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In New York, Funding Announcement, Supply Chain Management

Inspectorio Raises $50 Million To Help Brands Ensure Quality In Their Supply Chain

Brilliant Hire’s Smart Job Matching

Supply chain is a web that spans so wide that many large corporations can’t easily track the entire life cycle for each of its products — let alone capture enough data to ensure that everything is being done to standards and protocol. Carlos Moncayo knows the system all too well as the former founder and CEO of ASIAM Inspector, a company that supports brands and retailers with sourcing operations in Asia, he did everything from inspections to auditing to sourcing. This gave Moncayo deep insight on the many layers of the supply chain and it wasn’t pretty. He noticed a lot of issues surrounding visibility. After 10 years with the company, he was surprised they hadn’t gotten any better.

“We thought with supply chain management and production chain management, the only way to solve [the issues] was to approach it from moving offline relations to online relations and helping companies make sense of the data coming out of that,” he tells Forbes. But at the time, no one was trying to tackle that, so the former founders of ASIAM decided to try it themselves. They launched Inspectorio in 2016 to help companies and brands move their supply chain online and have better visibility and data surrounding quality and sustainability. Since Inspectorio launched its first product in 2017, the company has expanded its product offerings and more than 7,000 customers including Target and Kohl’s have signed on.

The Minneapolis-based startup raises a $50 million Series B round led by Insight Partners with participation from Techstar Ventures, Matchstick Ventures and strategic backers including Flexport, among others, as originally reported in Midas Touch newsletter. Ryan Hinkle, a managing director at Insight, says the firm has been building a relationship with Inspectorio since the beginning of the startup’s life. While the investment could have been sparked by the company’s progress — Hinkle points to the startup’s 93% revenue growth in 2021 — for him it was a bit more personal. His family used to own a clothing store and he remembers helping unwrap shirts and using a measuring tape to ensure the sleeves were the same length and that the size labels matched when he was a kid. Both of which would fall under the quality control assurances Inspectorio looks to provide further down the supply chain.

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In Funding Announcement, Supply Chain Management, Singapore

Smart IoT tracking startup Tag-n-Trac launches with $10M in new funding

“Internet of things” tracking startup Tag-n-Trac Inc. today launched out of stealth with $10 million in new funding.

Dell Technologies led the Series A round, with Merck Global Innovation Fund and Aerosafe Global also participating. Including the new funding, Tag-n-Trac has raised $11.8 million to date, according to data from Crunchbase.

Founded in 2020, Tag-n-Trac was founded with the goal of modernizing the entire logistics lifecycle. The company offers a full-stack IoT solution that integrates multiple modes of hardware, software and data technology to build smarter solutions that solve complex problems. The founding team consists of senior executives with engineering leadership experience in WiFi, Bluetooth, sensors and positioning technologies.

Tag-n-Trac says its platform offers complete, real-time visibility into the entire global supply chain ecosystem. The company’s technology combines low-cost “printable” hardware sensors and a sensor-agnostic software-asa-serivce platform to help shippers, logistics providers and manufacturers track goods’ location, status and condition from manufacturing to shipping to delivery.

The Tag-n-Trac platform, powered by wireless Bluetooth and cellular smart label technologies, grants a complete end-to-end view to help efficiently address production obstacles such as temperature excursions, tamper detection and potential diversions. Usable in various verticals, Tag-n-Trac works with supply chain partners, including multi-modal third-party logistics, enterprise resource planning, business intelligence software providers, and packaging and labeling manufacturers.

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In Tel Aviv, Funding Announcement, CRM & Customer Experience

Jebbit Raises $70 Million Strategic Growth Investment From Vista Equity Partners

Jebbit, provider of the world’s leading zero-party data platform, has received a $70 million strategic growth investment from Vista Equity Partners, the leading global investment firm focused exclusively on enterprise software, data and technology-enabled businesses. The growth capital will help the company scale across all departments to further accelerate its mission to help brands deliver personalized digital experiences that collect data that is willingly and intentionally shared by a consumer (“zero-party data”).

Jebbit’s no-code platform enables companies to build beautiful interactive product and personality quizzes, lookbooks, trivia, lead generation forms and more that gather zero-party and first-party data. Jebbit experiences help brands drive higher engagement, lead capture and conversion while maintaining data privacy and security. In a world where cookies and ID’s will no longer be a reality, Jebbit’s solutions empower companies of all sizes to gain deep customer insights that fuel engagement and increase sales. Jebbit’s easy-to-launch, no code quizzes offer seamless integration and scalability, making them ideal for small- and medium-sized business as well as large global enterprises, across a wide range of industries, including consumer packaged goods, retail and commerce, travel and hospitality, and financial services.

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In Funding Announcement, CRM & Customer Experience

Collaboration platform CloudApp raises $9.3M to enhance workplace productivity

Visual work communication tool CloudApp has raised $9.3 million in Series A funding led by Grayhawk Capital and Nordic Eye. The round also includes previous investors Kickstart Fund, Cervin Ventures, New Ground Ventures, Bloomberg Beta and new entrants Peninsula Ventures & Forward VC. It also features CloudApp customers Peter Kazanjy, the CRO of Atrium, and Derek Andersen, the CEO of Startup Grind and Bevy.

Founded in 2015, CloudApp aims to help teams share information faster through instantly shareable videos, gifs and screenshots. The tool is an all-in-one screen recording software that captures and embeds HD video, marked-up images and more into workflows. Every file users create is securely stored in the cloud, and accessible via CloudApp’s native Mac and Windows Apps, or shareable on the web through secure password-protected links.

The goal of the company is to help teams avoid having to schedule extra calls or emails and instead communicate their message through simple shareable videos. CloudApp sees itself as a visual voicemail that can be read at any time without disrupting workflows. The tool supports dozens of integrations, including Slack, Atlassian, Trello, Zendesk and Asana. Since its launch, CloudApp has garnered more than four million total users. Notable CloudApp clients include Adobe, Uber, Zendesk and Salesforce.

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In Funding Announcement, Business Technology Platform

BigID Announces Splunk Ventures Investment to Extend Data Management Innovation

BigID, the leading data intelligence platform that enables organizations to know their enterprise data and take action for privacy, security, and governance, today announced Splunk Ventures is investing in BigID’s next phase of growth and innovative technology development.

Splunk Ventures is the corporate venture capital arm of Splunk Inc., the data platform leader for security and observability, and is dedicated to investing in organizations that expand and enhance the value of business data to drive outcomes. BigID is an innovator in data intelligence, with an ML-powered enterprise platform that reimagines data management for data discovery, privacy, security, and governance. BigID helps customers proactively manage and protect their data, reduce risk, and get more value from their data.

Data drives the world, and as digital transformation and cloud initiatives continue to accelerate, BigID’s modern approach to data management is purpose built to address the challenges of today’s data landscape. With BigID, customers can make better decisions with their data, achieve compliance, scale with evolving data privacy and protection landscape, and ultimately reimagine how they manage their data.

“Now more than ever, organizations need clearcut ways to harness their data to drive innovation while also remaining compliant and secure,” said Varoon Bhagat, vice president of Corporate Development for Splunk. “Our investment in BigID is the latest example of our commitment to transform data into business value and remove the barrier between data and action.”

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In Business Technology Platform, Berlin, Funding Announcement

Wandelbots raises another $84 million to teach robots without code

Dresden, Germany-based Wandelbots has raised a healthy sum in the years since it appeared on our Disrupt Berlin stage, way back in 2017. The following year, the no-code robotic software firm raised $6.8 million, followed by another $30 million in June 2020, as excitement around automation continued to build as COVID slowed manufacturing to a crawl.

Today the firm returns with a healthy $84 million Series C, putting its funding well north of $100 million to date. This latest round was led by Insight Partners and featured a slate of existing investors, including 83North, Microsoft, Next47, Paua, Atlantic Labs and EQT.

Wandelbots’ mission is a deceptively simple one, and something a number of firms are pushing to solve in the space. Can a robotic software layer lower the barrier of entry for deploying robotics in a factory setting? Specifically, how can a firm deploy a robotic army without the need for a lot of outside help, significant sums of money and/or robotic coding know-how? The company’s solution involves a “Trace Pen,” which an instructor uses to mimic a motion and train the robot in the process. The motion can then be fine-tuned on the software without coding.

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In Supply Chain Management, San Francisco, Funding Announcement

Verusen Raises $25M in Series B Funding

Verusen, an Atlanta, GA-based provider of tools to manage materials for global supply chains, raised $25m in Series B funding.

The round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from current investors Glasswing Ventures, Flyover Capital, Zetta Venture Partners, Forte Ventures, BMW i Ventures, and Kubera VC.

The company intends to use the funds to accelerate its global footprint, and further build out its AI-driven technology platform expanding its reach in both the Indirect MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Operations) and Direct Materials space.

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In Tel Aviv, Funding Announcement, CRM & Customer Experience

Mention Me secures £18.5 million Series B investment led by Octopus Ventures

Mention Me, the customer advocacy platform, has secured a $25m Series B round, led by Octopus Ventures. Lead investor from the prior round Eight Roads Ventures also participated.

The London-based scale-up helps businesses turn referrals into a strategic channel for acquiring high-quality customers, while gathering valuable first-party data that amplifies wider marketing activity.

Mention Me will use the funds to support its vision to make every brand think advocacy-first by expanding into the US, investing in its partner network (which includes Klaviyo, TrustPilot, Ometria and SAP) and developing its product offering. This includes further development of Mention Me’s approach to applying AI and machine-learning to referral data, so brands can more effectively identify their biggest fans and optimise the wider customer experience to drive customer advocacy.

The platform’s unique Referral Engineering® technology has already delivered more than 4.5 million referrals totalling more than USD $1.5 billion in revenue for clients globally. Sports brand Puma, international franchise Pret a Manger, InsurTech unicorn Bought By Many, Europe’s leading online florist Bloom & Wild and international fashion retailer ASOS are among its 450-strong client base.

The funding will also be used to grow the team following a series of senior hires. This includes Roy Robinson from Boxever as CPO to lead product development, Ash Rama, previously at Trustpilot, as VP People and Rebecca Hooley joining from private equity firm Livingbridge as CFO.

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In Tokyo, Funding Announcement, Business Technology Platform

Office leasing proptech Estie completes $9m Series A

Estie, a Japanese proptech operating an office leasing and rental office matching service, announced raising a approximate ¥1 billion ($8,750,000 USD) Series A, according to TechCrunch Japan. The company says it will use the funds to strengthen its HR team recruitment and plans to expand both its product and operation departments in order to build, develop and support its multi-product commercial real estate offering.

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In Berlin, Munich, Funding Announcement, Business Technology Platform

Lixo raises €3.5 million from Demeter Partners, Raise Seed For Good and 50 Partners

Lixo, a Paris, France-based SAAS developer of analytics tools for the waste management and recycling industries, announced closing a seed funding round at €3.5 million ($4M).

The money was raised locally from France from investors including Demeter Partners, Raise Seed For Good and 50 Partners, joined by angel investor Amaury Bierent (Ovive and Optyma).

Lixo, founded in 2019 by CEO Marjorie Darcet, developed technological solutions for the waste management industry, helping with waste tracing and recovering it. The tools uses computer-vision and sensors in order to sort the waste and analyze its quality composition in real time. The company says it works with french partners, including waste collectors such as Veolia and Brangeon, sorting centers such as Tiru, ​​Sotraval, Kerval, recyclers Norske Skog , Freudenberg, Wellman and cross-functional and national players such as Citeo or Valorplast.

In Blog, Global, Venture Studio, Funding Announcement

Brilliant Hire by SAP Shines Bright in Venture Capital Round

By Jacqueline Prause, SAP Global Content Team

The future shines bright at Brilliant Hire by SAP, a dynamic startup that believes in giving job candidates the agency to bring their whole selves to the companies of their dreams. Fresh off a round of venture capital funding, the employee-led startup has been given an extended runway to execute on its ambitious product vision for the talent acquisition market.

The new round of Series A funding, awarded by principal investor SAP, comes as businesses are struggling to fill jobs left open as a result of the global phenomenon known as the Great Resignation. Hiring has never been more fast-paced and competitive, with recruiters bearing the brunt of the pressure to hire workers more efficiently and achieve new standards for quality of hire. To gain an edge in attracting qualified and diverse job candidates, businesses are increasingly integrating AI-powered solutions in their talent acquisition strategy.

SAP is stepping up to address this need on behalf of customers that run SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting with an infusion of venture funding for Brilliant Hire by SAP, an employee-led startup in the SAP.iO Venture Studio, an innovation hub that helps employees start up and scale with SAP. As an organically innovated solution, Brilliant Hire by SAP brings customers the advantage that it integrates with and is developed in parallel to SAP SuccessFactors.

Delivering the Candidate-First Experience

With the successful validation of Brilliant Hire’s three-year product roadmap, Jeanine LeFlore, General Manager, Brilliant Hire by SAP, says the team is already building out the solution with new features to address some of the toughest challenges in recruiting. For many recruiters, providing an amazing candidate experience is now top of the agenda.

“The industry is at a crucial juncture right now,” LeFlore says. “Delivering a powerful candidate-first experience is paramount to the success of any company in the talent acquisition landscape today. At Brilliant Hire, we put the candidate at the core of everything we do, and this in turn is what drives the highest value for our customers.”

LeFlore sees the next stage of development as a golden opportunity to leverage the momentum Brilliant Hire generated in 2021. The team plans to build out its vision for an intelligent data platform that enables recruiters to develop authentic relationships with both active and passive candidates, while using data to create personalized journeys for candidates. She says, “We are seeing tremendous traction in the recruiting space with our smart job matching AI/ML- powered technology, and we’ve just scratched the surface. With this new round of funding, we will double down on building the most compelling candidate-first experiences that connect recruiters with both active and passive candidates — to meet them in their environment, rather than making candidates have to search.”

Attracting More Qualified and Diverse Talent

For companies seeking to hire more qualified and diverse talent, Brilliant Hire by SAP helps increase the visitor-to-applicant ratio on careers sites and empowers diverse candidates to apply for roles best fit to their qualifications. In an example of how SAP runs SAP, the global software company runs Brilliant Hire on its career page, which is a vital hub for the one million-plus members of its talent communities.

“With Brilliant Hire by SAP, we are able to leverage AI to elevate the candidate experience and help candidates find the SAP job that is best fit to their skills,” says Elke Manjet, Global Head of Talent Attraction, SAP, and Member of the Executive Board of Advisors for Brilliant Hire. “We are seeing strong results from our use of Brilliant Hire’s smart job matching feature, both in terms of KPIs and qualitative feedback from candidates. Candidates really like that they can immediately see if they are a strong match for an open position or if they qualify for other positions they had not considered — so that the best-fit jobs find the candidates and not the other way around. We want people to have an amazing experience along their SAP journey from the start, and we do that by presenting the very best of SAP technology and innovation.”

Brilliant Hire by SAP offers a pilot of smart job matching for SAP SuccessFactors customers on SAP Store with self-sign-up for customers in the U.S., Germany, and India. The team recently presented smart job matching during its Be Brilliant! webinar series, available for on-demand viewing here.

What is Series A funding for an intrapreneurial venture?

The SAP.iO Venture Studio supports employee-led ventures from small, entrepreneurial teams. Although these ventures are housed within SAP, they experience all the same growth opportunities and challenges that are typical for startups, including technology innovation, market fit and funding.

“Series A funding for an intrapreneurial venture is not unlike funding for an external startup,” says Ram Jambunathan, senior vice president and general manager, SAP.iO Venture Studio. “Our approach is to ‘build fast and learn things.’ Investments are made based on achieving aggressive milestones aligned to product development and business execution. Each venture in the Venture Studio has an executive board that holds it accountable to meeting milestones. What makes the Venture Studio such an exciting opportunity for SAP employees is that we empower employees to drive and own the progress and success of their venture. The Venture Studio provides an incubator environment that offers these ventures runway to develop transformational solutions that will ‘future-proof’ SAP and its customers.”

From Pilot to Venture — The Story of Brilliant Hire by SAP

The story of Brilliant Hire by SAP began with a passion for creative problem-solving, when a small team of developers at SAP Labs India pitched the winning solution at an SAP internal hackathon in 2016. It was the start of a remarkable entrepreneurial journey for the team and their pilot project.

“The inspiration for Brilliant Hire came from our own hiring experience,” says Hemant Shetty, co-founder, Brilliant Hire by SAP. He recalls his astonishment as he was interviewing many candidates to scale the team. “There was a 90 percent rejection rate in the first round of interviews. We realized that finding the right candidate is like finding a needle in a haystack.”

The experience gave the team insight into the pitfalls of the hiring process and opened the way for the launch of Brilliant Hire by SAP, which found seed funding after a successful pitch to the SAP Innovation Center Network (ICN) in 2017. “Hiring is time consuming and it includes human unconscious bias. At Brilliant Hire, we wanted to solve this and create experiences for recruiters as well as candidates,” Shetty says.

In 2018, the team joined the SAP.io Venture Studio to begin working full time on Brilliant Hire by SAP as an independent venture. Brilliant Hire has grown from a three-person pilot to a dynamic team of twenty passionate experts spread across India and the U.S., who bring a diverse range of experience to solving challenges in recruiting. With its third round of funding, Brilliant Hire by SAP shines a bright light on the possibilities for AI to elevate the candidate experience in talent acquisition.

“We believe in creating a world where a candidate’s dream job finds them,” says Swetha PB, co-founder, Brilliant Hire by SAP. “We’ve focused on building an intelligent and inclusive platform that provides companies the ability to build authentic relationships with candidates they want to hire and candidates to own their successes.”

The future of talent looks bright indeed at Brilliant Hire by SAP!

About Brilliant Hire by SAP

Brilliant Hire by SAP is a dynamic startup in the HR Tech space with teams in San Francisco and Bangalore. It offers an AI-powered application that integrates with SAP SuccessFactors to deliver a more personalized and inclusive candidate experience on companies’ careers sites, and streamline processes for recruiters. Brilliant Hire by SAP is a venture within the SAP.iO Venture Studio.

Find out more on www.brillianthire.io

About SAP.iO Venture Studio

SAP.iO Venture Studio drives a new era of organic growth at SAP. It invests in new ventures founded by small, entrepreneurial teams inside of SAP who are focused on building the future of enterprise business processes. SAP.iO Venture Studio provides design, development, and sales support to help these ventures launch.

Find out more on www.sap.io/studio

In San Francisco, Funding Announcement, HR & People Engagement

‘Paradox’ startup company becomes unicorn with ‘Olivia’ investment

Paradox, the startup that developed Olivia – a digital recruiter that communicates with job applicants, completed a $200 million round of funding at a value of $1.5 billion and has become a unicorn, due to the company’s investment in the digital recruiter.
Olivia, Paradox’s core product, is a virtual personal assistant that joins human recruitment teams and helps them automate all recruitment processes. For example, the software checks and screens the suitability of a resume for relevant jobs, carries out automatic interview scheduling, reminds the candidate to fill out forms and provides information that would be accessible to recruitment teams and other candidates. It can also send job offers automatically to possible candidates.
Over the past year, Olivia has conducted 30 million job interviews for hundreds of companies in some 50 countries and has independently scheduled 3.1 million interviews. Paradox began operating in Israel in early 2021 after acquiring the startup Spetz, whose workers integrated with the company.
In Funding Announcement

On a Mission to Build the Next Generation of HR and Recruiting Software through Conversational AI, Paradox Raises $200M Series C

Paradox, the conversational recruiting platform built to give every recruiter, hiring manager, and talent professional an assistant to get work done, announced a $200M Series C investment. The round was led by Stripes, Sapphire, and Thoma Bravo, and included participation from Workday Ventures, Willoughby Capital, Twilio Ventures, Blue Cloud Ventures, Geodesic, Principia Growth, DLA Piper Venture Fund and current investor Brighton Park Capital.

Paradox’s vision is embodied by Olivia — the conversational AI assistant helping companies like Unilever, Nestle, McDonald’s, CVS Health, and General Motors automate tasks like candidate screening, interview scheduling, onboarding, and more through smart, simple, mobile-first experiences. In just five years, Olivia has helped 500+ global clients save millions of hours of manual work — freeing their teams up to spend time with people, not software.

“When we created Paradox, we saw a future where software became invisible — driven by conversations that untether people from their desktop through an assistant who gets work done for them. That vision is now taking hold in some of the biggest companies in the world and we couldn’t be prouder of that accomplishment,” said Paradox founder and CEO, Aaron Matos.

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In Funding Announcement

Gtmhub’s $120 Million Series C Financing

Gtmhub, an objectives and key results (OKR) platform, announced its $120 million Series C financing led by Index Ventures. The company’s OKR management software is designed to help fast-growing companies combine goal management and data integration to support human decision-making. The new capital will be put toward hiring and product expansion.

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In Funding Announcement

Automation Anywhere expands into process discovery with FortressIQ acquisition

Automation Anywhere, which is best known for its robotic process automation (RPA) software, plans to expand the platform. The company announced that it intends to acquire process discovery startup FortressIQ. The companies did not reveal the purchase price. FortressIQ gives Automation Anywhere this missing process discovery component, which enables AI-fueled software to map internal processes in an automated way, replacing high-priced consultants.

“Together, Automation Anywhere and FortressIQ will reshape the future of automation, changing the way our customers automate, adapt, and accelerate as they pursue digital transformation initiatives,” Automation Anywhere CEO and co-founder Mihir Shukla said in a statement.

While there is more than a hint of executive bombast in that statement, the acquisition does expand the company’s capabilities. Consider that FortressIQ raised $46 million since its founding in 2017, according to PitchBook data. We covered the $12 million Series A in 2018 and $30 million Series B last year.

But compare that with Celonis, the market leader, which has attracted $1.4 billion in investment, according to Crunchbase data, including a massive $1 billion Series B on an $11 billion valuation in June. That followed a significant agreement with IBM in April to help sell its services inside large organizations.

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