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In Article, CRM & Customer Experience, Supply Chain Management

Help Holiday Shoppers Shop with Retail Solutions on SAP Store

This holiday season, consumers are more budget conscious than ever as they react to inflation – and smart retailers are harnessing all the tools available to keep sales up while spending goes down. A seamless shopping experience across channels, simplified product discovery that anticipates buyer needs, price optimization – these are all essential to building customer loyalty and repeat purchasing. And savvy retailers have recognized that the ability to respond to overnight shifts in consumer behavior can be achieved only with the agility enabled by the cloud.

Cloud Solutions for the Agility You Need to React and Respond

With these innovative solutions, SAP and our partners can help you maximize opportunities now during the busiest shopping season and gain momentum for the year ahead. On SAP Store, you’ll find a wide range of solutions that you can try, buy, and deploy quickly. SAP rigorously validates partner solutions for quality, interoperability, and a similar look and feel for usability and fast adoption. Check out these cloud solutions for retail today.
Coveo Search and Recommendation for SAP Commerce – Online buyers can easily and quickly find what they’re looking for, as well as personalized recommendations for what they might be looking for, with this AI-powered industry cloud solution. When shoppers can discover more options in an online product catalog with automated suggestions based on their intent, they tend to buy more.
EcoCart Carbon Neutral Orders – With this solution, your customers can opt to offset the environmental impact of their orders at checkout with a single click and add 1-2% to their total – which can boost conversion and customer loyalty while strengthening your brand. In addition, EcoCart Plus can help you build and execute a comprehensive sustainability strategy.
Retail Suite – Everyday Price by Eversight – Drive sales growth and margins through dynamic AI-powered price optimization with this industry cloud solution that integrates with the SAP Customer Activity Repository application. Even as the cost of goods increases and shopper preferences change, you can set the right price at the right moment by experimenting and benchmarking against the competition – using your own business rules.
Recommerce Management System by Loop Logistics – Shoppers can rent, resale, or buy secondhand products thanks to this solution, which lets you make use of unsold products without discounting or destroying them. This solution, accelerated with the SAP.iO strategic business unit that invests in start-up innovation, helps retailers reduce environmental impact and generate new revenue streams.
Mention Me – This referral marketing platform uses unique data sets to build dynamic conversion programs, helping you increase customer loyalty and advocacy. It harnesses customers’ enthusiasm for your brand and gathers first-party data that allows you to see the true lifetime value of a customer’s propensity to refer. Development of Mention Me was accelerated by SAP.iO.
MyWave.AI Intelligent Personalization Platform – This solution combines AI, personal data, and proactive automation to deliver intelligent personalization at scale. Based on customer preferences in the context of past behavior and intent, MyWave.AI dynamically offers relevant products or advertising along with intelligent cross- and up-sell options.
Threekit 3D and Augmented Reality – This visualization platform allows brands to offer immersive experiences to their customers, who can view, spin, build, and customize products to their specifications. The enhanced product experience gives customers confidence in their selection, increasing conversion rates and reducing returns.
SAP Intelligent Returns Management – Optimize your margin on returns and enhance the customer experience by guiding them through a smooth product return that keeps them engaged and updated throughout the process. The solution also helps you identify key trends early and mitigate issues to drive correction actions and optimize assortments and price points.
SAP Omnichannel Promotion Pricing – This solution enables consistent pricing for promotions across all sales channels, calculating effective prices for a product or set of products by applying promotional rules. The result is a consistent buying experience across the Web, sales order, point of sale, and so on. An administration service deletes obsolete prices and promotional rules.
Zoovu Conversational Assistants for SAP Commerce & Sales Cloud – This solution for product discovery makes it easy to find, evaluate, and buy by bringing context to the search. It guides the buyer through the process with relevant questions and interactive buying advice. Conversational assistants enrich product content automatically with industry-specific taxonomies and work across all industries.
You can find the full list of cloud solutions from SAP and our partners for retail on SAP Store here, many available for a demo or free trial.
In Article, Supply Chain Management, Business Technology Platform

NavVis & Wandelbots Named Top Innovative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Powered Startups Based in Germany

AI startups are one of the most popular and influential upcoming sectors in the market nowadays. From sales to software development to the medical sector, artificial intelligence has the power to revolutionize a wide range of businesses. Two of SAP.iO’s startups have been named most innovative AI startups  based in Germany.

NavVis enables service providers and businesses to record and share the built environment as photorealistic digital twins by bridging the physical and digital worlds. Their SLAM-based mobile mapping systems produce high-quality data at scale and speed with survey-grade accuracy. Users can make better operational decisions, increase productivity, optimize business processes, and increase profitability through digital industrial solutions. It serves the needs of the manufacturing, AEC, retail, real estate, and facility management sectors.

Wandelbots’ user-friendly software democratizes robotics. Wandelbots provides a straightforward approach to robot programming and a single platform for developers to produce more user-friendly robot software. Through the use of demonstration-based training, it creates solutions that allow the integration of robots driven by AI. Its main product is a pen with sensors that can track human movement in real time and send that information to a robot so it can duplicate it.

Read More…

In Foundries, Blog, Article, San Francisco, Featured, HR & People Engagement

Meet 4 SAP.iO startups working to make the Future of Work more diverse

SAP prides itself on making its customers and the world run at its best. In no other area is this more apparent than within its New Ventures and Technologies (NVT) organization, where teams across the company work together to bring new, innovative technologies into the company’s core portfolio. NVT has committed itself to developing teams and solutions that align with SAP’s overall goals – whether they are tied to the company’s business goals, sustainability goals, or more notably, its diversity and inclusion (D&I) goals.

One example of that commitment to diversity and equity is the SAP.iO No Boundaries initiative to accelerate more than 200 startups founded or led by women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ and others from underrepresented groups in tech by 2023. The program is the first comprehensive inclusive entrepreneurship initiative for underrepresented entrepreneurs in the business software industry. Each SAP.iO Foundry location follows a different theme within respective No Boundaries cohorts, with themes ranging from Professional Services to the Future of Work, and more.

The SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco’s Spring 2021 cohort was built around the topic of the Future of Work. Here are four startups from the most recent program that aren’t just founded by underrepresented entrepreneurs but have also dedicated themselves to increasing diversity and equity in the workplace.

Gapsquare (Acquired by XpertHR)

Founded in 2015 by Dr. Zara Nanu and Ion Suruceanu, Gapsquare is building a world where work is inclusive, pay meets value, and diverse talent thrives. Through its SaaS platform, Gapsquare offers insights into salary equity for gender, race and/or disability, inbuilt consultancy, and data-driven recommendations for change. By focusing on these key areas, companies will be able to compete in today’s job market and adequately address the concerns of employees and prospective hires.

With Gapsquare’s fair pay analysis, companies can approach pay equity with a clear understanding of root causes of issues and help focus their resources to implement sustainable change. Not only that, but the startup also utilizes the data on its platform to support organizations with pay gap reporting legislation and equal pay audit work.

Gapsquare integrates with SAP SuccessFactors so customers can analyze their people and pay data to better understand inequity in their organizations. According to Nanu, understanding pain points and actioning sustainable change helps users build more flexible, engaged, and happy workforces.

HumanlyHR Inc

Based in Seattle, Humanly was founded in 2019 by Prem Kumar and Andrew Gardner and aims to create more equitable and efficient job interviews through conversational analytics.  The startup automates job candidate interactions and provides hiring teams with voice analytics to not only make interviews more efficient but also less biased.

Today’s hiring teams handle a high volume of applicants per role, where they have to sift through hundreds of applications and resumes. Such an influx means a lot of qualified candidates may not be engaged with at all – falling into what the Humanly team calls the “black hole” at the top of the hiring funnel. Humanly works to solve the issue by using data to ask the right candidate the right question, thus replacing the need for large teams of recruiting coordinators. Not only that, but Humanly automates top-of-funnel hiring tasks and provides interview analytics to hiring teams so that they can focus on improving areas of the hiring process that should remain human-driven and empathetic.

In addition to interview analytics and insights, Humanly also automates note-taking for interviews, screening and scheduling for high applicant volume roles, re-engagement of silver medalist candidates, reference checks, and two-way applicant tracking system integrations.

Humanly integrates with the SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting Module so that all candidate conversations and associated efficiency and equity analytics are synced into candidate records in SuccessFactors, including adding interviews analytics, adding new candidate records, updating, and moving screened candidates to the right place in the SF Recruiting Module and attaching interview notes.  

Mentor Spaces

For many employees of color, corporate allyship and career mentorship may be a feat easier said than done. Mentor Spaces is working to solve this challenge through its community-driven membership for Black and Latinx professionals.

Founded in 2017 by Chris Motley the startup works to help companies scale D&I efforts while advancing the careers of underrepresented talent by encouraging mentorship among community members. In doing so, diverse talent acquisition and retention are streamlined within companies.

One charge that Mentor Spaces wants to take on is bridging the gap between siloed HR teams and employee networks, or Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). The startup posits that ERG members want to support HR teams but are unable to due to lack of bandwidth and visibility into the hiring process. Partnering with Mentor Spaces enables both HR and ERGs to connect, and in doing so they can build diverse talent pipeline, improve retention, and enhance corporate culture.

Mentor Spaces’ platform has a plethora of features, including native mobile apps that facilitate mentorship conversations. Not only that, but they have launched community partnerships with national nonprofit organizations and Historically Black Colleges and Universities to provide direct access to the largest pool of underrepresented professionals that Mentor Spaces helps cultivate on behalf of its clients.

The Mom Project

Called the “career destination for moms,” The Mom Project provides companies with consistent, scalable access to the most comprehensive community of highly skilled gender and ethnically diverse moms (but they also include dads and allies) in the United States.

According to founder Allison Robinson, The Mom Project was built with moms in mind, and has become a two-sided marketplace and community that connects companies with highly skilled and professionally relevant talent. This marketplace facilitates all work types, ranging from short-term staffing needs to customized talent programs and is now comprised of more than 500,000 professionals with strong backgrounds in the core suite of business functions including: marketing, sales, finance, technology, legal, and HR.

Every aspect of The Mom Project has been designed on the core insight that juggling work and family is hard. With that in mind, the team wanted to make them feel supported throughout every step in the journey. Thus, The Mom Project’s platform isn’t a job posting platform, but one that actively supports moms throughout the entire application process. Profile and resume crafting, job search programs, covering childcare so candidates can prepare for interviews, and community generated support are only a handful of the platform’s features.

The Mom Project’s API complements SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting by shortening the hiring process and allowing organizations to have one system of record for talent process that consider high-skilled moms with the willingness to return to work.

About SAP.iO
To learn more about how SAP.iO is helping innovators start up and scale with SAP, please visit https://sap.io/.

In Article, Funding Announcement, Fund

Jina.ai raises $30M for its neural search platform

Berlin-based Jina.ai, an open-source startup that uses neural search to help its users find information in their unstructured data (including videos and images), today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series A funding round led by Canaan Partners. New investor Mango Capital, as well as existing investors GGV Capital, SAP.iO and Yunqi Partners also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $39 million to date.

Read More on TechCrunch

In Article, Global, Portfolio News, HR & People Engagement

5 Innovative Companies Transforming Their Employee Experience with Startup Innovation

Since 2017, our team has been scouting and accelerating innovative startups from around the world with the goal of helping the world run at its best. Today, over 30 solutions from startups in our portfolio are integrated with SAP SuccessFactors and are available on SAP Store. These solutions are uniquely positioned to solve some of the most important challenges facing businesses today that will define a new era in the future of work.

Taking charge of change requires a bold vision and we’re deeply inspired by the five stories below that demonstrate the art of the possible when working with startups to put people at the center of how we work.

 

Nestlé & Pulsifi: Finding Top Talent with AI & Predictive Analytics

Nestlé Malaysia & Singapore received a huge number of applicants for their popular Management Trainee Program and faced a lack of data consistency, a long screening process, and unmet requirements. They worked with Pulsifi, a people data platform, to better understand candidates’ behavior with 97% accuracy and improved efficiency in the processing of candidates by over 70%.

Pulsifi works with SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting and is available on SAP Store.

GE Healthcare & Immerse Learning: Transforming Radiography Training Through VR

GE Healthcare was able to increase the quality and number of practical training hours for their radiographer trainees with the help of Immerse Learning. Together, they created a VR environment that helped enable faster training processes and real-time tracking to enable instant review and feedback on performance.

Immerse Learning Limited works with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and is available on SAP Store.

ENGIE & Andjaro: Improving operational performance by identifying and redeploying internal talent at scale

ENGIE, the world’s third largest energy company, was struggling with developing a systematic and flexible approach for managing their field technicians and reducing inter-project periods. With the help of Andjaro’s operational performance tool, ENGIE was able to reclassify 94% of its available technicians, reduce their interim costs, and improve inter-agency collaboration.

Andjaro works with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and is available on SAP Store.

Stanley Black & Decker & 360 Learning: Improving ROI of Training Programs

Stanley Black & Decker chose 360 Learning to empower and enable trainers to create programs in real time and receive feedback in an easy-to-use platform. By using 360 Learning, their trainers now produce programs in 2 hours compared to a process that would have previously taken several weeks.

360 Learning works with SAP SuccessFactors Learning and is available on SAP Store.

Bentley Systems & Plum: Driving Equitable Talent Decisions Based on Proven Science

Bentley Systems is leveraging Plum’s predictive data-driven platform to capture candidates’ skills to enable better hiring decisions. Plum’s insights are presented in their SAP SuccessFactors Recruitment Dashboard so hiring teams can quickly evaluate external candidates, match them to open roles, and reduce bias in the hiring process.

Plum works with SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting and is available on SAP Store.

Interested in collaborating with a startup in our portfolio? Let us know!

 

All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

In Press, Article

How SAP Is Tapping into Startup Innovation

Alexa Gorman, senior vice president and global head of SAP.iO Foundries and Intrapreneurship at SAP, was featured earlier this year by Handelsblatt, the German business newspaper, as one of the “100 female leaders moving Germany forward.”

After years working in business development and strategy roles, Gorman took on joint responsibility for SAP’s startup acceleration programs at the start of May, along with the intrapreneurship team that supports ambitious innovators within the company.

Creating a Win-Win-Win Scenario for Customers, Startups, and SAP

The SAP.iO Foundries program was created as a strategic business unit in 2017. “We saw a need to work more closely with startups in a curated way, as startup innovation was becoming increasingly important for our customers in their digital transformation journeys,” Gorman says. “With SAP.iO Foundries, we are offering them the innovative power of pre-selected startups whose solutions can integrate seamlessly with SAP solutions. And while most of the startups are at an early stage, we do a lot of due diligence to ensure that they will be long-term, viable partners of SAP.”

Gorman joined the team in 2017 and set up SAP.iO Foundry Berlin, the first of its kind in Europe. Located across 10 locations today, SAP.iO Foundries make up a global network of top-tier startup programs, including accelerators, that can enable startups to build and scale innovative software solutions that deliver value to SAP customers.

Over the past four years, Gorman and her team have been working with over 330 early-stage startups to bring them into the SAP ecosystem and make them the next generation of SAP partners.

“We encourage the startups to use or integrate with SAP technology and support them in doing so,” she explains. “In exchange, the startups expand their ability to scale more quickly through access to our customers and fast-track support to becoming an SAP partner. Thus, we can ensure that our customers have access to the latest and best startup innovation that increases the return on their investments in SAP.”

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In Foundries, Article, Press Coverage

Four SAP.iO Startups Named to Inc 5000 List in 2021

SAP.iO is proud to announce that four startups in our portfolio were named to Inc. 5000 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America list for 2021.

BigID (Backed by SAP.iO Fund) was recognized for 14,421% 3-Year Growth. Their solution helps organizations discover, manage, protect, and get more value from their personal data and is available on the SAP Store.

Paradox (Accelerated by SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco) was recognized for 1,922% 3-Year Growth. Their conversational AI software helps companies automate human resources tasks and is available on the SAP Store.

meQuilibrium (Accelerated by SAP.iO Foundry New York) was recognized for 216% 3-Year Growth. Their solution helps businesses build workforce well-being and potential with predictive analytics, biometrics and neuroscience and is available on the SAP Store.

Jebbit (SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv) was recognized for 119% growth. and is available on the SAP Store.

In Article, Press

C-Suite Leaders from Hulu, Snap and Harry’s Join Season 2 of The Business of Marketing

Earlier this year, Adweek and SAP.iO debuted The Business of Marketing podcast, a new series where listeners learned from company leaders and innovators on how CMOs work collaboratively with their C-suite partners to drive business transformation.

Over the course of the first season, we sat down with 17 executives from across the marketing landscape and covered topics such as responding to a global pandemic and using data to scale your business featuring leaders from brands like Walmart, Unilever, Mastercard, Square, Rolling Stone and NBCUniversal.

Today, we are excited to announce the release date for Season 2 of The Business of Marketing and the initial lineup of guests.

Season 2 will kick off July 29 with guest Alexa Gorman, svp and global head of foundries and intrapreneurship at SAP.iO, sitting down with Adweek’s chief innovation officer and host of The Business of Marketing, Toby Daniels, for a conversation about how to drive business transformation through startup acceleration.

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In Article, Portfolio News, CRM & Customer Experience

A Quick Dive into Retail Tech Startups In Europe

Statistics say that since 2015, nearly $130 bn has been invested across the continent in nearly 23,600 equity deals to tech startups in the European continent alone. It is interesting to note that despite the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact of the same on the global supply chains, 2020 still managed to produce major tech breakthroughs along with some profound startup launches and growth stories.

From shelf monitoring to increasing brand engagement, retail tech startups in Europe have developed amazing solutions for the global market. European Retail Tech Startups have driven $26 trillion revolution and the retail tech landscape in the continent seems to be at its peak.

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In Article, New York, Supply Chain Management, Sustainability

Turn Waste Into Value With Analytics

Trusting your data, telling stories about your success and knowing that every act, no matter how small, can help win the fight against waste was some of the advice shared by Queen of Raw and Topolytics, two gamechangers in waste management at the recent SAP Sustainability Summit panel discussion about orchestrating ecosystem innovation for impact.

“Zero waste can only be achieved with the help of data,” said Michael Groves, Founder and CEO of Topolytics, a data analytics business for waste managers. “Data shows public and private players exactly what is happening to their waste and will help them build better intervention options and create closed loops for recovery.”

Groves was one of the people on the boat hosting the Ocean Plastics Leadership Summit (OPLS) in 2019, a research expedition to better understand the scope of plastic pollution and to develop cross-industry solutions and partnerships to solve this global challenge over the next decade.

Seeing is believing

Whenever the ship approached clumps of sargassum seaweed, the participants would stop their meetings and jump into zodiac boats with their snorkeling gear. But they didn’t see any fish. And at first, they didn’t see much plastic either. That’s because it’s often not visible. Plastic in the ocean breaks down into small particles that are caught in seaweed and ingested by marine creatures.

“What you don’t see is the real problem,” says Groves, winner of the Circular Economy 2030 challenge sponsored by SAP and Google that year. A geographer who was appalled by the amount of plastic he encountered in South East Asia long before people began talking about the crisis, Groves believes waste is still not getting the attention it desperately needs.

While we may not actually see the damage, the data is irrefutable. An alarming 60 percent of waste produced in cities around the world gets dumped or leaked into the environment, and an equally alarming 61 percent of people globally don’t have access to proper waste management infrastructures. It’s a thorny problem because the waste value chain is very complex and opaque, with many private and public sector players and a significant informal sector around the world. To make matters worse, there is a huge mix of materials, each requiring different methods of recovery and recycling.

Realizing that money follows data, Groves developed a solution that uses analytics and machine learning to follow trash as it travels. Clear data and insights are fundamental to spurring investments in new infrastructure and innovation in the sector. With useful data available about what waste is where and in what quantity and quality, companies can then procure this waste much more effectively and bring the materials back into their production processes through platforms like SAP Ariba software.

Debunking myths

“Many companies think they know what’s going on with their waste, but they are usually surprised by the truth,” he says. “There is huge potential to unlock economic and social value that is currently just draining away!”

One person helping fashion retailers stop the drain is Stephanie Benedetto, co-Founder of Queen of Raw, a marketplace to buy and sell unused textiles, from organic cotton to some of the highest quality luxury deadstock fabrics that would otherwise be burned or buried.

Benedetto was inspired by her childhood experiences growing up in an immigrant family in the Garment District of New York. Her grandfather would collect unused clothes from the neighborhood and repurpose them into beautiful, fashionable items for local sale. It was a profitable, sustainable business that inspired her when she later became a corporate attorney on Wall Street, specializing in technology and sustainability. When the crash came in 2008, she decided to start her own company.

When Benedetto first started talking to brands and retailers about sustainability years ago, it was seen as nice to have. People responsible for sustainability were new in the position, and they did not have big budgets. Her first big challenge was debunking the myth that sustainability has to cost a lot of money.

She realized that retailers became paralyzed when faced with objectives such as becoming 100 percent sustainable by 2030. “You wouldn’t know where to start on day one if you heard that. It’s too much, too fast,” she says. “We go to the retailers and help them pinpoint the valuable waste in their supply chain. We look at their unused inventory and their deadstock. We help them sell it on the marketplace, and we provide tools to minimize waste going forward.”

Once the retailers are making money on their unused inventory, she explains, they can start putting their savings into doing other good work such as paying their workers better wages and using innovative technology and sustainable materials without increasing overall capex expenditure.

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In ERP & Finance, Network & Spend Management, Supply Chain Management, Article, Interview

How Staple is Helping to Power the First Mile of Data Processing

We talked to Ben Stein, CEO at Staple about converting documents into structured data and here is what he said about it.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times? 

Ben Stein: We are all doing well, thank you! Like most of the world, all team members have been involuntarily separated from friends and family. Our team is decentralized across Singapore, Vietnam, India and Sri Lanka. Our relationships have shifted online, and that is something we have grown accustomed to. Thankfully our team, our families and our friends are all doing well.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Staple.

Ben Stein: I previously worked with KPMG in Australia, Europe and North America for almost a decade, then in various corporate positions in London and Singapore. After working with clients in banking, energy, manufacturing and real estate, I noticed persistent inefficiencies in both enterprises and SMEs around data management. I left my CFO position at the time to explore how deep technology (“deep tech”) might present potential solutions to these inefficiencies. I joined EF (joinef.com), where I met my co-founder, Josh, a Ph.D. computer scientist. Together we met with more than 150 companies to understand their most pressing pain points, and we built Staple to address them. 

Staple’s solution can read, interpret, extract and reconcile data from semi-structured and unstructured documents, regardless of layout or language. Currently, we support more than 90 languages, and we are helping customers process data-heavy workflows in Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese and Indonesian. 

How does Staple innovate? 

Ben Stein: There is a lot of hype around big data, RPA, AI and analytics and their potential to rapidly accelerate the digitalization of business. What many don’t appreciate is that these technologies can’t function without a core ingredient: clean, structured data. RPA and bots are fantastic innovations, but they can only work with structured data. There is so much reliance on data, yet enterprises struggle to access, unlock and use it at scale because the data is not available in a standardized, accessible format. Without structured data, RPA bots cannot function, analytics tell an incomplete story, and information for decision making is either not timely, inaccurate, or not useful. 

Many businesses are unable to reap the benefits of automation technologies as they cannot cross the divide between structured system needs and the unstructured or semi-structured realities of business. It’s the classic adage of “garbage in, garbage out”: unless meaningful, accurate, standardized data is ingested from the outset, RPA and automation implementations will fail. It’s important that digitalization agendas have proper regard for the “first mile of data processing.” 

We dedicate a lot of effort to building software that employees actually enjoy using, as opposed to software that employees are forced to use. We don’t think there should be a distinction between software for SMEs or software for the enterprise; it should all just be software to be more productive. We also have a sharp focus on developing solutions that anybody – from the most junior employee to a highly technical CTO – can use. We’re working on tools that allow non-technical users to develop new AI models without touching a line of code. This introduces a level of flexibility that was previously out of reach for many users.

Read More…

In Press, Article, Portfolio News

Sustainable Waste Management Platform Goodr Exceeds Goal By $500K In Pre-Series A Funding Round

Goodr, a Black-owned and Atlanta-based sustainable waste management platform, has just announced that they’ve exceeded their own expectations.

In a press release announcement, it was revealed that the company raised $1.5 million in their recent Bridge to Series A funding round, which exceeded their initial goal by $500,000. Capital One Ventures were joined in this round by Backstage Capital, Unreasonable Ventures, and the Laurene Powell Jobs-helmed Emerson Collective.

“It is an extremely exciting time here at Goodr,” CEO Jasmine Crowe said in the press release announcement. “We are expanding our team, our market reach, and solving two critical problems at the same time. I welcome our new investors as part of the team as we continue to strive towards ending hunger.”

The company has already announced that they are on the hunt for a Lead Engineer, and are actively filling roles for other key executive positions. The supplemental funds will also allow them to improve their product and service offerings, increase marketing initiatives, and activate new markets.

The concept of Goodr doesn’t just cut down on food waste. Rather, it helps businesses save money on taxes, feed more people, and reduce food waste by rerouting surplus food from cafeterias and restaurants to people in need. Their food distribution services include grocery delivery, popup grocery stores, and food delivery to support food insecure communities around the United States. The company’s philosophy is simple: food insecurity is not an issue of scarcity, but of logistics.

Read More…

In Press, Article, Supply Chain Management

Accenture/SAP to accelerate sustainable transformation

Decades long, Accenture and SAP have been collaborating for many years to help companies to embed sustainability across their entire business operations to unlock new value in their supply chains.

Breaking down Accenture and SAP’s latest partnership

By combining SAP’s technology with Accenture’s Sustainability Services and broad industry knowledge, the two are expanding their current partnership to create new solutions that empower companies to accelerate full decarbonisation in the supply chain, and capture their share of economic growth that a circular economy could bring. 

The new solution

Co-innovating and co-developing, SAP and Accenture plans to create a new solution for responsible production, manufacturing and design. Its capabilities will help companies to embed sustainability metrics across their value chain and supply chains. 

How does it work?

The solution harnesses integrated data from multiple operations, allowing companies to better design and produce products with less waste, better recyclability, and more recycled content. 

By providing this solution, SAP and Accenture hope to help to reduce the growing cost of compliance which has been driven by new regulations. 

“Our work together will enable SAP’s customers, which include 92% of the Forbes Global 2000, to use their core systems to help drive their sustainability agenda, optimize their ESG performance and achieve their goals. This expanded collaboration builds on our long history with SAP — including our joint partnership with the United Nations Global Compact and 3M — and our shared commitment to drive adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals,” said Julie Sweet, chief executive officer at Accenture.

SAP’s Climate 21 initiative

In addition to partnering with SAP on this new solution, Accenture supports SAP’s Climate 21 initiative. Climate 21 allows companies to use analytics to measure and minimise their CO2 emissions as well as lower their carbon footprint across a products lifecycle. 

In doing so, sustainability metrics harnessed across the end-to-end supply chain allows for an integrated view of environmental savings and cost impacts, as well as the ability to more easily optimise operations.

“To successfully tackle the greatest threat to our world today, we need to collaborate at every level of business and society. Building on our long-standing and trusted partnership, SAP and Accenture are joining forces to help our customers realize long-term growth in a sustainable way. We’re creating visibility into the environmental impact across the entire value chain, providing enterprises with the insights they need to take the right action and accelerate their transition to the circular economy,” said Christian Klein, chief executive officer at SAP.

SAP.iO a global accelerator

Furthering their efforts to accelerate sustainable transformation, SAP and Accenture began a global sustainability focused accelerator program at SAP.iO. 

As part of the SAP.iO, the ‘Sustainability Future’ program – the latest cohort to date – aims to help B2B startups in their early stages drive digital transformation and innovation in four target areas: carbon tracking and trading, resource efficiency, climate risk tracking and mitigation, and circular economy.  

Read More…

In Article

“Safe but very uncomfortable” — a deep dive into SAP’s intrapreneurship programme

Intrapreneurship programmes often get criticised for being unstructured and ineffective.

Innovation consultant Alberto Onetti recently wrote that the majority of intrapreneurship programmes he has seen fail to produce meaningful results [and suggests ways of doing them better].

Worse yet, in a piece about the “dark side” of intrapreneurship, Tim Heard, founder of the Circle of Entrepreneurs, told the stories of entrepreneurs left in limbo, with little support structure.

So when I got the chance to have an inside look at SAP’s entrepreneurship programme recently, speaking with Vishal Shah, one of the entrepreneurs who has come through the programme and with Alexandra Begue, head of growth at the programme, I was curious to see how this one measures up.

The programme was revamped in 2015 and since then has assessed something in the region of 3000 ideas and produced 3 businesses, one of which has gone on to become its own business unit.

How the intrapreneurship programme fits in with the rest of SAP

Like many large organisations, SAP has a large number of innovation initiatives, for both “internal” startups that had been incubated within SAP and “external” startups that might want to work with SAP .

On the external side, SAP.iO Foundries is a network of equity-free accelerators for startups and SAP.iO Rising Stars is a program that helps promising startups scale up their partnerships with SAP.

On the internal side, the SAP intrapreneurship programme is a company-wide, internal scouting programme and SAP Venture Studio is a venture building unit in which takes the most promising of those scouted projects and turns them into commercial businesses.

These internally-built ventures most often become part of one of SAP’s existing business units. SAP Supplier Financing, for example, was a successful venture built by Vishal Shah, founder and general manager, in the venture studio. It was eventually merged with SAP’s Ariba Network, the ecommerce network.

How the intrapreneurship programme works

There is a call-out for ideas every spring between April and May, which will typically result in around 500 ideas submitted to the innovation team. Submitting an idea involves recording a short video, explaining the project and answering 6 key questions around whether the project can achieve mass scale, whether it can be efficiently tested and if SAP can leverage any particular advantage in pursuing the idea.

The innovation team will cull the initial 500 ideas down to 100 which will go through to a fast-track validation phase that takes around 3 months. The fast track teams receive mentoring and help in developing their idea.

Some 25 of the most promising of the ideas will go through to an 3-week accelerator programme, where they get an even more intense crash course in entrepreneurship and venture-building.

At the end of the accelerator programme, the teams pitch to an investment committee and around a handful go on to join the SAP.iO venture studio.

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In Consumer Industries, Foundries, Article, Berlin

With Stylumia, Real-Time Data Intelligence Powers Competitive Retail Advantage

Consumer fashion may be among the most unpredictable markets on the planet, but one startup in India has created a demand sensing platform based on artificial intelligence (AI) that combines the brilliance of data scientists with seasoned industry experts to ferret out trends with uncanny accuracy. The idea is to close the gap between supply and demand.

“We help companies create demand-driven fashion forecasts from consumer data across a holistic value chain,” Ganesh Subramanian, founder and CEO at Stylumia, said. “Our demand sensing engine collects and analyzes publicly available global data to rank product trends, providing fashion designers, retail buyers, and merchandisers with a much deeper understanding of real-time consumer demand signals.”

More Profitable and Sustainable Business

Forecasting fickle consumer appetites for unseen products has long stymied the most experienced minds in the fashion world. Stylumia can reveal breaking trends, allowing people to make design and merchandising decisions perfectly in sync. This can reduce under- and overbuying.

According to Subramanian, the typical Stylumia customer has improved the prediction accuracy of style and color levels by up to 30% and increased sales and revenue between 25% to 50%, compared to the performance of products not designed and merchandized using the platform. Customers have also reduced excess inventory and carbon footprint levels by an aggregated average of up to 40%.

“When products are selling well, companies have less stock and are able to lower their carbon footprint because they’re using fewer resources while generating the same amount of revenue,” he said. “Since our founding, we have reduced the number of garments that our customers have produced by over 60 million while their sales and profits have grown.”

Consumer Intelligence Research on Steroids

From its headquarters in India to hubs in Australia, the U.S., and the UK, Stylumia’s teams work with fashion, sports, and lifestyle brands that represent companies of all sizes worldwide.

Instead of brainstorming solely by intuition, designers and buyers log in to their personalized portal to storyboard ideas using Stylumia’s AI-fueled algorithm or their own images for design inspiration. As they select colors, materials, patterns, and other product features, Stylumia instantly surfaces trending demands against the designer’s ideas. They can view similar products, see where selling levels are highest, and save and share their ideas with colleagues.

For retail merchandisers, the tool improves forecast accuracy for better assortment planning down to the local level. They can see which sizes, colors, and styles are most popular by geography. Subramanian added that the platform is not just for large consumer brands.

“We’re democratizing intelligence for small and midsize companies that can use these insights for their growth too, bringing the right products to the right geographies at the right time,” he said.

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