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No-code industrial robotics programming startup Wandelbots raises $30 million

Dresden, Germany-based Wandelbots  — a startup dedicated to making it easier for non-programmers to “teach” industrial robots how to do specific tasks — has raised a $30 million Series B funding round led by 83North, with participation from Next47 and Microsoft’s M12 venture funding arm.

Wandelbots will use the funding to help it speed the market debut of its TracePen, a hand-held, code-free device that allows human operators to quickly and easily demonstrate desired behavior for industrial robots to mimic. Programming robots to perform specific tasks typically requires massive amounts of code, as well as programmers with very specific, in-demand skill sets to accomplish. Wandelbots wants to make it as easy as simply showing a robot what it is you want it to do — and then showing it a different set of behaviors should you need to reprogram it to accomplish a new task or fill in for a different part of the assembly line.

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Jobful, start-up founded by Mihai Cepoi, receives an investment of 250,000 euros

Launched in May 2018, the Jobful platform is dedicated to both young professionals who want to develop their careers and companies who want to streamline the recruitment process through a first test of candidates, as well as their interest.

In December 2018 he was third in Startarium, and in April 2019 he was accepted in the accelerator SAP.io in Berlin. In May this year, Jobful was one of three Romanian startups selected to present their product at the South East Europe Tech Tour 2019.

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SAP.iO Fund Invests in Andjaro, an Internal HR Staffing Marketplace Connected to SAP SuccessFactors Solutions

SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that its investment arm, SAP.iO Fund, has invested in second round funding of Andjaro, a Paris-based company that provides real-time workforce optimization and helps manage and staff remote workers. The €13.4 million Series B round was led by Idinvest Partners and includes existing investor Balderton Capital.

Andjaro helps companies redeploy employees internally and works with SAP SuccessFactors solutions. SAP works with Andjaro to provide SAP customers with a real-time overview on staffing gaps, employee skills, availability and proximity to propose voluntary redeployment for a short period of time. SAP.iO Fund previously invested in the Balderton-led 2018 Series A round.

“SAP customers are continually exploring how to best allocate their most valuable resource — their talent — especially in the current environment,” said Ram Jambunathan, SAP senior vice president and managing director of SAP.iO. “Andjaro’s platform can provide enterprises with new opportunities to redeploy existing human resources efficiently.”

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Queen of Raw Among the First to Get Funding From MIT Solve

Queen of Raw, a blockchain and AI-powered platform that pairs buyers and sellers of unused fabrics, is one of three teams that has landed funding via MIT Solve, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology initiative.

Led by cofounder and chief executive officer Stephanie Benedetto, Queen of Raw is the “2019 Circular Economy Solver.” Access Afya, a Kenya-based health-care center that caters to the urban poor, and Kinedu, an app that specializes in video-based, research-supported activities for children under age four, are also receiving funding.

With $120 billion worth of unused fabric stowed away in factories and being burned or buried, Queen of Raw works to make those sustainable materials available to people at any time and from any place. Deadstock and sustainable fabrics can be bought and sold online through its marketplace. Factories, brands and retailers post their unused fabric for resale on the platform so that purchasers can have easy access to new materials at lower price points.

rders can vary from one yard to one million yards. The company claims to have saved more than one billion gallons of water through its efforts. With the global textile market expected to hit $1.23 trillion by 2025, less than 1 percent of material used to make clothing is recycled. Queen of Raw also closed $1.5 million in seed funding Tuesday, an MIT Solve spokesman said.

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Marketing data platform Adverity raises $30M Series C led by Sapphire Ventures

In the time many of us live in now, we all know our online media consumption is — to state the obvious — going through the roof. Subsequently, the amount of data pertaining to online marketing is, equally, reaching stratospheric heights and in recent years tech companies like Datorama and Funnel.io, SuperMetrics and Adverity have appeared to give marketeers a data intelligence platform to deal with the welter of spreadsheets and reports necessary to track everything.

Last year, Vienna HQ’d Adverity closed an €11 million Series B funding round for its AI-driven platform to produce actionable insights in real-time for marketers.

Today it’s announcing a Series C financing round of $30 million, bringing the total amount it has raised to $50 million. The latest funding round is led by Valley-based Sapphire Ventures . Also participating is Mangrove Capital Partners, Felix Capital, SAP.iO and aws Gründerfonds who have all re-invested in this latest round. 

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Adverity raises $30 million to collect, prep, and analyze marketing data

Adverity, a data analytics startup targeting applications in media, marketing, and ecommerce, today announced that it raised $30 million in equity financing, bringing its total raised to $50 million.

By accelerating R&D and growth within Adverity’s offices domestic and abroad, the fresh capital could help the company’s customers — among them Ikea, Red Bull, Unilever, MediaCom, and IPG Mediabrands — address the challenges AI and machine learning present with respect to productization. According to Algorithmia, 50% of companies spend between 8 and 90 days deploying a single AI model, with 18% taking longer than 90 days

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Shippeo Raises €20 Million to Provide Real-time Visibility Into the Global Supply Chain

Shippeo announced the closing of a €20 million Series B round co-lead by NGP Capital and ETF Partners with participation from Bpifrance Digital Ventures and Partech.

Shippeo provides predictive and real-time visibility into goods delivery. The AI-based platform aggregates data from hundreds of sources in real-time to calculate estimated time of arrival with 98% accuracy. Since its creation in 2014, Shippeo has successfully scaled its operations and is now servicing more than 50 large customers across 40 countries. The team has grown tenfold and Shippeo now employs 80 people in seven different offices across Europe.

Over the last year, Shippeo has increased its turnover by 300%, positioning itself as one of the fastest-growing start-ups in Europe.

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Wethos raises $3M to help meaningful brands adapt to fast-paced demands of digital

Wethos Founders

Wethos, the leading platform for rapid-response creative and marketing teams, announced today that it has successfully raised an oversubscribed round of $3 million in ninety days, led by NYC-based Laconia Capital and with the participation of Flybridge Capital, Loup Ventures, Higher Ground Labs, and other strategic investors. This latest round follows a year of substantial growth, in which the three-year-old company deployed over one hundred agile, on-demand teams and increased its revenue by five hundred percent.

The company’s tech-enabled “pop-up departments” leverage agile methodology to build brands, websites, digital content, awareness, and growth campaigns in real time based on each client’s unique needs. Recent leadership hires in sales, marketing, and customer experience will enable Wethos to keep up with the demand of its most popular teams, and expand into new verticals.

“As brands struggle to cut through the noise in a rapidly-evolving digital landscape, we need business and creative minds to come together at 100x the speed they do today,” said Wethos co-founder and CEO Rachel Renock. “Legacy operating systems put unnecessary obstacles in the way of brilliant and diverse people who are hungry to help accelerate progress.”

Unlike big agencies with siloed departments, expensive overhead, and opaque pricing, proprietary technology enables Wethos to rapidly scope complex work and curate teams based on each customer’s unique needs. With a growing database of over 4,000 U.S.-based specialists, Wethos pairs together vetted talent from the best brands in technology, politics,
fashion, education, and more.

“The best founders are compelling storytellers, and the most successful companies are the ones who can align a community of customers, partners and advocates around that brand story,” said Jesse Middleton, General Partner at Flybridge Capital and founding team member at WeWork. “The Wethos team has built a platform that offers this “super-power” to companies of all sizes, bringing unlimited, top-tier talent and execution to help solve pressing challenges around customer acquisition and movement building.”

Wethos is also leading the fight for a more ethical gig economy, with standards like guaranteed on-time payments, transparent pricing, and protection from retaliation.

“No matter your location, gender, race, or skill-set, people should be paid fairly for the value they deliver,” said Renock. “With a workforce that’s increasingly remote, flexible, diverse, and craving purpose, we believe treating talent the best will attract the best talent — period. By putting our community of specialists first, and allowing them to connect in real-time, we’re working toward a more distributed and collaborative future.”

Learn more about Wethos here

AI-based chatbot Niki.ai Raises Funding

Founded in May 2015 by IIT Kharagpur graduates Sachin Jaiswal, Keshav Prawasi, Shishir Modi, and Nitin Babel, Niki.ai is a vernacular conversational platform where users can simply talk to ‘Niki’ in order to pay their monthly bills, book bus or movie tickets, browse plans, prepaid recharges, find local deals and much more, while its personalisation helps one choose the option best suited for them.

Backed by Ratan Tata, Unilazer Ventures, and SAP.iO among other investors, with over 4.5 million users (80 percent of whom are living in Tier II, Tier III India), Niki.ai hit a GMV run rate of about $30 million and a revenue run rate of over $1 million in FY18. After adding Hindi language capabilities, it also witnessed 300x growth in Hindi GMV since October 2018, annualised at $40 million.

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Revuze Attracts Investment From the SAP.iO Fund

Revuze, the SaaS provider of the first self-service consumer product feedback analytics solution, announced today that the SAP.iO Fund made an investment in the company, as part of a funding round that included existing and new investors.  The SAP.iO Fund joins other well-known investors in Revuze, including Nielsen, NPD, TIC Group and Prytek.

The funding comes on the heels of fast international adoption of the Revuze solution across multiple industries and geographies, from China to US and Europe.

Revuze’s artificial intelligence solution is the first in the market to transform how brands consume customer experience (CX) insights. While other solutions are typically requiring experts and manual labor to deliver insights, while being limited to specific feedback channels like Social Media or Surveys, Revuze allows any role in the organization to gain deep insights from any data sources and without any manual labor or experts involved. With Revuze organizations distribute decision making, making better decisions, faster across the board.

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WeGift Closes £4 Million Investment as It Sets to Revolutionise Global Digital Rewards Industry

SAP.iO Fund and Unilever Ventures join Series A investment round as WeGift reports 500 per cent annual revenue growth. This investment round will help WeGift deliver on its vision of creating the world’s first real-time infrastructure for digital rewards and incentives. The funds will be used to further scale WeGift’s operations, as well as to support the company’s expansion to the US, and for further investment in its technology platform.

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