During this episode, you will hear from Fang Cheng, CEO at Linc, the only end-to-end CX Automation solution purpose-built for brands and retailers. Linc was not only just a part of the SAP Foundries program in 2019 but has gone on to partner with SAP. Learn the genesis of the idea and what they see as the biggest drivers of growth for the company.
October 19, 2021 — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) welcomes a new cohort for its startup program focused on sustainability in retail and consumer industries at SAP.iO Foundry New York. Seven startups were selected to join the program by a jury of SAP experts, partners and customers among hundreds of startups.
The startups are using next generation technologies to drive sustainability across the value chain in areas such as reusable packaging, responsible and ethical supply chain as well as circular economy. Over the next 16 weeks, the startups will have access to curated mentors, exposure to SAP® technology and application programming interfaces (APIs), and opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers around the world.
The following startups are participating in the SAP.iO Foundry New York sustainability in retail and consumer industries program:
About SAP.iO
SAP.iO delivers new partnerships and products for SAP by accelerating and scaling startup innovation as well as incubating employee ventures. SAP.iO brings together innovators from every region, industry, and line of business to transform how businesses run. Since 2017, SAP.iO has helped 330+ external startups and internal ventures accelerate their growth while enabling thousands of SAP customers to access innovation. For more information, visit https://sap.io/.
LISNR today announced that its LISNR Customer Connect solution is now available on SAP® Store, the online marketplace for SAP and their partner offerings. LISNR’s Customer Connect merchant wallet solution utilizes near field ultrasonic with SAP Commerce to deliver a way for attendants to easily connect on-premise customers to their digital profiles.
SAP Store, found at store.sap.com, delivers a simplified and connected digital customer experience for finding, trying, buying and renewing more than 1,800 solutions from SAP and its partners. There, customers can find the SAP solutions and SAP-validated solutions they need to grow their business. And for each purchase made through SAP Store, SAP will plant a tree.
More and more people are doing their shopping from home these days, and whether they’re ordering groceries, home office equipment, or Covid-19 tests, they increasingly expect their deliveries to be fast and on time.
Companies have struggled to keep up with the rise in orders and expectations. One of their biggest challenges is optimizing the so-called last mile of delivery — when a driver takes packages from a regional hub to their final destination.
Now Wise Systems, a startup that began as a class project at MIT, is offering a dispatch and routing platform designed to make the last-mile delivery experience better for everyone, from drivers to dispatchers to customers.
Wise Systems’ routing solution is built on algorithms and machine learning models that continually improve as they gather more data. The company’s web app, meanwhile, gives a high level of visibility into fleet operations in real time. The mobile app also leverages an often-underappreciated asset in the industry: the drivers on the ground. It enables them to make notes on unique stops, communicate with dispatchers, and confirm deliveries.
“Drivers, regardless of the technology they use, are very, very knowledgeable about every one of their stops and every one of those parts of town, so we believe in harnessing their knowledge to make their experience better,” says Vice President of Customer Experience Layla Shaikley SM ’13, who co-founded Wise Systems with CEO Chazz Sims ’13, SM ’14; CTO Ali Kamil ’16; and COO Jemel Derbali.
The founders began working on Wise Systems in 2014 but say they’ve felt the sense of urgency among customers increase during the pandemic.
“Ultimately what we’re interested in is the perfect delivery experience,” Shaikley says. “What that really means is something that’s predictable, cost-effective, and automated for the people using the product.”
A class project worth pursuing
The founders met in the 2014 Development Ventures class at MIT’s Media Lab, a course that challenges students to come up with ideas that have the potential to impact a billion lives. With the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL), they began exploring ways to use machine learning and data to improve last-mile delivery.
That summer the founders entered the delta v accelerator hosted by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, where they were introduced to companies who would help them hold their first pilots. Delta v was one of several ways MIT helped the founders early on.
“What resource didn’t we use at MIT?” Shaikley jokes. “We applied for every award. I won the Caroll Wilson award; Ali got a transportation scholarship as a graduate student; we did every pitch competition; we were involved in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. We definitely used every resource possible. We walked into professor Edward Blanco’s office one day and said, ‘We’re starting a company, can you advise us?’ He said, ‘Absolutely.’ To this day, the network is so supportive. We were also in [the MIT Startup Exchange’s] STEX25 startup accelerator. Doors are always opening for us.”
Research was carried out across 200 retailers (by Censuswide) and 2,000 UK consumers.
“It’s clear from our report that the retail industry is still in its infancy of digital transformation, but I’m buoyed by the progress that has been made in such a short period of time since stores reopened to the public,” says Olga Kotsur, CEO and Co-Founder, Mercaux.
“The role of the store has changed – it is no longer perceived as a simple sales channel, but instead a multi-purpose omnichannel centre.”
“What the findings confirm for me is that retailers have been busy setting the foundations of digital success – particularly during the past 18 months – by upgrading their existing and implementing new age backend systems, such as OMS.”
“They now find themselves at the next stage, on the very cusp of a digital transformation wave, finally allowing us to achieve our connected omnichannel retail aspirations. Exciting times ahead!”
Anthill AI Inc. announced that its Anthill Deskless Workforce Software solution is now available on SAP Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings. Anthill’s solution integrates with SAP SuccessFactors solutions and delivers talent management communications for the deskless workforce to customers.
“Often, the most overlooked workers are deskless workers, found in manufacturing, retail, and supply chain related jobs, especially when it comes to talent management solutions,” said Muriel Clauson and Young-Jae Kim, Anthill’s co-founders. “By integrating our offering with SAP SuccessFactors solutions and offering it on SAP Store, Anthill looks forward to providing customers with the ability to better meet the needs of their deskless employees, by connecting with them and helping to develop their skills.”
Anthill Deskless Workforce Software is a machine-learning enabled, SMS-based solution built for the unique challenges and needs of the deskless workforce, those who never work at a desk or computer. Anthill helps deskless workers stay in the loop; feel valued and heard; and get the right opportunities for reskilling, training and advancement. With the Anthill solution, customers can reach their deskless workers with engagement, reskilling, and operational communications — employees can communicate and learn more about themselves via text, while employers gain actionable, data-driven insights about their employees. In 2021, Anthill participated in the SAP.iO Foundry New York program, during which it focused on building out its solution.
Threats to employee wellbeing continue to intensify well over a year into the pandemic, as evidenced by a 21% rise in burnout and a 17% increase in somatic stress symptoms, a new meQuilibrium study found. The study examined changes in overall wellbeing among 5,474 meQuilibrium members from a broad range of industries representing managers and individual contributors.
“Employee wellbeing continues to be under threat 18 months into the pandemic,” says Brad Smith, Ph.D., Chief Science Officer, meQuilibrium. “Our data shows that workers continue to feel the cumulative mental health impacts of the crisis in the form of increased stress symptoms, burnout, and diminished motivation. We need to take action now to protect employee wellbeing before the clock runs out.”
The study also revealed a particularly large burnout risk increase among younger workers of 64%, which was nearly three times the increase for employees over 30 (22%). The increase in burnout symptoms is especially high among managers (+54%), hospitality (+48%), health care (+32%) and finance (30%) industry workers.
When it comes to gender differences, meQuilibrium found that although men and women are experiencing about the same rate of increase in burnout (+24% in women and +25% in men), men’s somatic stress levels are rising at a faster rate than women’s (+9% for men vs +3% for women).
No matter what job title, gender or industry, a key factor in wellbeing risk is employer support. Employees who felt strongly supported by their employers reported the highest levels of wellbeing and were less likely to report turnover intent.
Amberdata, the digital asset data company, announced it has raised $15 Million Series A led by Citi. Franklin Templeton, Galaxy Digital, Rovida Kruptos Assets, and executives at GoldenTree Asset Management also participated in the capital raise. They are joined by HWVP who previously led Amberdata’s Series Seed.
Amberdata will use the funds to double R&D headcount and expand go-to-market both in the United States and internationally.
Amberdata delivers comprehensive data and insights into blockchain networks, crypto markets, and decentralized finance. Founded in 2017, Amberdata analyzes over 8 million blockchain network transactions and more than $500 Billion in trading activities daily. The platform powers financial institutions with data for research, trading, risk, analytics, reporting, and compliance. It serves as a critical piece of infrastructure for investors entering the asset class and participating in digital asset markets. Institutional customers can easily integrate real-time and historical data and metrics via FIX, REST, WebSockets, and RPC and gain access to reference rates, Indexes, and analytics.
“Partnering with the exceptional group of strategic investors gives us unprecedented insights into institutions’ roadmap and challenges,” said Shawn Douglass, CEO at Amberdata. “Blockchain technology enables entirely new financial products to be created and offered at a much lower cost with global market reach. We see growing institutional interest and demand in crypto assets. Our customer list and investors are a stamp of approval for the value we are creating for institutions.”
Social entrepreneur Jasmine Crowe has one mission: feed more, waste less. Her company Goodr is tackling food waste and getting food to those who need it most.
Jasmine Crowe is a social entrepreneur and the founder of Goodr, a startup based in Atlanta, Georgia that is leveraging technology to combat hunger and food waste.
Goodr collects surplus food from organizations like Turner Broadcasting Systems, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, and others, and redirects that food to nonprofits who distribute the food to people experiencing food insecurity. The company also works directly with cities and governments to purchase quality food for certain communities.
Crowe has collected and donated more than two million food items worldwide and fed more than 80,000 people through the Sunday Soul Homeless feeding initiative as well. The initiative started out as formal pop-up dinners for the homeless community of Atlanta.
Click here to listen to Part 3 of TED Radio Hour episode The Food Connection
Muriel Clauson is the CEO and co-founder of Anthill. She is an active speaker, advisor, and thought leader on the future of work and artificial intelligence, and has authored scientific publications, was a scientific advisor for several governments and organizations around the world, and is an advisory board member for Humans for AI. Muriel is completing her doctorate in industrial-organizational psychology at the University of Georgia and conducted research at Emory University’s Goizueta School of Business and the Carl Vinson Institute of Government. In this interview, she explains how Anthill achieved its goals, how the company is connected to SAP, and what’s next for the startup.
Muriel Clauson: Anthill is the first talent management software for the deskless workforce, the 80 percent of the global workforce that does not work at a desk or computer. Anthill has broken the barriers to connecting with and understanding deskless employees in manufacturing, supply chain, and retail sectors, which exist in almost every large enterprise.
Clauson: Anthill is built upon a predictive relational model linking hundreds of assessments. Our backend technology allows us to ask employees a few questions on our mobile experience and learn a lot about them, because each answer helps us predict responses for the rest of the questions in our model. This is made possible by Anthill’s machine learning technology based on years of historical data, which is able to predict a wide range of people insights, like skills and turnover drivers, from limited responses and deliver a comprehensive map of the talent in an organization in an ongoing, rewarding way for employees. Anthill’s predictive model is complex but results in a seamless and fun user experience for workers. Anthill is available via app or SMS texting for employee users. Anthill’s dashboard capabilities focus on engagement and retention, internal mobility, and reskilling and development tools.
Cogniac Corporation (“Cogniac”), a San Jose, California-based provider of enterprise-class Artificial Intelligence (AI) image and video analysis, today announced its partnership with Trimac Transportation (“Trimac”), one of the largest transportation service companies in North America. The partnership implements Cogniac’s proprietary visual data processing platform throughout Trimac’s document identification and filing processes.
Cogniac designed, and is deploying, the document imaging solution to boost operational efficiencies within Trimac’s billing process. With 3,400 team members and more than 140 branches located throughout North America, Trimac is seeking to leverage Cogniac’s machine vision to drive efficacy in the classification and organization of the millions of documents uploaded, digitally filed, and invoiced throughout the year.
“We believe our AI vision is an excellent fit for Trimac’s unique needs in operations,” said Vahan Tchakerian, Chief Partnership Officer at Cogniac. “By utilizing our platform’s abundant collection of visual data, Trimac will be able to glean important information more quickly and efficiently from uploaded documentation. Our technology is designed to drive productivity at enterprise scale by advancing the management of operational logistics.”
Trimac’s integration of the Cogniac system will provide support and process infrastructure to allow Trimac to focus on their commitment to providing high-quality bulk shipping solutions with a secure supply chain, by accelerating the document digitization process, optimizing workflows, and allowing the company to strategically redeploy employees throughout a range of operations.
Trusting your data, telling stories about your success and knowing that every act, no matter how small, can help win the fight against waste was some of the advice shared by Queen of Raw and Topolytics, two gamechangers in waste management at the recent SAP Sustainability Summit panel discussion about orchestrating ecosystem innovation for impact.
“Zero waste can only be achieved with the help of data,” said Michael Groves, Founder and CEO of Topolytics, a data analytics business for waste managers. “Data shows public and private players exactly what is happening to their waste and will help them build better intervention options and create closed loops for recovery.”
Groves was one of the people on the boat hosting the Ocean Plastics Leadership Summit (OPLS) in 2019, a research expedition to better understand the scope of plastic pollution and to develop cross-industry solutions and partnerships to solve this global challenge over the next decade.
Seeing is believing
Whenever the ship approached clumps of sargassum seaweed, the participants would stop their meetings and jump into zodiac boats with their snorkeling gear. But they didn’t see any fish. And at first, they didn’t see much plastic either. That’s because it’s often not visible. Plastic in the ocean breaks down into small particles that are caught in seaweed and ingested by marine creatures.
“What you don’t see is the real problem,” says Groves, winner of the Circular Economy 2030 challenge sponsored by SAP and Google that year. A geographer who was appalled by the amount of plastic he encountered in South East Asia long before people began talking about the crisis, Groves believes waste is still not getting the attention it desperately needs.
While we may not actually see the damage, the data is irrefutable. An alarming 60 percent of waste produced in cities around the world gets dumped or leaked into the environment, and an equally alarming 61 percent of people globally don’t have access to proper waste management infrastructures. It’s a thorny problem because the waste value chain is very complex and opaque, with many private and public sector players and a significant informal sector around the world. To make matters worse, there is a huge mix of materials, each requiring different methods of recovery and recycling.
Realizing that money follows data, Groves developed a solution that uses analytics and machine learning to follow trash as it travels. Clear data and insights are fundamental to spurring investments in new infrastructure and innovation in the sector. With useful data available about what waste is where and in what quantity and quality, companies can then procure this waste much more effectively and bring the materials back into their production processes through platforms like SAP Ariba software.
Debunking myths
“Many companies think they know what’s going on with their waste, but they are usually surprised by the truth,” he says. “There is huge potential to unlock economic and social value that is currently just draining away!”
One person helping fashion retailers stop the drain is Stephanie Benedetto, co-Founder of Queen of Raw, a marketplace to buy and sell unused textiles, from organic cotton to some of the highest quality luxury deadstock fabrics that would otherwise be burned or buried.
Benedetto was inspired by her childhood experiences growing up in an immigrant family in the Garment District of New York. Her grandfather would collect unused clothes from the neighborhood and repurpose them into beautiful, fashionable items for local sale. It was a profitable, sustainable business that inspired her when she later became a corporate attorney on Wall Street, specializing in technology and sustainability. When the crash came in 2008, she decided to start her own company.
When Benedetto first started talking to brands and retailers about sustainability years ago, it was seen as nice to have. People responsible for sustainability were new in the position, and they did not have big budgets. Her first big challenge was debunking the myth that sustainability has to cost a lot of money.
She realized that retailers became paralyzed when faced with objectives such as becoming 100 percent sustainable by 2030. “You wouldn’t know where to start on day one if you heard that. It’s too much, too fast,” she says. “We go to the retailers and help them pinpoint the valuable waste in their supply chain. We look at their unused inventory and their deadstock. We help them sell it on the marketplace, and we provide tools to minimize waste going forward.”
Once the retailers are making money on their unused inventory, she explains, they can start putting their savings into doing other good work such as paying their workers better wages and using innovative technology and sustainable materials without increasing overall capex expenditure.
Gappify, Inc. (“Gappify”), a provider of digital workers for the accounting enterprise, today announced that it has completed a financing round led by Stage 2 Capital. As part of the transaction, Stage 2 Capital Managing Partner, Jay Po, will join Gappify’s Board of Directors.
Gappify, whose team consists of former accountants and KPMG auditors, will use the funding to invest in new product development and accelerate sales and marketing efforts.
“Gappify is excited to build innovative, industry-leading products that help corporate accountants close their books faster and in a compliant and efficient manner,” said Jotham Ty, CEO and founder of Gappify. “This investment will enable our team to develop autonomous solutions for more processes within the Controllership, and provide our customers an enhanced experience with robust capabilities and deep system integrations.”
“We were impressed with Gappify’s vision for modernizing the accounting profession,” added Stage 2 Capital’s Jay Po. “With more CFOs prioritizing efficiencies and compliance in their accounting organization, we see an enormous opportunity to partner with Gappify to accelerate digital transformation efforts and create immediate value for the Controllership function.”
Other participants in the financing round include SaaS Ventures, Manila Angel Investor Network, Pasudeco Investment Management Corporation, Overtime.vc, and former Oracle CFO Jeff Epstein.
Cogniac Corporation (“Cogniac”) today announced that its Visual Operations Intelligence platform is now available on SAP® Store. Cogniac’s AI, machine vision platform complements the industry cloud portfolio from SAP for automotive and industrial machinery and components industries and integrates with SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud, delivering an AI-based approach to customers looking to extract value from their visual data.
“Today marks an important moment in Cogniac’s growth,” said Vahan Tchakerian, chief partnership officer at Cogniac. “Through our valuable experience in the SAP.iO Foundries program and our partnership with SAP, businesses that use SAP solutions will now have access to Cogniac technology. By offering our platform on SAP Store, we are able to scale more efficiently and deliver exceptional performance in the manufacturing and industrial sectors.”
Cogniac’s Visual Operations Intelligence platform uses no-code AI, enabling companies to maximize the value of their visual data. By integrating with SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud, capabilities of the Cogniac platform are now accessible within the solution’s architecture, providing advanced AI machine vision technology across a variety of industries.
For customers in the automotive, rail, manufacturing, government, logistics, packaging and kitting, and safety and security industries, Cogniac’s AI machine vision platform drives significant process improvements. Through better defect detection, safer operations and increased efficiencies, Cogniac supports many customers looking to achieve Industry 4.0 standards, reduce costs, and optimize their processes.
Building on the Intelligent Enterprise strategy, SAP is expanding its vertical solutions with an ecosystem of industry cloud applications. These solutions complement the existing SAP portfolio to extend the value of joint customer investments.
“The Visual Operations Intelligence platform developed by Cogniac complements our portfolio and enables an AI-based approach to customers looking to extract value from their visual data,” commented Stefan Krauss, SVP General Manager Discrete Industries and Energy and Natural Resources at SAP. “This is a prime example of how co-innovation between our organizations can deliver value for customers. We look forward to continued collaboration with Cogniac to create innovative cloud solutions and applications for customers who want to drive cost-effective and sustainable growth in their industry.”
SAP recently brought together SAP Store and SAP App Center into one single marketplace at store.sap.com. It delivers a simplified and connected digital customer experience for finding, trying, buying, and renewing more than 1,800 solutions from SAP and its partners. There, customers can find the SAP solutions and SAP-validated partner apps they need to grow their business. And for each purchase made via SAP Store, SAP will plant a tree.
Innovation happens at the edge. We need it to move business forward, to stay agile, and to stay relevant. That’s why we set out to find companies with leaders who do exactly that.
Click here to watch the documentary-style short-film.
