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In Blog, Global, Venture Studio

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

July — September 2021 | Achievements & News from SAP.iO Venture Studio

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

Autumn is upon us which means another three months have passed! Despite the summer break in many regions of the world, SAP employees have continued to take charge of their venture, pursued the freedom to shape their own strategy and taken their own decisions, also accelerating their own personal growth. Find the highlights of recent events and developments below:

 

The SAP.iO Venture Studio has welcomed a new venture to their portfolio. Yet to be named, it already had its first outing back at SAP’s customer flagship event.

We’ll share more on the venture soon!

Brilliant Hire by SAP

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

  • Brilliant Hire is now live on the SAP Store!
  • Despite already having mentioned their latest video in last quarter’s edition, we nevertheless wanted to highlight it once more. Watch and read how their product elevates the candidate experience with smart job matching.

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

GreenToken by SAP

GreenToken by SAP is a supply chain solution that offers companies new levels of transparency through reliable, blockchain-based information. Gain visibility into where raw materials came from and produce products with knowledge about where and how the materials were produced, even in complex, non-batch supply chains.

  • After featuring prominently in the global opening CEO keynote at SAPPHIRE 2021 and announcing their collaboration with Eastman Chemicals, the partners got together for yet another project, in the form of a 24-hour hackathon. Read more on the event in this blog post on LinkedIn: 24 hour Hackathon delivers cool consumer ‘App’​
  • Further, Eastman also strengthened their commitment to GreenToken and a more sustainable future by mentioning the venture in their quarterly update for investors: “In addition, we continue to drive the circular economy platform from every angle, including digital. We are proud to highlight our collaboration with SAP GreenToken technology. The Eastman and SAP collaboration will leverage the blockchain-based platform of GreenToken to provide visibility through the value chain of sustainable products, such as the specialty plastics produced with Eastman’s molecular recycling technologies. Through data transparency enabled by blockchain, the platform is designed to give brands and consumers traceable information of sustainable attributes of products, including their percentage of certified recycled content.”

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

Paid Promptly by SAP

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

  • Brilliant Hire has a new General Manager! Paul Parter has taken over the task from Erin Dierker who is on to a new academic chapter at Stanford Business School. We’re wishing both all the best!

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

EverLoop by SAP

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

  • Read here about the founders’ journey and how they developed an idea that was initially discussed over coffee into a product!
  • The team will be from now also sharing updates on their LinkedIn channel, so don’t forget to follow them on their journey of enabling the circular economy through transparent and easy e-waste disposal and recycling management.

More on this venture on https://everloopbysap.webflow.io/

SourceAgent by SAP

Great sourcing shouldn’t be a secret. Source Agent by SAP gives you the insights and strategies to address spend intelligently and wow your stakeholders. Identify sourcing opportunities by aligning your spend to current market intelligence. Receive a targeted sourcing strategy and supplier recommendations based on your data and requirements for each spend category. Quickly convert strategies and plans into eSourcing event prep and execution.

  • The venture celebrated their six months anniversary on September 1! If you need a throwback, re-read their investment announcement from our 2020/2021 cohort here.
  • The team will be from now also sharing updates on their LinkedIn channel, so don’t forget to follow them on their journey of building the future of sourcing.
  • Their pilot program is currently open. Visit their website or email sourceagent@sap.com to learn more.

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

In Blog, Global, Venture Studio

Starting a corporate venture: From idea to funding

Co-Founders of EverLoop by SAP

Sometimes the best ideas just come from chatting over a coffee: The founders behind EverLoop by SAP share insights on how they started their business, what hurdles they had to overcome along the way and what makes a successful team.

Co-Founders of EverLoop by SAP

When and how did you know you had a viable idea for a start-up?

So, you have a problem to solve. Now what?

Which difficulties did you have to overcome in your first months as co-founders?

What plans do you have for the future?

About EverLoop by SAP

About SAP.iO Venture Studio

 

In Blog, Global, Venture Studio

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

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

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

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

 

Brilliant Hire by SAP

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

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

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

GreenToken by SAP

GreenToken by SAP is a supply chain solution that offers companies new levels of transparency through reliable, blockchain-based information. Gain visibility into where raw materials came from and produce products with knowledge about where and how the materials were produced, even in complex, non-batch supply chains.

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

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

OwnID by SAP

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

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

Paid Pronto by SAP

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

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

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

EverLoop by SAP

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

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

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

SourceAgent by SAP

Great sourcing shouldn’t be a secret. Source Agent by SAP gives you the insights and strategies to address spend intelligently and wow your stakeholders. Identify sourcing opportunities by aligning your spend to current market intelligence. Receive a targeted sourcing strategy and supplier recommendations based on your data and requirements for each spend category. Quickly convert strategies and plans into eSourcing event prep and execution.

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

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

In Blog, Global, Venture Studio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Smart Job Matching works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Brilliant Hire by SAP

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

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

About SAP.iO Venture Studio

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

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

In Blog, Global, Venture Studio

Venture Voices: Tips for successful start-up marketing

Start-up marketing, Storytelling and Co.: The Director of Product Marketing at Brilliant Hire by SAP shares some key lessons that that she has learned through the years. 

By Katya Pokrovskaya, Director of Product Marketing at Brilliant Hire by SAP 

Having recently made a career move, I joined Brilliant Hire by SAP as Director of Product Marketing just over a month ago. Brilliant Hire is an employee-led venture in the SAP.iO Venture Studio, SAP’s in-house incubator designed to build new growth businesses for the company. Having worked for a few early-stage software start-ups in the past, it feels great to be back in the innovation space. I wanted to share two tips that I believe are key in developing strong messaging and positioning for a SaaS start-up: building your story around your audience and communicating value over functionality. 

So, why does my start-up need marketing?

As a marketer, a question that I often get asked from non-marketer colleagues and friends is “Why do we even need marketing in the first place? We’re building a great product. It should sell itself”. It’s an interesting question as there’s no doubt that a great product is the foundation for the success of a business. Organizations such as Product-Led Institute have built fantastic frameworks and entire training programs on building fast-growing SaaS businesses with a product-led approach. However, as important as product is, so is getting the word out about it in a way that will resonate with your market. Marketers exist to craft a clear, compelling story and bring it to the right people at the right time – to ultimately communicate the value of your product and drive growth. 

Tip: Make your customer the hero of your (marketing) story

Who is your target audience? If you’re trying to appeal to everybody, then you’re probably not appealing to anybody. I would argue that the number one rule of marketing is this: know your audience. It starts with taking a step back from what you’re building or selling to listen and empathize with your target user and customer. Try to learn as much about them as possible to understand their unique needs and think about where you can help. Make time for qualitative research such as interviews and focus groups to build detailed buyer/user/customer persona profiles. If your product addresses a few different audiences, repeat the audience profile exercise for each one to understand all the key personas that you are positioning your product to. Ask yourself: Who are you building your product for? What problems does it solve for them? What value can it bring to their lives?   

The expert knowledge you gain from empathizing with your audience should be the foundation for your marketing storytelling. Think of your marketing message as a story and your customer as the hero of the story. I recently came across an interesting framework for crafting a marketing story in a great book that I’m reading: Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller.  As in any story plotline, the hero (your customer) will need to overcome a challenge or obstacle. Eventually, they meet a guide (your product/service/solution) who will offer them a plan and provide a call to action to help them solve the problem. How does your product help customers overcome a challenge and make them successful?   

Tip: Communicate value, not feature/function

In the fast-paced, information-saturated world that we live in, communicating value helps people quickly understand why they should care about your product. When creating marketing messaging for software, it can be easy to resort to listing the features and functions of the amazing SaaS product that you’re building. However, unless you’re targeting a highly technical customer, this approach most likely wouldn’t resonate with your audience. Instead, think about how you can help your customer: specific use cases for your product, the problems solved for the end-users and ultimately, the value that it brings. Even better, could you quantify the value to show things like time saved or ROI?   

Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder of Slack, once sent a memo to his team that said: “Just as much as our job is to build something genuinely useful, something which really does make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive, our job is also to understand what people think they want and then translate the value of Slack into their terms”. 

The category of company-wide messaging software wasn’t new when Slack entered the market in 2013. However, Slack was unparalleled in translating their platform’s capabilities into a clear value proposition. By positioning themselves as a replacement for email and the place “where work happens”, Slack clearly communicates how its product makes users’ working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive. The strong messaging and positioning, coupled with a fantastic product, powered Slack’s impressive hypergrowth.   

At the end of the day, customer-centric marketing that communicates clear value will make it quick and easy for your audience to understand why they should choose your product over all of the other options out there.

Check out the SAP.iO Venture Studio website to learn more about how we drive organic innovation for SAP.

About Brilliant Hire by SAP

Brilliant Hire intelligently matches candidates with a personalized shortlist of a company’s jobs based on what really matters to them. It allows the candidates to search based on their skills, interests and passions — instead of keywords.

About SAP.iO Venture Studio

SAP.iO Venture Studio drives a new era of organic growth at SAP. It invests in new ventures founded by small, entrepreneurial teams inside of SAP who are focused on building the future of enterprise business processes. SAP.iO Venture Studio provides design, development, and sales support to help these ventures launch. Founding teams join the SAP.iO Venture Studio primarily through the SAP.iO Intrapreneurship and Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) programs.

In Blog, Global, Venture Studio

Venture Voices: A year of and with GreenToken by SAP

Sometimes news unfold on April Fools Day that isn’t a joke, but real and exciting: The founders behind Green Token by SAP share their venture’s founding anniversary with other greats in the tech industry. Here are some of their highlights from their first year.

Founded on April 1, 1976, Apple most certainly wasn’t a joke. Nor was Google’s announcement in 2004, introducing the beta version of Gmail, its new — and free! — web-based email service. And of course, though hard to believe today, SAP was once also considered a start-up. When five entrepreneurs started the company on April 1 in 1972, Hasso Plattner didn’t even own a personal computer.

Today, almost all of the world’s 100 most valuable brands use SAP software and the company has grown to more than 100,000 employees. Even with its storied history and reputation in the tech industry, SAP has not strayed far from its start-up roots. Among its 100,000 employees, some continue to build products and teams from scratch through the SAP.iO Venture Studio, an organization dedicated to fostering employee-driven innovation. Since 2016, SAP has been investing in small, entrepreneurial teams to find and test new areas with products that attack some of the biggest problems in enterprise. On April 1, 2019, Green Token by SAP, a venture building a solution focusing on supply chain transparency for more ethical business, also joined the ranks of SAP’s employee-led ventures. Hear what James Veale and Nitin Jain have to say, looking back on their first 12 months and ahead as venture founders:

Exactly one year ago you started GreenToken by SAP after 18 months of evolving the idea. What happened since?

Nitin & James: “Like one-year-old humans we have learnt an incredible amount in the last 12 months and now proudly stand on our own two feet. Our memorable successes since April 1, 2019 have to be :

  • Building a fantastic team of eleven passionate individuals who go above and beyond in their daily tasks to make GreenToken a success.
  • Great meetings with our motivated advisory board members who have given us excellent guidance and share our drive and enthusiasm for this project.
  • Our launch customers who helped us prove GreenToken at scale at the end of last year and continue to challenge us to make the product frictionless and fit for purpose.”

Biggest misconception on founding and building a venture you had so far?

Nitin & James: “One of the biggest myths we faced was ‘you all have to be based in one location for this to work.’ We have team members in APJ, Europe and North America and we and made it work! What’s more, GreenToken works with global supply chains and our globally distributed team is actually able to talk to any customer or prospect in the world in their local business hours.”

Plans for your second year as venture founders?

Nitin & James: “Our second year is shaping up to be as exciting as our first! This year we plan to release the production-ready version of GreenToken and run it at scale, we intend to expand into new industries across many different raw material supply chains, and we aim at adding new features that will give our customers meaningful insights into their raw material supply chains showing them the good actors, the risk and the blind spots. We want to enable them to make meaningful procurement decisions and help drive sustainable and circular economies. And we already hit the ground running in year 2: Watch this space and our personal LinkedIn accounts for our new initiatives in a circular economy industry.”

Feel free to personally connect with Nitin and James on LinkedIn and never miss a beat on their upcoming projects & results.

About Green Token by SAP

GreenToken by SAP is a supply chain solution that offers companies new levels of transparency through reliable, blockchain-based information. Gain visibility into where raw materials came from and produce products with knowledge about where and how the materials were produced, even in complex, non-batch supply chains. More on www.green-token.io

About SAP.iO Venture Studio

SAP.iO Venture Studio drives a new era of organic growth at SAP. It invests in new ventures founded by small, entrepreneurial teams inside of SAP who are focused on building the future of enterprise business processes. SAP.iO Venture Studio provides design, development, and sales support to help these ventures launch. Founding teams join the SAP.iO Venture Studio primarily through the SAP.iO Intrapreneurship and Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) programs.

In Blog, Global, Venture Studio

Venture Voices: Isn’t it time that we see a Chief Receivables Officer?

Receivables teams might need to look across the hall to their procurement and payables counterparts for a transformation roadmap.

By Andrew Blum, Head of GTM and Customer Engagements, Paid Pronto by SAP

The path is laid out

The procurement and payables space has been transformed by a digital revolution over the last few decades. This has in turn enabled significant automation. I’m lucky to have witnessed it firsthand as a practitioner, consultant, and technology advisor. Procurement and accounts payable organizations have evolved from focusing on tactical, cost-control measures to adding meaningful value towards the organization’s bottom line. Local or regional organization structures have been replaced by centralized global procurement organizations.

Technology has been at the center of this revolution and the results are clear. Compliance and cost-control is managed by the technology which allows procurement professionals to focus on higher-value, strategic initiatives.

This great transformation has increased the importance and visibility of the roles within the organization. Often an afterthought, a Procurement Manager used to be the middle person executing on the tactical parts of purchasing. Now that the tactical tasks are automated, and focus is on adding strategic value to the bottom line, we’ve seen a surge in companies adopting the title of Chief Procurement Officer — a reflection of the value that they bring to the enterprise.

Is Accounts Receivables really that much different than Procurement and Accounts Payable?

When I joined Paid Pronto by SAP and took a deeper look into the accounts receivable space, I realized that it’s very similar to where procurement was 20 years ago and ripe for evolution. In fact the only major differences between accounts receivable and its procurement and accounts payable counterparts are that we’re talking customers instead of suppliers and managing invoices instead of purchase orders.

If the global pandemic has taught us anything in the business world, it’s that a strong cash flow helps prepare enterprises for anything. Outside of increasing sales or improving margins, there are two levers that finance organizations have to improve cash flow: (1) increase payment terms or (2) decrease receivables.

All too often, I see organizations only focus on the first lever. I’ve seen firsthand where a company made a blanket increase to their standard payment terms, from Net-45 to Net-120. And while larger suppliers can (uncomfortably) accept that, this is potentially fatal to smaller businesses that don’t have deep capital pockets.

So, we need to start focusing on the second lever, and optimize receivables. This presents a massive opportunity for Receivables Managers to provide strategic value to the enterprise. They are now at the same inflection point that procurement and accounts payable managers were at 20 years ago.

The opportunity case is there. Improving days sales outstanding by one day provides a $2.7M cash flow benefit for every $1B in sales. Simply put, the receivables team can easily make a material impact on the bottom line. A cash flow benefit of this magnitude is sure to make any C-suite notice, especially in capital intensive industries.

The key to unlocking this value is automation of tactical activities so receivables professionals can use their expertise to focus on the complex problems. A receivables agent typically spends most of their day putting out fires and executing routine tasks, unable to tackle their work in a strategic manner. Whether it’s asks from a customer to update a contact or upload to a portal, internal payment status queries, or just trying to get others to respond, there is a huge opportunity for automation.

It’s uncanny how similar this opportunity is to what procurement and accounts payable teams faced a just a few decades ago. They’ve successfully tackled this problem and have been rewarded with a seat in the C-Suite. So, I ask the question: Isn’t it time that we see a Chief Receivables Officer?

Paid Pronto by SAP is your transformation partner

We at Paid Pronto want to be your partner as you embark on this transformation. Our solution automates standardized receivables tasks, so that your receivables team can focus on the complex, high-value-added activities. Early pilots have shown significant improvement in day sales outstanding, total cash collected, and number of open invoices.

Paid Pronto by SAP is currently looking to expand our pilot program. If you are interested in letting us obsess over your success as part of the program, reach out to paidpronto@sap.com.

Find more also on www.paidpronto.io

About SAP.iO Venture Studio

SAP.iO Venture Studio drives a new era of organic growth at SAP. It invests in new ventures founded by small, entrepreneurial teams inside of SAP who are focused on building the future of enterprise business processes. SAP.iO Venture Studio provides design, development, and sales support to help these ventures launch. Founding teams join the SAP.iO Venture Studio primarily through the SAP.iO Intrapreneurship and Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) programs.

In Blog, Article, Venture Studio

Simple Checklists to Prepare for COVID-19 Now Free Through Ruum by SAP

By: Stefan Ritter Co-Founder & Head of Product at Ruum by SAP

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 Blog, Article, Venture Studio

SAP’s Newest Venture Investment Protects Users’ Identities

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.

Dor Shany, co-founder of OwnID by SAP, states: “Our personal information can feel incredibly dispersed among all of the websites we use every day. We want to give people the freedom to keep their personal information personal.”

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).

In New York, Portfolio News

Startup Brings Personalized Coaching To Every Employee

Professional coaching is no longer an exclusive perk for select employees courtesy of Bravely, a cloud-based platform that delivers workplace guidance on-demand to more workers. The New York-based startup provides coaching to employees in numerous industries, including professional and financial services, hospitality, retail, and high technology.

Everyone should have a trusted, skilled coach to help them navigate important make or break moments at work,” said Toby Hervey, co-founder and CEO at Bravely. “Supporting an employee at moments that matter fundamentally transforms their long-time success and viability, as well as company culture.”

Business benefits from coaching for all

Sarah Sheehan, co-founder and president at Bravely, said the coaching platform reflected people-first workplace trends.

“Forward-thinking leaders know employees need hard skills and relationship-building expertise to achieve goals together,” she said. “Using technology, companies can cost-effectively give more employees access to coaching. This reduces employee stress and prevents burnout for improved mental health leading to higher productivity. “

Not surprisingly, Bravely helps companies address business commitments to inclusion and diversity. This is something that the co-founders live every day; Hervey is a gay man, and Sheehan is a new mother.

“We see strong usage of our coaching among groups such as women, LGBTQ workers, and people of color who are underrepresented the higher up you go in many organizations,” said Hervey. “We want to be a force for behavioral change across the board, and equitably support people at every level.”

Read More…

In Blog, Global, Venture Studio

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.