Meet Erez Raanan & Guy Ernest, the Co-Founders of Aiola. Aiola developed a super powerful virtual analyst that helps CPG managers in the sales, marketing, trade, and planning departments make better data-driven decisions. Aiola participated in the SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv’s Consumer Products Spring 2020 cohort, and is integrating into SAP’s Sales Cloud.
As more and more brands have shifted to the E-commerce world as their primary sales channel, they seem to have forgotten one crucial player along the way: the seller. Especially today, as people are less frequently walking into stores and avoiding physical engagements altogether, the role of the online seller is critical; people buy from people, not ads. These sellers operate as brand ambassadors who represent the brand online, much like a salesperson would in a physical store.
The solution that seamlessly helps brands provide expertise and guidance to consumers through digital ambassadors? TVPage.
TVPage provides every brand the ability to turn on ambassador digital storefronts on their websites, empowering subject matter experts, in-store sales associates, influencers, and savvy customers to promote and sell their products online. With TVPage, brands transform their sales team into ambassadors who sell on their digital storefronts on the brand’s site, with an intuitive platform that measures results and commissions ambassadors on their actual sales. Today’s consumers depend more and more on recommendations to help dictate their purchasing decisions, and TVPage allows brands to seamlessly engage with their consumers through digital ambassadors.
Today, brands spend between 5–50% of their annual marketing budget on product sampling (Sampler Research). However, brands have been blindly distributing samples, unable to effectively target consumers and measure ROI on traditional product sampling strategies.
The solution that helps large Consumer Packaged Goods companies get their products into the right hands, while providing a personalized and memorable experience for consumers? Sampler.
Sampler is a Direct-to-Consumer product sampling platform that allows brands to target, track, and measure their sampling program from start to finish. By targeting the right audience, gathering information about the consumer’s profile, sending samples directly to homes, and gleaning feedback from the data collected, Sampler helps brands gather the insights they need to build one-on-one relationships with consumers. Having worked with over 400 brands such as industry giants L’Oréal and Nestlé and reaching over 50 million consumers globally in 24 different countries, it is clear that Sampler is on to something.
Check out our how our Consumer Products cohort helps companies create and engage with consumers in moments of opportunity! Hear how our amazing 7 startups bring value to SAP & our customers at our concluding event.
When Rahul Nambiar, co-founder and CEO of Botsync, transformed his passion for robotics into autonomous mobile robots with three other co-founders, little did they imagine their efforts will become key in the new reality of business today.
“As a company, we want to resolve the mismatch between consumer demand and limited labor supply in the logistics and manufacturing sectors,” said Rahul. “It is estimated that by 2028, there will be 2.4M jobs unfulfilled in these industries. So, we knew there will be a definite demand for the autonomous mobile robots we are building. What we hadn’t expected was how quickly this demand would evolve.”
In today’s new normal where businesses resuming operations are facing new restrictions due to COVID-19 infection risks, the logistics and manufacturing sectors are finding it challenging to operate. They face mandatory sanitation measures, safe distancing rules, and a manpower crunch due to restrictions in travel. This has seriously affected productivity levels.
Across the world, individuals, communities, and businesses are struggling with changing regulations imposed to counter the COVID-19 pandemic. From lockdowns followed by the easing of those measures to renewed restrictions as new infection rates spike, a hodgepodge of rules and guidelines are creating confusion on how businesses should resume operations, and “who’s allowed to do what”.
Fortunately, this same set of conditions is inspiring rapid and important changes on a global scale. Amid this environment, SAP.iO has been delving deep to support startups that can help businesses and the world adapt. We’ve been building a space for collaboration to back relief efforts for COVID-19. And we’ve been amazed and humbled by the incredible amount of creativity and good work we are witnessing.
One of the efforts we are excited about stem from HyBird, a startup we are supporting as part of the SAP.iO Foundry Singapore Industry 4.0 program. Its platform, Clarity, helps alleviate health and safety risks for critical infrastructure workers.
As the crisis slowly ebbs and economies round the world tentatively re-open, it’s time for organizations to regroup and plan their next act. At the beginning of the crisis, companies needed to rapidly innovate to maintain business continuity, ensure liquidity, support remote work and focus on employee safety.
The next act will require organizations to refocus their innovation efforts on their core businesses in their specific industries, to recover in the short run, and set them up for growth in the long haul.
Whether it is Amazon’s latest acquisition of autonomous driving startup Zoox for potential contactless freight delivery opportunities, or Lululemon acquiring ‘at-home’ fitness startup Mirror, some of the smartest innovation continues to emerge from the startup open ecosystem.
Popwallet for mobile contactless consumer experiences, Pecan for AI based revenue growth management, TVPage for online influencer marketing and ClearMetal to fortify supply chains with ML based freight tracking, are some of the latest innovations relevant for industries to rapidly recover in these pandemic times (Source: SAP.iO Fund and Foundries).
The world is constantly evolving, whole industries are emerging in revolutionary ways — all because of increasing amounts of accessible data which is changing the way we use and allocate resources. As a result, now more than ever before, there is a tremendous opportunity for enterprises to capture numerous sources of previously untapped data, which can then enable predictive decisions, and even drive or create whole new utilizations. If you’re anything like thousands of SAP customers, you know how valuable innovation is and the advantages of adopting groundbreaking solutions, early.
Startups innovate at lightning speed and have made their mark on the B2B space with their disruptive business models and daring technology-fueled visions. Yet, what they lack is the reliability, market recognition and proven track-record. This is why the SAP.iO Fund and Foundries were created, to act as a bridge between SAP customers and startup innovations within the larger and thriving SAP ecosystem. The unit’s mission is to invest, accelerate and incubate startup innovation that strategically expand the SAP ecosystem to create value for SAP customers.
“Our mission is to empower the innovators that will simplify and transform the way business operates. To execute against our mission, we accelerate startups that are changing the face of enterprise software,” said Alexa Gorman, SAP.iO Foundries EMEA Head.
SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv, SAP’s startup accelerator program, is opening its next cycle and looking for startups that help solve some of the biggest challenges facing the Utilities Industry, as well as startups that are looking to break into the Utilities field.The Utilities Industry has a staggering effect on our daily lives, and energy companies have a large responsibility to bring a constant supply of energy that will support our modern way of living. Looking ahead, this responsibility will only grow. With international pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the increasing demand for alternative energy sources, energy suppliers will be tasked with upholding existing regulations while facing several new challenges and updating regulations.
Erik Davis, Chief Product Officer of Sampler, a Foundry TLV startup, shares how Sampler found new opportunity in the recent crisis, and provides tips on how other startups can do the same.
Watch interview with Sébastien Gibier on BFM Business (French TV Channel) as they discuss how HR Technology supports working from home.
Hasura is an open-source engine that can connect to PostgreSQL databases and microservices across hybrid- and multi-cloud environments and then automatically build a GraphQL API backend for them, making it easier for developers to then build their own data-driven applications on top of this unified API . For a while now, the San Francisco-based startup has offered a paid version (Hasura Pro) with enterprise-ready reliability and security tools, in addition to its free open-source version. Today, the company launched Hasura Cloud, which takes the existing Pro version, adds a number of cloud-specific features like dynamic caching, auto-scaling and consumption-based pricing, and brings those together in a fully managed service.
Verusen, an innovator in artificial intelligence, materials inventory and data management technology, announced today that it has been named to the Supply & Demand Chain Executive’s SDCE 100 for 2020. The prestigious list spotlights successful and innovative projects that deliver bottom-line value to small, medium and large enterprises across the range of supply chain functions. These projects can serve as a map for supply chain executives looking for new opportunities to drive improvement in their own operations.
Verusen’s successful work with a Fortune 500 pulp and paper manufacturer with more than 60 North American facilities exemplifies the impact its AI-based intelligent technology platform can quickly make. The manufacturer set an aggressive initiative to reduce working capital by $5 million, obtain enterprise inventory visibility and rebalance inventory through a virtual maintenance, repair and operating (MRO) inventory network.
With Verusen’s cloud platform, the team laid the appropriate data foundation by structuring its material master (MM) data in weeks instead of a year. AI ultimately cleansed the MRO data, allowing the company to begin a “self-cleansing” data strategy as well as an internal “buy-from-self-first” inventory optimization strategy. Additionally, the AI delivered optimized insights on where inventory could be reduced as well as how to avoid creating excess. In less than 100 days, Verusen’s AI platform produced more than $20 million in verified savings.
The utility company of the future will be an energy bank, enabling customers to cash-in on unused electric capacity by making it available to other customers who need it. Utilities will be the intermediary facilitating the transaction and reducing energy waste in the process.
So believes SaLisa Berrien, a Bethlehem native, 1987 Allen High School graduate, former PPL Corp. engineer and now an entrepreneur who launched a startup called COI Energy Services in early 2016.
Based at the University of South Florida’s Tampa Bay Technology Incubator, COI Energy offers software that helps utility companies take full advantage of smart grids, or electrical supply networks that can react to patterns and changes in energy usage.
This past week, Berrien submitted patent paperwork for the COI Energy Optimizer. Her signature technology is a digital portal that makes it easy for commercial customers to communicate with their utility, and allows utilities to better manage demand response, renewable energy and energy efficiency programs.
She calls it the “Uber of Energy.”
COI’s first 16 months have been equal parts exhilarating and scary for Berrien, a successful mechanical engineer and businesswoman who has spent her entire career in the energy sector. New challenges have included keeping her perfectionism in check, knowing when to seek financing and determining the trustworthiness of potential partners.
As CEO, Berrien has has embraced those challenges and says she’s surrounded herself with people who share a vision of Tampa as the next big technology hub. She lives in Tampa, but until April owned a home in Upper Macungie and still returns to the Lehigh Valley regularly.
“I think we’re building something great here, and I want to be part of the story,” she said.
