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Maven leads £5.5 million funding round for transport tech platform Liftango

Liftango’s carpool platform helps larger employers and academic institutions to internally match drivers and passengers in real-time to minimise their carbon footprint, reduce parking congestion and create a convenient shared transport experience to and from offices or campuses.

The new investment should help the business take advantage of commercial opportunities in the transport sector, by recruiting several key sales and marketing staff as it looks to scale its operations in Europe and across North America.

Martin McLaren, investment director at Maven, said: “We are seeing a notable shift towards DRT solutions as organisations across the world seek to address parking, congestion, zoning and environmental issues attributed to transport.

South Korean Payments Firm CHAI Pockets US$45 Million in Series B+ Fundraise

South Korean payments startup CHAI raised US$45 million during a Series B+ funding round that was co-led by SoftBank Ventures Asia (SBVA) and Nyca Partners.

SBVA’s participation in this funding round marks their second Series B investment into CHAI.

The round also received additional participation from investors such as KT Investment, Conductive Ventures, Nordstar Capital, Samsung NEXT and B Capital.

CHAI said that it will use this funding to expand its footprint in Southeast Asia and develop a fully automated end-to-end payment infrastructure for digital merchants throughout Asia.

Founded in 2019, CHAI aims to bridge the payments gap in Asian markets by providing a unified payment orchestration solution for local merchants through a single application programming interface (API).

Through CHAI Port, merchants can activate and offer over 30 payment options such as credit cards, digital wallets, bank transfers and cross-border payments to their customers in under an hour.

CHAI currently processes more than US$6 billion on behalf of over 2,2 00 merchants and had launched CHAI Port in Vietnam and Thailand

nwo.ai’s story with SAP Data Marketplace: Unlocking the Value of Your Data

If you have a business, you likely have a lot of data. It’s your one true source for insight to understand your customers, their needs, and what they want.

But data is more than just information, it’s an asset. There are many ways to unlock the value of data, but few providers can give you all these benefits at once. The possibilities are limitless with SAP Data Marketplace’s ability to bring all of your data together in one place for instant insights and seamless integration into applications like SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.

In this story, we introduce you to a use case enabled by NWO.ai, a data & analytics startup, that is among the first Data Providers to be listed on the Data Marketplace. You will also be able to understand the main benefits of SAP Data Marketplace for you as a Data Provider, why it’s so important, and what value it can bring to your company.

“We want to give our customers an opportunity and an easy way to get instant insights from various alternative data sources and merge them with their operational information. And we see Data Marketplace as part of Data Warehouse Cloud as a perfect environment for that, because majority of the SAP products are already connected there. It is as simple as clicking and collecting all the necessary data, both internal and external, in one place.”

-Miroslav Dimitrov, Chief Operating Officer at NWO.ai

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SAP.iO In Business Technology Platform

Unlocking The Next Growth Frontier By Using Alternative Data Sources

The holiday gift-giving season is just around the corner, and businesses are hopeful for a strong year-end due to the opening of the economy and the expected lift of the U.S. travel ban. Adobe Analytics forecasts a record-breaking online shopping season, which could top $200 billion.

Factoring in the ongoing challenges around Covid-19, the flu season and the growing adoption of models like buy-now-pay-later and curbside pickup — as well as recent supply issues — in order to avoid empty shelves, companies will need to tap into new data sources to anticipate and meet rising consumer demand.

Buy-Now-Pay-Later (And Hopefully Deliver)

Supply chains and stockouts remain the main issue in front of most businesses ahead of the holiday season. According to Adobe’s holiday forecast referenced earlier, out-of-stock messages are up 172% from the pre-pandemic period. These messages are primarily driven by supply chain factors, including forecasted inaccuracies and strained logistics networks. Ever since the start of the pandemic, we’ve witnessed sudden spikes in demand for unforeseen categories — from toilet paper to thermometers. While the reasons for most of them are clear in hindsight, companies must adapt quickly to stay close to consumer trends.

During the pandemic, we’ve also witnessed reformed consumer behavior and habits when it comes to health, ethics and sustainability. Additionally, they now demand the same commitment from brands and are ready to act and boycott to drive that change.

In this new market dynamic, narrative is king, and a brand’s story has become overwhelmingly shaped by consumers through their reviews, blogs and social media posts. A McKinsey survey reports that 33% of Gen Z consumers and about 12% of boomers choose to buy from companies that align with their values. Businesses must recognize that this will not be a one-time adjustment of strategy but a new competitive factor to consider.

Some of the key questions that need to be addressed immediately include: How quickly can brands embrace change in consumer values, preferences and habits, and to what extent (if at all) can they spot the early signals?

Pulkit Jaiswal and Imogen Low from nwo.ai named to Forbes 30 Under 30 2022

Using machine learning and human metadata to identify global shifts early and throughout the trend lifecycle, nwo.ai enables corporations and governments to get insights on sectors ranging from consumer products to global war. Low, a Westpac Bank Trust Scholar, ran SAP’s Machine Learning efforts in APAC at age 17. Jaiswal, a drone pioneer and serial entrepreneur, developed geopolitical trading signals for hedge funds. The company has $3.5 million in seed funding.

Milk Moovement Bags $1.5M From SDTC

Milk Moovement, which makes supply chain management software for the dairy industry, now controls about 10 percent of United States milk production and has bagged a $1.5 million grant from federal agency Sustainable Development Technology Canada.

CEO Robert Forsythe said in an interview that, in the wake of a United States expansion that saw the company move its sales office to Minnesota, Milk Moovement has inked deals with three of the country’s largest dairy cooperatives — including California Dairies, which includes more than 300 farms.

He said Milk Moovement’s revenue has grown about 350 percent on the back of the American deals, with annual recurring revenue set to hit $2 million by the end of this year.

In addition to a $4 million equity funding round last Spring, the money from SDTC follows a smaller, $100,000 grant from 2020.

“From there, they really looked at, ‘Okay, who’s high-performing and who’s growing really quickly, and who could benefit from further investment?” said Forsythe.

“They were just seeing traction and an ability to really double down on what we pitched for the $100K.”

Milk Moovement’s software is now used in the production of 23 billion pounds of milk annually — about a tenth of the 223 billion pounds produced every year in the United States. The technology is used by about 800 farms and Forsythe expects that number to double by early next year.

But he said $2 million of revenue from 10 percent of the market does not mean Milk Movement’s annual revenue from the U.S. will top out at $20 million. Dairy co-operatives are the company’s beachhead market, but next year, he expects to begin making inroads into the tenfold larger dairy processing industry.

SAP Startup Spotlight: Wisy

SAP invests in a lot of promising startups, and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of all of them. E-3 Magazine has selected the most interesting companies to showcase in our SAP Startup Spotlight Series. In this article, we will take a look at Wisy.

Min Chen is the CEO of Wisy, a startup that solves a $1.9T problem in the CPG and retail industry by optimizing operations, reducing out-of-stocks and waste with artificial intelligence. She is an award-winning serial entrepreneur and software engineer with 20 years of experience. In this interview, Min Chen will explain what problem Wisy is trying to solve, what makes her company different, and what’s next for the startup.

E-3 Magazine: What problem is Wisy trying to solve?

Min Chen: Wisy is solving a problem that affects everybody who shops at a store. All of us have had the inconvenience of not finding the product we want to buy, and this problem causes a $1.9T annual loss in the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) industry due to stockouts and waste. While stockouts can happen for several reasons, one of the most common causes is the lack of actionable data at the point-of-sale for CPG and retailer personnel to take timely, correct actions and prevent the problem in the future. Stockouts lead to losses in sales and waste as products are not sold before their expiry date because they are not being restocked on shelves in a timely manner.

Why is this such a difficult problem to solve?

Chen: Imagine a dairy company with over 100 different products sold at thousands of stores or the dairy department in a grocery store with thousands of products to choose from. Keeping track of product rotation, inventory, planogram compliance, assortments, and pricing of every product and every store is a daunting task that is still done manually. Manual retail execution processes rely on the memory and eyeballing capabilities of employees. It is no surprise that error margins are high, data are inaccurate and not actionable. High personnel turnover adds more challenges as new employees take longer to execute the same tasks and could make more mistakes due to their unfamiliarity with the company’s myriad of products.

How is Wisy helping to solve this problem?

Chen: Wisy has developed an artificial-intelligence solution that works in any mobile device to empower field employees to quickly identify retail execution issues and perform corrective actions quickly and consistently. Instead of verifying out-of-stocks manually, employees just have to snap a picture of the shelf and Wisy will identify issues such as out-of-stocks, planogram compliance, unauthorized products, and pricing issues. Employees won’t have to rely on memorizing the hundreds of products and their right quantities for each store to identify issues. Wisy will do that for them in a matter of seconds. It is likely to increase efficiency by at least 25 percent and accuracy to 90 percent, leading to potential combined benefit of 3 to 10 percent of revenue.

BigID Ranked Number 27th Fastest-Growing Company in North America on the 2021 Deloitte Technology Fast 500™

BigID announced it ranked #27 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™, a ranking of the 500 fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, fintech, and energy tech companies in North America, now in its 27^th year.

BigID’s chief executive officer, Dimitri Sirota, says, “This recognition of our growth reflects the critical importance for companies to reimagine data management everywhere for data privacy, security, and governance across their entire data landscape.”

“Each year the Technology Fast 500 shines a light on leading innovators in technology and this year is no exception,” said Paul Silverglate, vice chair, Deloitte LLP and U.S. technology sector leader. “In the face of innumerable challenges resulting from the pandemic, the best and brightest were able to pivot, reinvent and transform and grow. We celebrate the winning organizations and especially the talented employees driving their success.”

“The pandemic has underscored the urgent need for tech solutions in a variety of areas across health care, fintech, energy tech, entertainment, to name a few, so reliance on innovators like the winners of the Technology Fast 500 is more important than ever,” said Christie Simons, partner, Deloitte & Touche LLP and industry leader for technology, media and telecommunications within Deloitte’s audit & assurance practice. “These companies are not only at the cutting edge, transforming the way we do business, but most importantly, recognize the strategic importance of ongoing innovation, especially in the ever-changing world of technology.”

Overall, 2021 Technology Fast 500™ companies achieved revenue growth ranging from 212% to 87,037% from 2017 to 2020, with median growth of 521%.

MANTA Recognized in 2021 Gartner® Market Guide for Active Metadata Management

Data lineage platform MANTA today announced its inclusion as a “Representative Vendor” in 2021 Gartner Market Guide for Active Metadata Management.

The report found that organizations are increasingly turning to metadata management solutions to address emerging data management challenges. While metadata management has been used in one form or another for decades, it is becoming more important as enterprises become more data-intensive. “Active metadata management is seen as a set of capabilities that enable continuous access and processing of metadata that support ongoing analysis over a different spectrum of maturity, use cases and vendor solutions.” The report identified that “increased demand for orchestrating exiting and new systems has rendered traditional metadata practices insufficient”, and that “organizations are demanding “active metadata” to assure augmented data management capabilities”.¹

MANTA is a world-class data lineage platform that automatically scans your data environment to build a powerful map of all data flows and deliver it through a native UI and other channels to both technical and non-technical users. With MANTA, everyone—from data science teams, cloud architects, and compliance teams to business leaders at the highest level—gets full visibility and control of their data pipeline. MANTA’s extensive lineage capabilities, unique features, and advanced filtering options make the platform an unbeatable solution that allows users to finally understand how their data enters and flows across systems to make data a truly enterprise-wide asset.

SAP Startup Spotlight: NWO.ai

SAP invests in a lot of promising startups, and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of all of them. E-3 Magazine has selected the most interesting companies to showcase in our SAP Startup Spotlight Series. In this article, we will take a look at NWO.ai. In this interview, co-founder and co-CEO Pulkit Jaiswal talks about what NWO.ai has to offer, how it is connected to SAP, and what’s next for the startup.

E-3 Magazine: Why did you start NWO.ai?

Pulkit Jaiswal: Prior to beginning my journey with NWO.ai, I was an entrepreneur in the drone industry. During this time, I understood the power of providing actionable insights as-a-service to large enterprises, powered by data that was previously untapped. Shortly after that, I started building signals that predicted geopolitical volatility for trading purposes, recognizing how global relations and natural disasters could disrupt standard patterns. After achieving a profitable run, I realized the asymmetry in data that exists between hedge funds and large companies – hedge funds often know more about specific industries than companies within them. Essentially, NWO.ai was born out of the realization that I could provide corporations with the same level of access to data and reveal actionable insights.

How could your solution potentially help customers navigate the COVID-19 pandemic?

Jaiswal: As we speak, global supply chains are crumbling while the cost of raw materials for most consumer goods has skyrocketed, in part due to rising inflation and a parabolic adoption of e-commerce. Moreover, geopolitical instability has reached an all-time high, and living with uncertainty is the new normal for businesses today. COVID-19 has created a new social, political, and economic world order – one that is increasingly driven by cultural narratives and online discourse. In fact, the online narrative is single-handedly driving demand for certain consumer goods and creating completely new product categories at an exponential pace. NWO.ai’s natural language processing engine enables clients to surface the fears, motivations, and demand drivers underlying various signals, providing them with unprecedented access to the Why behind a narrative. Whether it’s figuring out which new product categories are about to break out or finding anomalous interest in demand for certain products, NWO.ai has successfully helped clients stay ahead of the curve, enabling proactive rather than reactive decision-making processes.

How are you connected to SAP?

Jaiswal: We are thrilled that NWO.ai has premiered as one of the first data providers to join the SAP data marketplace. This new feature, part of the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, enables businesses and IT users to directly consume partner data offerings that are available on SAP Store. We also have former SAP executives at the helm of our company: our COO, Miroslav Dimitrov, directed the SAP.io Foundry in Berlin, and our CTO, Imogen Low, led machine learning efforts for SAP in Singapore.

How has SAP.io’s involvement impacted your journey?

Jaiswal: Besides our collaboration with SAP DWC, we are also lucky to have graduated from SAP.io’s Berlin Foundry Program. As part of the program, we had the chance to interact with and learn from various industry experts, stakeholders, and potential customers, which in turn helped us achieve a product-market fit.

NWO.ai Partners with SAP to Support the Consumer Goods Industry

NWO.ai is offering its Consumer Intelligence solution on the data marketplace for SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, enabling the tracking of cultural and consumer behavior shifts globally.

The data marketplace is a new feature of the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud solution which enables businesses and IT users to directly consume partner data offerings that are available on SAP Store.

NWO.ai provides clients with a significant competitive advantage and helps them stay close to their customers, according to the vendor.

Specifically, consumer product companies can now leverage Consumer Intelligence from NWO.ai to:

Analyze and identify potential demand growth drivers
Track global cultural shifts by analyzing billions of data points in under 60 seconds
Understand consumer sentiment and the leading indicators behind it
Deep dive on microtrends associated with products and categories
Identify the influential voices and brands that drive the consumer narrative

As a partner in the SAP PartnerEdge program, NWO.ai is empowered to build, market, and sell software applications that supplement and build on SAP software and technology.

Can Artificial Intelligence Take The Guesswork Out Of The Customer Journey?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is shedding light on one of the most examined yet least understood experiences of modern life: the customer journey. From shopping malls and sports arenas, to train stations and city streets, C2RO is an AI-powered video analytics platform that captures anonymized data about people’s movement so organizations can improve the customer experience.

“We analyze human behaviour in physical spaces, and transfer it into actionable data,” said Tim Heaney, vice president of sales at C2RO. “With a fact-based understanding of the amount of people coming into a space, how they move through it with whom, where they linger, and what they touch and eventually purchase, organizations can manage physical environments more efficiently to improve the customer experience and business results.”

Real-time data eases commuter experience

A transportation organization used data from C2RO to improve subway train and bus terminal planning.

“Based on the number of people boarding and leaving trains at certain times and days, as well as which direction they’re headed at terminals, transportation managers could alleviate traffic crunches,” said Heaney. “They could reverse escalator directions to help people more easily exit or enter terminals. Aligning vehicle dispatches to actual passenger traffic flows reduced wasted trips. It also means fewer people waiting in the cold or forced to stand in crowded cars and buses.”

Real-time data is particularly valuable to manage other operations such as shopping malls and entertainment venues during peak usage times like rush hour, holiday shopping, or performances. Companies can also use historical data for future planning.

Heaney added that monitoring in-person occupancy levels has helped organizations meet social distancing mandates during the pandemic.

Anticipate & Track Global Cultural Shifts with NWO.ai | Now available on SAP Store

SAP Data Intelligence, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Business Technology Platform customers can now turn unstructured data into insight with NWO.ai‘s platform that aggregates, analyzes, and produces actionable reports on human-generated data.

Check out Consumer Intelligence by NWO.ai on SAP Store

The Industry Problem

As consumer behavior and habits change abruptly (as evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic), companies cannot keep up and make sense of the vast amount of external data created every single day.

NWO.ai’s Solution

NWO.ai uses diverse data sets and views them in context to define trends as they emerge and evolve in relative terms. NWO.ai’s platform shows how a product, company, trend, or concept increases/decreases in its saturation within a global context with regards to mindshare, using news, social commentary, and searches.

BigID Announces SAP Endorsed Apps Certification for its Discovery-in-Depth Data Insight Platform

BigID, a leader in data management for privacy, security, and governance, today announced that the Discovery-in-Depth Data Insight Platform, a cloud native solution, is a certified SAP endorsed app available on SAP^®Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings.

SAP Endorsed Apps are developed by independent software vendors that have been endorsed to support and complete SAP’s vision to help customers become best-run intelligent enterprises. Solutions awarded with this premium certification go through in-depth technical testing, measurements against benchmarks results, and due diligence that meets stringent requirements in a customer environment.

“We’re thrilled to expand our relationship with SAP to include our subscription-based, cloud-native solution as a premium certified SAP endorsed app,” said Dimitri Sirota, CEO and Co-Founder of BigID. “BigID and SAP serve some of the largest and most global organizations in the market today. These companies have hundreds, if not thousands, of data sources across the enterprise, and BigID helps SAP offer businesses a solution to manage data for privacy, security, and governance.”

The Discovery-in-Depth Data Insight Platform provides additional access to various BigID Apps for Privacy, Security and Data Governance, available upon request, as well as provides extended data source coverage to include SAP^® SuccessFactors^®. BigID also offers an on-premise solution, called SAP Data Mapping and Protection by BigID

Archlet named Future 5 Procurement software start-up of 2021 by Spend Matters

Spend Matters, the leading source for Procurement solution intelligence, declared Archlet a ‘Future 5’ Procurement software vendor for 2021. For the 8th year in a row, Spend Matters has released its annual “50 Procurement Providers to Know” and “50 Procurement Providers to Watch” lists — plus the 3rd annual “Future 5” list of noted start-ups. Each year, their technology analysts assess the capabilities for an array of companies across 10 procurement technology market sectors to determine the lists totaling 105 vendors in the industry. These represent the best-in-class companies you need to know about as well as the up-and-coming, growing firms to keep your eye on. The announcement took place at the SIG Executive Summit in Carlsbad, California, USA, yesterday.

The recognition as ‘Future 5’ Procurement software provider highlights Archlet’s innovative approach to democratizing advanced features like optimization in sourcing and making them accessible to a larger audience. Optimization and scenario-based analysis are usually only used in highly complex events and high spend categories like transportation, where it is used by extensively trained power users with a background in mathematics. Archlet is making these capabilities available to every Procurement manager in every sourcing event, independent of spend category or complexity and therefore unlocks new savings opportunities for organizations.