughout their partnership.

“In particular, aligning on expectations from each stakeholder – academia, start-ups, and corporations – is a key to establishing trust and long-term success,” said Ram Jambunathan, Managing Director, SAP.iO. “Academia is often focused on pushing the boundaries forward through proof-of-concept demonstrations, while corporates may be looking for something incremental that can align to existing offerings, mature development processes or sales motions. And in between are start-ups coming from universities that are in the process of establishing product-market fit.”

Read More…

SAP.iO Announces Seven Innovative Israeli Startups for the First SAP.iO Foundry Program in Tel Aviv

SAP announced the names of the seven Israeli startups that will take part in the first accelerator program at SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv.

The SAP.iO program is part of SAP’s innovation strategy and designed to accelerate early-stage business-to-business (B2B) startups that build innovative software and deliver high value for SAP’s customers.

“This foundry is part of a wider and exclusive network of similar programs we have created throughout the United States,” said Alexa Gorman, head of SAP.iO Foundries EMEA. “SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv reflects SAP’s commitment to the dynamic Israeli high-tech ecosystem.”

Startups will have access to curated mentorship, exposure to SAP technology and application programming interfaces (APIs), and opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers.

“The selected startups will have our support and access to our technology expertise,” said Orna Kleinmann, managing director at SAP Labs Israel and SVP, Technology & Innovation Cloud Experience. “We believe in their ability to offer a variety of advanced solutions for SAP’s customers.”

The SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv cohort includes the following startups:

  • ARpalus is an augmented reality (AR) and predictive analytics retail technology startup that builds an AI@XR platform for automatic collection and deep analysis of large-scale data on shopper behavior.
  • EasySend helps financial enterprises improve customer experience and increase operational efficiency using EasySend’s cloud-based, drag-and-drop, no-code platform to quickly and easily build 100% digital, omnichannel-accessible customer-facing processes.
  • GrowthSpace replaces traditional one-to-many learning and development using tailored online coaching platform for enterprise employees. Users hold one-on-one video coaching sessions targeted at specific career objectives.
  • Outgage is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketing direct-mail platform bridging the gap between offline and online campaigns to create personalized brand experiences, for effective conversations between enterprises and their customers.
  • Silverback is an online sales intelligence platform that relies on cross-marketplace analytics to enable online marketplaces, stores, sellers and brands to monitor product sales across different e-commerce sites.
  • Supersmart provides the world’s first scan-and-go solution with advanced loss prevention capabilities, enabling consumers to instantly check out their fully loaded cart or basket and have a positive customer experience.
  • YOUTILIGENT uses machine learning and the Internet of Things to enable vendors and service providers to change the way they communicate with their appliances, through a new connected consumer solution.

Predicting Job Success and Preparing Enterprises for the Future of Work

Everywhere I turn, I hear concerns about technology and workforce automation causing job losses. For employers, however, it seems that the real worry lies not in eliminating but retaining their workforce.

How can they prepare their existing talent pool – and their organizations – to thrive in the new economy? How can they deal with the impending mass migration of jobs toward those requiring new skills?

Those are the fundamental questions that emerged from my discussion with Emily Lambert, Content Marketing specialist at Plum, Inc. Plum offers a solution, also called Plum, that is now available on SAP App Center. It uses the precepts of industrial and organizational psychology combined with – you guessed it – artificial intelligence (AI) to help organizations hire, grow, and retain top talent.

Read More…