Article Archives • SAP.iO

SAP.iO In Article, CRM & Customer Experience

Startup trends 2024: Innovations in e-commerce CX

Enterprise e-commerce solutions have to be holistic, comprehensive, relevant, and up-to-date with customer needs and market trends. In order to deliver an end-to-end suite of applications and services, large e-commerce vendors have to maintain a clear strategic partner approach.

At SAP, innovation is a core element of our partner strategy. In order to offer customers a relevant ecosystem of partners, we always scout for solutions that are both innovative and enterprise-ready to complement our offerings. To deliver on that commitment, in 2017 SAP established SAP.iO, with an ongoing mission to build the company’s next generation of partners.

Here are five startup trends for 2024 in the e-commerce space, represented by startups that graduated the SAP.iO program and are now certified SAP partners.

Startup partnerships lead the way in e-commerce innovation

E-commerce has come a long way, but we can expect even more innovation ahead as startups set their sites on ways to improve it as consumer needs and habits change.

New technologies, with AI likely playing a big role, will help brands deliver seamless, personalized, and interactive e-commerce experiences that drive loyalty and sales.

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SAP.iO In Foundries, Article, Technologies

Helping Customers Innovate with More Than 125 AI-Powered Startup Partner Solutions

We are proud to share that SAP.iO has surpassed the 125-mark for AI-powered startup partner solutions in our partner ecosystem. These solutions are fully integrated with SAP and available via SAP Store for immediate adoption by SAP customers. The encompassing solutions range across lines of business and industries, including finance, HR, supply chain, and customer experience.

SAP.iO In Article, Inclusiveness, Interview

SAP Leverages Its Massive Network to Uplift Diverse Startup Founders

Almost 90 percent of global financial and goods flows touch an SAP system. That kind of reach is almost unthinkable — and the tech giant wants to put it to work to empower diverse startup founders.

While the company doesn’t fund startups directly, its SAP.iO Foundries initiative arguably offers something even better. The program gives startups an opportunity to integrate within SAP’s technology ecosystem and develop relationships with the company’s vast network of customers, partners and employees.

Almost half the companies (44 percent) in SAP.iO’s global portfolio are founded or led by an underrepresented entrepreneur. Since 2017, the 525 companies incubated by SAP globally have raised around $11 billion in venture capital post-graduation from SAP.iO. They’ve also landed sales in the tens of millions thanks to connections made through the program and created around 36,000 jobs.

“The feedback that underrepresented people often get when they go to investors is, ‘You don’t have enough traction,’ whether that’s valid or not,” said Kange Kaneene, vice president of SAP.iO Foundries in North America, Latin America and the Caribbean. “What we can say is: We are going to give you that traction. We’re going to give you big contracts with big customers that are incontrovertibly impactful in whatever region or industry they sit in, and then we’ll help you fundraise by introducing you to people. And that’s something that the numbers show has been extremely successful for us.”

A boost for underrepresented founders…

SAP.iO intentionally seeks out underrepresented founders, who it defines as entrepreneurs from groups whose venture capital funding is disproportionately low for their region. This varies globally but often includes women, people of color, LGTBTQ people and people from countries that tend to be overlooked by VC funders.

SAP.iO formalized its commitment to these founders in 2019 with the launch of SAP.iO No Boundaries, which it bills as “the first comprehensive inclusive entrepreneurship initiative for underrepresented and underestimated entrepreneurs in the business software industry.” It pledged to scale SAP.iO Foundries with a focus on diverse founders, aiming to support at least 200 startups founded or led by underrepresented entrepreneurs by 2023. It met that goal in July, six months ahead of schedule.

But incubating startups led by diverse founders is only the beginning. Creating a landscape in which these startups can succeed also means busting preconceived notions and changing hearts and minds.

“When I talk to external stakeholders about how we’re excited about the focus on underrepresented founders, their feedback is always, ‘Oh, so does that mean you’re compromising on quality?’ That’s always very frustrating, but we’re excited to say that [the startups led by underrepresented entrepreneurs] in the portfolio tie or surpass the rest of the portfolio on all the typical external metrics,” Kaneene said.

The 200 startups founded or led by underrepresented entrepreneurs make up 44 percent of SAP.iO’s global portfolio — and they represent half of the unicorns in the portfolio (meaning their valuation exceeds $1 billion), as well as 42 percent of cumulative VC funding. They also “have a greater likelihood to progress in their partnership with SAP,” according the company.

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SAP.iO In Foundries, Article

How Startups Can Maximize Their Partnership With Corporates

The partnership between a startup and a corporation is all about balance. Startups harness their agility to identify new market opportunities but often struggle to scale. On the other hand, corporations have successfully scaled but can miss new market opportunities. This is not to say that either can’t do the other successfully – they can and have – but there’s a benefit to partnering up.

There’s a reason 94 percent of tech executives think innovation partnerships are an essential component of their strategy. Partnerships offer access to new markets and customers. They can lower development costs, provide valuable insights into experimental technologies and the talent required to build them, and, importantly, accelerate innovation. The problem is that these partnerships are anything but a sure thing.

Let’s dive into what corporates look for in a partner and how startups can increase the chances of a successful collaboration.

Corporates offer more than funding

While many corporates ask for equity in startups, entering the partnership with a no-equity stake goes a long way in establishing clear parameters and trust for both parties. Although seemingly counterintuitive, financing is not among the top three reasons startups engage in corporate partnerships.

Startups are primarily interested in access to the corporate’s customers and market. In exchange, startups help solve a broader range of customer problems and expand a corporation’s product offerings. More partners also mean a more extensive ecosystem and the chance to offer customers a curated selection of startup solutions.

Understand what makes you unique

Startups should acknowledge that there is often a chasm in work cultures and styles. Corporates plan, budget, and approach risk differently. They also have different types of customers.

Mark Osborn, GVP Business Development & Strategy, SAP Consumer Industries, advises startups approaching corporate customers should find others with a similar mindset. “It helps when you can identify the innovators in those organizations – people who are willing to take some risk on new products in exchange for innovation,” says Osborn. “Startups need to understand that the value they bring to a corporate customer is the opportunity to innovate and get ahead of the competition, even if it means taking a risk.”

Not all partnerships work out

The stakes will always be higher for startups than for corporations. Most startups don’t succeed, and more than two-thirds of them never deliver a positive return to investors. So having access to a corporate partner’s market and customers while sending a positive signal to investors can help. Despite the benefits, not all partnerships work out. For example, an integration won’t strengthen anyone’s value proposition if the startup’s ideal customer doesn’t use the corporation’s products.

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.

SAP.iO 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

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

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.

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/.

Max Kahn In Fund, Article, Funding Announcement

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

Max Kahn 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!

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SAP.iO 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.”

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.

SAP.iO In Press, Article

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.

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.

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.

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.