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‘Shopify for physical stores’ raises £1.3m

Retail disrupter Mercaux has secured £1.3 million in new debt financing from Flashpoint Venture Debt. 

The London firm helps transform retail stores from simple point of sale, into multi-purpose centres that deliver a personalised in-store customer experience and omnichannel sales, as well as serve as customer acquisition and remote selling channels.  

It achieves this by deploying built-for-purpose modular in-store digital platform that connects stores to eCommerce and other systems, such as OMS, PIM and CRM.  

The company’s in-store solutions are operated by store associates, or self-served by customers, and also reveal a rich pool of in-store customer behaviour data that can be leveraged in other channels. 

Mercaux’s clients include Stadium Goods, Dufry, Holland & Barrett and TENDAM (formerly the Cortifiel Group), operating in more than 1,000 stores across the world.  

Founder and CEO Olga Kotsur said: “What Shopify is for eCommerce, Mercaux is for physical stores.  

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Popwallet’s Elias Guerra: ‘The pandemic was a catalyst for changing consumer behaviour’

As the payment journey continues to evolve, innovative methods are taking on a heightened role of importance, especially as global economies emerge from the pandemic. 

Elias Guerra, Founder and CEO of Popwallet, spoke to Payment Expert about how the pandemic has shifted consumer habits and elevated the importance of mobile wallets. 

Payment Expert: Firstly, can you tell us more about the Popwallet offering? 

Elias Guerra: Popwallet is a Mobile Wallet Marketing Automation and Customer Experience Management Platform. Really, that’s just a fancy way of saying we provide software tools for brands to reach and engage their customers through mobile wallets like Apple Wallet and Google Pay.

Popwallet enables brands to leverage mobile wallets to deliver contactless customer experiences such as dynamic coupons and offers, loyalty, gift, and member ID cards, tickets, and other branded content. The mobile wallet enhances traditional marketing and communications tactics by replacing paper and plastic with a dynamic mobile engagement channel.

PE: How has the climate for mobile wallets changed over the past year? 

EG: The pandemic really was a catalyst for shifting consumer behaviour. Think pre-pandemic: the value proposition for these mobile wallets was more about convenience. It was a little bit easier to use your credit card if it was on your mobile device as people’s mobile devices are with them at all times, so you’re less likely to forget something at home.

When the pandemic hit, the value proposition shifted to be driven more by consumer safety than convenience. The idea of touching a payment terminal or handling a plastic credit card or paper cash–any physical object–all of a sudden was undesirable; people no longer wanted to touch things as a means to try and stay safe from COVID-19. This definitely accelerated the use of mobile wallets and contactless transactions over the past year.

PE: What role do loyalty points and cards sit within the payment journey and how integral are they to providing an engaging user experience? 

EG: Brands want to acquire new customers and retain loyal customers. A common way to do this is by rewarding customer behavior around purchases. The ability to reward through exclusive offers and loyalty is essential for acquiring and retaining these ideal customers, so being able to accomplish this through one common place, like a mobile wallet, is the ultimate combination of content and commerce.

It is a very powerful tool for brands, and provides utility and value for consumers. With the mobile wallet as the centerpiece of the loyalty program, brands are able to seamlessly tie loyalty and rewards to purchase behavior in a way that’s very convenient for their customer.

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New SetSail Analysis Shows Micro-Incentives Combined With Actionable Data Are Key to Successful B2B Sales Cycle

SetSail, the Revenue Execution platform for sales, releases new data on the anatomy of a successful B2B sales deal, derived from its analysis of deals at six large enterprises, including one of the Fortune 10, over the past two months. SetSail found sales reps are most effective when given data on the next best action in tandem with a micro-incentive (points that lead to prizes and rewards) to act. On average, if a sales rep takes action on five or more success indicators the deal win rate increases by 62%.

“Reps must be aware of the path to success and motivated to execute on multiple recommendations, focusing on the small wins that lead to big deals,” said Haggai Levi, SetSail CEO. “Micro-incentives accomplish this – they lay out success indicators and prompt reps to take action, making the difference between a deal closing and an indefinite sales cycle.”

As part of its analysis, SetSail broke down the three most important elements of a B2B deal: Buyer Persona (who the rep is contacting), Buyer Engagement (contact type and frequency) and Deal Progression Keywords (keywords discussed throughout the deal cycle) and the impact that micro-incentives play within them.

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Breinify announces $11M seed to bring data science to the marketing team

Breinify is a startup working to apply data science to personalization, and do it in a way that makes it accessible to nontechnical marketing employees to build more meaningful customer experiences. The company announced a funding round totaling $11 million.

The investment was led by Gutbrain Ventures and PBJ Capital with participation from Streamlined Ventures, CXO Fund, Amino Capital, Startup Capital Ventures and Sterling Road.

Breinify co-founder and CEO Diane Keng says that she and co-founder and CTO Philipp Meisen started the company to bring predictive personalization based on data science to marketers with the goal of helping them improve a customer’s experience by personalizing messages tailored to individual tastes.

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SetSail Leverages AI To Empower Sales & Increase Team Productivity

SetSail, an AI-powered sales tracking, motivation and empowerment platform, leverages AI to identify buying signals and provide recommendations for sales teams, and help them follow the best path of action to closing deals faster and building good selling habits.

 

Back-Of-The-Box Details

SetSail is designed to help sales teams automate their sales data and buying signals in their CRMs to improve sales team behavior, helping salespeople at every level of an organization improve their productivity and performance while closing deals. SetSail’s signal-based coaching app also uses these signals to help managers coach their reps to close deals and generate revenue more efficiently.

The signal-based platform offers three different solutions, including:

  • SetSail Collect, which integrates all sales data from disconnected sources into a single view in a CRM or any other platform, and allows salespeople to pull relevant information for specific buyer interactions;
  • SetSail Discover, a solution that analyzes customer interactions with salespeople and provides 370+ prescriptive buying signals to help them uncover what is driving the buyer’s deal and decide what actions to take; and
  • SetSail Accelerate, a custom program that uses real-time micro-incentives to increase sales team motivation, rewarding reps for the right actions throughout the customer relationship.

Who It’s For

SetSail is designed for everyone involved in the sales cycle, including CROs, sales managers, sales reps and more, at organizations of all sizes.

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Omnichannel Insights for Marketing Decision Support

An old adage goes like this: 50% of the money spent on marketing programs is wasted. But which 50%?

That question can finally be answered in the new era of advanced analytics – and by Adverity Marketing Data Analytics Platform. No more tedious number crunching on spreadsheets for marketing teams, thanks to this popular solution on SAP Store. Now, data-driven marketers can take advantage of fully automated data integration for a single source of truth on the performance of their programs and move past “point-in-time” performance monitoring toward insights that lead to tangible actions.

I spoke with Sven Woeltjen, partner manager with Adverity GmbH, to find out more about the solution’s impact on the life of a marketer.

“From every source – paid search, social media, direct demand-generation campaigns, events – you get different data in different formats,” Woeltjen said. “Everyone is asking for ROI, and no one has the answer. Many marketing teams work in silos. Harmonizing and cleansing the data from all the different sources is a labor-intensive process that’s prone to mistakes, and typically takes many days. As a result, marketers spend more time wrangling data than they do interpreting it, meaning they miss out on opportunities to optimize performance and improve ROI. They don’t have current info and can’t produce timely reports. Those are the problems Adverity solves.”

Reporting in Near Real Time

With the Adverity solution, marketers can create omnichannel overviews in near real time. Integration with SAP ERP and SAP Marketing Cloud allows them to enrich their insights by pulling in data from finance or HR or whatever interests them, Woeltjen continued. The ability to build ad-hoc reports on their own enables them to explain to the business the impact of what they’re doing whenever they’re asked. Report templates and data visualization tools make that even easier. “With tangible results based on real data, they can turn their attention to the next program or campaign rather than the next report,” he added. “By better understanding what works and what doesn’t, they can make decisions from a strategic standpoint.”

In fact, Woeltjen speaks from experience after spending his career in marketing, including tenure with an agency where he was using the Adverity solution himself. He ended up approaching the company about potential partner opportunities and, not long after, joined the firm and worked with its most important partner, SAP.

Understanding Marketing Challenges – as Marketers

I asked Woeltjen to tell me more about the company, which was established in 2015. Like him, the founders themselves were working in the marketing field, experiencing the data challenges , and saw an opportunity. The company has grown steadily since then, largely by building relationships, understanding customers’ needs, and building new features accordingly – as all good marketers do. For example, an augmented analytics module uses machine learning to analyze large amounts of data, identify trends and anomalies, and deliver suggestions for improvements that enable marketers to proactively address issues affecting performance.

Teamwork is a crucial factor for Adverity. The implementation team sits next to the developers to promote collaboration. Even as they have transitioned to working from home, the relationships are in place. Now with about 250 employees, based largely in Austria, the U.S., and the UK, the company plans to double in size this year. With offices in London and New York City already, Adverity plans to establish a presence on the West Coast of the U.S. and in the Asia-Pacific-Japan region. As a digital company with most employees working remotely, not just during the pandemic, he commented, “We can hire the best people.”

And speaking of the pandemic, Adverity has been in the position to cushion some of the fallout for customers suddenly making the transition to online marketing. “Here in Germany, for example, many stores have been closed for a full year,” Woeltjen remarked. “People have had to get used to buying more online, causing many smaller businesses – distilleries, for example – to sell directly to consumers and use their marketing budgets to acquire customers online. We can help them with our tool.”

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VNTANA Launches 3D Digital Showroom to help Fashion Brands Sell Online to Retailers

VNTANA, the industry leader in 3D Content Management Software (CMS),  announced the launch of VNTANA’s new 3D Digital Showroom, which allows brands to instantly and easily create secure, shareable 3D digital showrooms with their existing designs. The 3D Digital Showroom looks like a traditional line sheet with interactive 3D versions of products.

By using 3D versions of products, brands can showcase products even before samples have been produced saving thousands of dollars and providing a differentiated experience for their customers.

The VNTANA platform has patented algorithms to ensure 3D models load fast with the highest quality images. The platform generates a sharable link and QR code to make sharing easy. Each file holds metadata, so all product information, such as fabric and style number is tied to the 3D file. A 3D digital showroom can be created in minutes instead of weeks by following a simple set of steps.

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Final-mile fulfillment startup parcelLab closes $112M Series C funding led by Insight Partners

Munich-based parcelLab, which offers a final-mile fulfillment service for online retailers, has closed a $112 million (GB£80 million) Series C funding round led by the U.S. VC/PE firm Insight Partners.

Germany’s Endeit Capital participated as a co-investor, alongside existing investors Capnamic Ventures and coparion. ParcelLab last raised an undisclosed Series B in October 2019. The new funding will feed into parcelLab’s global expansion plans and new product development.

Founded in 2015 by Tobias Buxhoidt (CEO), Julian Krenge (CTO) and Anton Eder (COO), the startup has managed to bag such customers as Lidl, to which it provides automated personalized shipping messages. This means that as much as 85% of Lidl customers return to its website.

It also works with Ikea and Farfetch to increase basket sizes and email open rates of — it claims — over 90%, 25% reductions in WISMO (where is my order) and increases of customer reviews.

In a statement, Tobias Buxhoidt, CEO and founder of parcelLab, said: “As e-commerce becomes increasingly competitive, providing unique and branded experiences will drive growth. Identifying opportunities to further connect with people and build a better, stronger relationship is a key differentiator.”

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Too Good To Go Expands Its Food Waste App Nationally Across the U.S.

Not so very long ago, the United States lagged far behind Europe in terms of the widespread availability of food rescue apps. Fortunately, a heightened awareness of the world’s food waste problem has changed this and created opportunities for food rescue companies in the U.S.

Case in point: Too Good To Go’s recent expansion westward. The company, originally started in Denmark, today announced its plans to expand across the United States, following a successful program in select East Coast states. The first stop is San Francisco, with 200-plus food businesses participating, including Mission Chinese, La Boulangerie, and Indie Superette.

Via the Too Good To Go app, users can browse surplus food options from participating restaurants, bakeries, and grocery stores at the end of every day. They can then sign up for a “surprise bag” which includes surplus items from these businesses. Depending on the business from which it’s ordered, that bag could include pastries, extra sushi rolls, surplus produce, and many other items.

Too Good to Go brought its app Stateside in 2020, starting in New York City. The company followed that move with a $31 million fundraise at the start of this year, specifically meant to enable a wider expansion around the U.S.

And while the concept of food rescue might be more commonplace Stateside compared to a couple years ago, it’s still unusual in the restaurant biz. Grocery delivery services like Misfits Market and Imperfect Foods address the grocery sector. Canada’s Flashfood app, based in Toronto, Ontario, similarly addresses surplus food in the grocery store via its U.S. partnership with Meijer.

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GoFundMe and Perksy Release New Data Revealing the Kindness of New Yorkers

GoFundMe, the world’s leading fundraising platform, today released new data about the state of giving in New York City. The findings, which combine new internal GoFundMe data with the results of a survey* conducted by Perksy among 1,000 New Yorkers in April 2021, demonstrate the kindness and resilience of the nation’s largest city.

While only 1% of New Yorkers described themselves as kind in the Perksy survey, data from GoFundMe between January 2020 and March 2021 indicates otherwise. In that period of time, GoFundMe found that:

  • Approximately $150 million was raised on GoFundMe by New Yorkers for people, causes, and organizations in need.
  • A New Yorker donated to a fundraiser every 30 seconds.
  • Over half of donors in New York City were first time donors.
  • Over 40% of donations made by New Yorkers were anonymous, a signal of the city’s understated generosity.
  • Over one-third of the fundraisers started by New Yorkers were for someone else.

“The data speaks volumes about the resilience and strong sense of community New Yorkers demonstrated over the past year,” said Emily Wolverton, Head of Analytics at GoFundMe. “With New York City often considered a microcosm of the United States, we’re inspired by the city’s generosity and commitment to uplifting one another that our research uncovered. From helping a friend in need to supporting a local coffee shop, we see the kindness of New Yorkers everyday on GoFundMe.”

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SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv announced 7 startups to joint its next program with Publicis Sapient

SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv launched yesterday its startup accelerator program focused on consumer engagement, together with the digital business transformation company Publicis Sapient. Seven startups have been selected to join the program, all are focused on developing advanced marketing and commerce solutions to help brands improve their consumer engagement.

“Recent year events and new market challenges in the Consumer Industries, emphasized the importance of expanding our partner portfolio in the e-commerce and marketing domains, and led us to launch a dedicated program with that focus.” says Lior Weizman, Director of SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv. “After screening startups from more than 30 countries, 7 startups originating from Israel, US, Poland and UK were selected. The selected startups present advanced capabilities in their fields and have a strong track record of success, will enable SAP’s clients to engage in new ways with their customers.”

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SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv Joins Publicis Sapient to Accelerate Consumer Engagement Startups

 SAP has teamed up with digital business transformation company Publicis Sapient to launch a consumer engagement–focused startup accelerator program at SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv. Seven startups have been selected for the program focusing on advanced marketing and commerce solutions to help brands improve their consumer engagement.

“In the consumer industries’ ever-changing environment, it’s critical to connect our industry cloud customers with innovative startups to deliver modular and easy-to-use solutions,” SAP Industries & Customer Advisory President Peter Maier said. “Thanks to SAP.iO, we have been able to successfully support our customers’ transformation journeys by providing the widest range of solutions available to support their unique industry requirements.”

SAP and Publicis Sapient will work closely with the selected startups to drive their joint customer-innovation initiatives, which include new solutions for personalized marketing content and offers, product discovery and trial, social engagement, consumer segmentation, and direct-to-consumer business models. The startups will also explore integrations with the omnichannel customer engagement platform from Emarsys, now an SAP company.

Publicis Sapient, the digital transformation hub of global communication leader Publicis Groupe and an SAP customer, helped identify suitable business-to-business startups from all over the world to participate in the 12-week program. Publicis Sapient also will serve as a potential beta site for pilots and go-to-market channel for the startups.

“This strategic initiative with SAP.iO helps foster innovation in the consumer products industry, bringing fresh thinking from creative startups to support our clients in accelerating their digital transformation,” said Kristen Groh, Publicis Sapient Consumer Products Industry lead.

During the equity-free program, the startups will receive curated mentorship and access to SAP technology and application programming interfaces (APIs). Their work includes creating new partnerships and value propositions that help solve key e-commerce and marketing challenges facing consumer brands.

The following startups were selected to participate in the consumer engagement SAP.iO program:

  • Algopix provides an intelligence platform for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, brands, e-commerce marketplaces and data companies to increase their omnichannel sales and market share and improve their e-commerce market trend visibility.
  • eStoreMedia provides an e-commerce automation suite that helps brands accelerate their online sales by combining digital shelf analytics, e-commerce research, e-content management and syndication to e-retailers.
  • Explorium offers an automated external data platform that automatically connects and matches internal data with thousands of relevant external data signals to accelerate value from advanced analytics and machine learning models.
  • Jebbit enables anyone to quickly build interactive experiences that capture first-party declared data without any line of code.
  • Mention Me is a referral marketing and customer retention platform that integrates into brands’ websites to incentivize, track and reward referrals throughout the customer experience.
  • SundaySky helps customer-centric brands deliver video-powered experiences at critical moments along customer journeys that engage, educate and inspire consumers.
  • Vue Storefront is a mobile-first e-commerce front-end platform that operates as an open source project and allows customers to build fast e-commerce websites and apps without changing the back-end platform.

SetSail Debuts New AI-powered Solutions to Help Sales Teams Unlock More Revenue

SetSail, the AI-powered micro-incentives platform for sales, will unveiled multiple new product features on at the company’s first annual SetSail Voyage virtual conference. New SetSail features include a signal-based coaching app; smart milestone signals to help reps accelerate revenue; and data automation tailored to the way reps use their CRM.

The world of work has changed in the past year, and the ‘new normal’ requires a new way of selling,” said Haggai Levi, CEO of SetSail. “To be successful today, sales teams must embrace data, signals and storytelling. This is where SetSail comes in – providing sales teams with the information they need to take the small steps that lead to closing big deals.”

Founded in 2018 by former Google machine learning experts, SetSail uses AI to identify the buying signals needed to close a deal. The platform then converts these signals into recommendations for sales reps and presents them with micro-rewards (e.g. monetary rewards and recognitions) for following the best path of action and building good selling habits.

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SAP.iO Launches Sustainable Future Accelerator Program with Accenture to Drive Startup and Partner Innovation

SAP.iO kicked off a global sustainability-focused accelerator program alongside Accenture at SAP.iO Foundries Berlin and Munich. The Sustainable Future program aims to help early-stage B2B startups get up and running quickly to enable companies across multiple industries to address sustainability challenges and create a positive impact on both industry and society.

Sustainable Future is the largest SAP.iO cohort to date. Thirteen startups have been selected to work with SAP.iO Foundries Berlin and Munich, in tandem with Accenture experts and leading companies in various industries.

“To address global challenges such as climate change, businesses must partner on all levels and across organizations, industries and regions,” said Daniel Schmid, SAP chief sustainability officer. “Teaming up with Accenture to accelerate early-stage startups is part of our holistic innovation approach to integrate new solutions in our portfolio that help our customers understand and improve their environmental and societal impact.”

Sustainable Future is an equity-free program that seeks to propel digital transformation and corporate-startup innovation in four target areas including carbon tracking and trading, resource efficiency, climate risk tracking and mitigation, and circular economy. The program builds upon SAP and Accenture’s long-standing partnership and shared commitment to using technology to help the world build a more sustainable future.

“Our clients are increasingly turning to technology to enable sustainability agendas across their business and deliver on their purpose-based missions to drive value for their stakeholders,” said Caspar Borggreve, global lead for the Accenture SAP Business Group. “Together with SAP, we are helping startups bring innovation to life with solutions and services that allow companies to raise the bar by integrating sustainability into their core processes, strategies and operating models.”

The startups in this cohort will receive curated mentorship, access to SAP technology and application programming interfaces (APIs), and exposure to SAP and Accenture customers to develop high-impact proofs of concept. The accelerator program will run for three months and conclude with a demo day on July 8, 2021.

The Sustainable Future cohort includes the following startups:

  • Astraea provides an integrated platform to access, analyze and deliver earth-observing data and geospatial information using artificial intelligence (AI).
  • Blacksquared GmbH / Changers.com motivates and rewards employees in a playful manner to participate in healthy and environmentally friendly activities.
  • Breeze Technologies measures and analyzes common pollutants like nitrogen oxides, ozone or particulate matter in real time using machine learning and Big Data technologies.
  • Carbon Minds GmbH has built the largest and most regionalized lifecycle database for the chemical industry to help companies reduce their environmental impact with evidence-based guidance.
  • Circular IQ is a digital platform that monitors the circular performance of different suppliers, products, components and materials throughout supply chains to improve their impact on people and the planet.
  • CodeCheck is a mobile application that promotes source transparency and enables consumers to check the ingredients in food and cosmetics by scanning the barcode.
  • Emitwise helps businesses measure, report and reduce their carbon footprint across their operations and supply chains by automating data collection and processing.
  • Footprint Technologies GmbH enables consumers to accurately measure their feet at home and find the right shoe size, thus avoiding returns, costs and COemissions for online retailers.
  • GreenPlat provides traceability from the extraction of raw materials until the final disposal of generated waste using blockchain technology to create transparency across the supply chain.
  • Journey Foods uses machine learning, AI, data scraping and cohort analysis to recommend the most nutritious and more sustainable ingredients for food companies.
  • Lixo is an AI-powered waste detection system to improve the performance of recycling companies, from waste collection to sorting and recycling.
  • Lizee helps retail brands enact their rental business model and successfully enter the circular economy.
  • Too Good To Go connects consumers to restaurants and stores that have unsold, surplus food to fight food waste.

Stockly lets e-commerce websites sell out-of-stock items from a shared inventory

Meet Stockly, a French startup that keeps the inventory of various e-commerce websites in sync. When you see an out-of-stock item on an e-commerce website, chances are you leave that website and try to find the same item on another site.

If you operate an e-commerce website, Stockly lets you sell items even when they’re currently out of stock. The startup automatically finds a third-party Stockly supplier with that specific item.

The order will go through and be sent by that supplier directly. Stockly tells its partners to use neutral packaging so that the end consumer isn’t confused.

This could be particularly useful for small-scale e-commerce companies that don’t have a healthy marketplace of third-party retailers. For instance, Amazon can already sell you an out-of-stock item if a supplier has listed that specific item on Amazon’s own marketplace. But that’s not the case for most e-commerce websites.

The main challenge for Stockly is that it has to sort through various catalog formats and match the different inventories of different retailers. It is focusing on clothing items at first. When an order is routed through Stockly, it selects a specific supplier based on different criteria, such as logistics, delivery time and historical data.

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