ClearMetal, a leader in Continuos Delivery Experience (CDX) for Supply Chain and Logistics solutions, announced today it has received an additional $15 million in funding in a round led by Palo Alto-based Eclipse Ventures, making the total capital invested in the company to date more than $31 million. The funding enables the further development of ClearMetal’s CDX Platform, which continually learns, adjusts and gets smarter to drive constant improvement in delivery and experience for customers. Additional investors include Prelude Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, NEA, SAP.io, Prologis, PSA Unboxed, DCLI, and the founders of GT Nexus, Navis, and Uber Freight.
This article covers some of the most interesting startups that have recently finished accelerator programs in Israel. The article highlights SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv, and recognizes our participating startups EasySend, YOUTILIGENT, and ARpalus
In 2019, at the opening of SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv, Orna Kleinmann, Managing Director of SAP R&D Center in Israel , announced that “The SAP.iO Foundry, an in-residence acceleration program, will broaden the way SAP, a market leader in the enterprise application software arena, will cooperate with Israeli startups”.
For the companies that get accepted into the SAP.iO Foundry Tel-Aviv, it constitutes as a unique opportunity to enjoy access to resources such as technical experts and mentors, and support in connecting to SAP’s customers, all of which enable these companies to leverage their operations based on the newly gained insights. On our side, there is a unique capability generated to make the innovation that answers the biggest challenges of our customers accessible.
The six startups chosen for SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv’s first cohort:
EasySend helps companies in the financial industry improve customer experience and increase operational efficiency. EasySend’s simple cloud interface enables companies to create efficient digital processes for their customers.
ARpalus helps retailers and manufacturers with shelf and stock management in brick and mortar stores by collecting and processing data in real time at the sale points using artificial intelligence, image processing, and augmented reality technologies.
GrowthSpace aims to replace traditional learning and development systems by creating 1Xmany, an online platform for employee and vendor instruction. Users have one-on-one training with coaches via video sessions suited to their career needs.
Outgage is a marketing SaaS company that provides a framework for campaign management using postal mail to bridge the gap between online and offline, to create a personalized brand experience and an efficient dialogue between a company and its customers.
Silverback provides e-commerce companies with an AI-driven platform for decision making in the online sales domain and displays within the best performing products and most competitive prices, and also performs sale-promotion automation.
YOUTILIGENT operates in the IoT industry using machine learning technologies. It enables vendors and service providers to make real time data-based decisions in order to improve the way they communicate with consumers, and aims to solve various challenges in the delivery, consumption, and maintenance industries using its Connected Customer Solution.
As with so much of what we do today in finance, technology can help you. Well-intended education initiatives simply aren’t enough. At SAP, we’re increasingly using machine learning and artificial intelligence embedded in human experience management software to alert us if job descriptions or management behaviors exhibit inherent bias. Cultivate is an AI software created in our SAP.iO startup accelerator that alerts managers when they’re giving disproportionate time and attention to some employees over others.
Chaque jour, retrouvez dans notre article EnBref les informations startup à côté desquelles il ne faut pas passer. Aujourd’hui : la Badass Economy, Entrepreneur Venture et SAP.io Foundry Paris.
BigID, a leader in data-centric personal data discovery and privacy, announced a global reseller agreement with SAP. Through this agreement, SAP can sell two BigID powered products under the names SAP Privacy Management application by BigID and SAP Data Mapping and Protection application by BigID. The agreement will enable businesses that use SAP solutions to more readily meet the challenges of data-centric data discovery and privacy by harnessing BigID’s advanced Machine Learning-based discovery and intelligence technology.
BigID is one of the industry’s first data privacy and intelligence platforms that allows customers to rely on actual data discovered across the enterprise and cloud rather than surveys and interviews to ensure privacy compliance.
The SAP.iO Foundry Berlin kicked off a dedicated financial technology (fintech) program with participants consisting of business-to-business startups focused on finance and governance, risk and compliance (GRC), SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) said today.
With the growing complexity of regulatory laws impacting enterprises, startup solutions and innovations will help optimize enterprise resource planning processes and address customer needs. In a recent report by Deloitte, cost reduction and increased regulatory scrutiny were the main drivers of a significant increase in spending on enterprise risk management. With more than 56 percent of organizations using, or planning to use, cloud-based platforms, enterprises are looking for intelligent, real-time, actionable solutions to meet their improved efficiency goals.
“In particular, aligning on expectations from each stakeholder – academia, start-ups, and corporations – is a key to establishing trust and long-term success,” said Ram Jambunathan, Managing Director, SAP.iO.
Universities and industry have a lot to learn from one another – and partnerships between the two can be mutually beneficial while especially serving the university’s entrepreneurial students.
It can be difficult to get these partnerships right, but with a structured collaborative framework on the part of the university, an eye to common values, flexibility and smart programmes for budding start-ups, these partnerships can benefit all involved.
Here’s how universities can better partner with industry and become more entrepreneurial.
Plum, a SaaS (software-as-a-service) firm specializing in providing enterprises with the data they need to quantify the potential of their employees, recently revealed that it had raised $4.2 Million in seed funding. Real Ventures, a Venture Capitalist company committed to future-focused startups led the funding for Plum. Adding in the funding it received in the Angel round, the total now moves up to $6.1Million.
The company made the announcement at SuccessConnect Las Vegas, the annual user conference from SAP SuccessFactors. The conference is aimed at helping HR professionals and Senior Business Leaders solve challenges relating to the workforce and predict future trends in order to take anticipatory actions. The other investors for Plum include SAP.iO and BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Venture Fund. Plum’s app integrates with SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting, which is a part of the HCM suite.
By: Stacia Garr, RedThread Research
The term “employee experience” has become increasingly popular in the last few years — so much so that we began an investigation into what it is and why it matters, which will publish in October. In the course of that research, we came across a wide range of perspectives on what it is, including from vendors like Medallia, Qualtrics, Service Now, and TI People.
But now, the heavy HR technology hitters are here to weigh in on the subject. Today, SAP SuccessFactors announced that their technology category, which we have long known as Human Capital Management, will now be known as Human Experience Management.
Along with this announcement comes a significant redesign of their user experience (UX) to offer a more integrated and holistic view of the information within the SAP SuccessFactors ecosystem in a more accessible format that intends to put individuals, teams, and organizations at the center of the experience. This new interface integrates into one location conversational AI, robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning, nudges, and predictions to try to get people higher quality information more efficiently. There is a lot we like in what the SuccessFactors team has done, and we applaud them for this holistic revamp of their product.
That said, the grand gesture of renaming the category begs us to take a closer look and to ask:
Is this, to borrow my friend and long-time SAPer Steve Hunt’s phrase, simply old wine in a new bottle?
Maybe.
Employee experience, as we at RedThread understand it, is about two things:
- Emotionally-laden events – These often include specific events in the employee life cycle such as the first day at work, a promotion, or returning from a job leave. During these events, employees are vulnerable because their expectations are high, which can suddenly impact their experience.
- Commonplace exchanges – These are frequent interactions between employees, colleagues, and the organization. These interactions are often relationship-based and happen on an ongoing basis, instead of specific touchpoints, milestones, or moments that matter. During these commonplace exchanges, employees are not as vulnerable as during emotionally laden moments because their expectations are not as high. Yet, these exchanges have a cumulative effect on employee experience. The SAP SuccessFactors team certainly understands the value of emotionally laden events, also called “touchpoints” or “moments that matter”. However, we couldn’t fully tell how this significant user experience redesign will enable managers to better understand – and critically, to enable and improve – how employees experience those touchpoints or commonplace exchanges. It may be that the team is on the earlier parts of the journey or that we just need to see more. So why can’t we just call this new UX old wine in a shiny new bottle? Three reasons:
- The Qualtrics acquisition – The SAP SuccessFactors team seems to have a strong vision and appreciation of what Qualtrics, which has a focus on both employee and customer experience, can do (I sure hope so, for $8 billion). They just don’t seem to have turned that into a reality yet, which is reasonable given that the acquisition only closed in January. There are some early indications of their efforts and direction, though. For example, with the new UX, the SuccessFactors team has integrated simple one-question surveys (from Qualtrics) on the quality of manager check-ins into their continuous performance management solution. It sounds like this is just the beginning of what they have in mind.
- An ecosystem play – SAP SuccessFactors is making a big deal about it being an ecosystem player, meaning that they acknowledge that they don’t have a monopoly on great ideas and are trying to be better at playing well with others. As a result, the number of apps that can integrate with SuccessFactors has shot up from just 45 last year to more than 250 this year. The variety of these apps enable organizations to build a more customized employee experience that fits their unique needs.
- SAP.io – For those of you who don’t know it, SAP.io is SAP’s start-up accelerator, with a vision toward potentially integrating them into the SAP ecosystem. There are several start-ups within SAP.io that are focused on truly transforming the employee experience. One of them, Cultivate (which I have written about several times in other formats), shows significant promise at truly leveraging the existing data and delivering new insights to managers and employees that can help strengthen their relationships (which are so much at the heart of employee experience). We think some of these solutions will increasingly become integrated with this “Human Experience Management” platform.
In some ways, this announcement simply puts an exclamation point on the fact that we are moving away from an era of seeing people as cogs and more toward seeing them as unique humans, which is something we obviously strongly applaud.
From the perspective of being an HR technology market observer, though, we see this as something different. This announcement heralds the mainstreaming of the employee experience concept, which again, is a good thing. As SuccessFactors further refines how employee experience shows up in their platform, they will heighten awareness of the need to take an employee-first perspective.
However, this announcement does also mean that the fight over what “employee experience” really means – and what it should look like from a technological perspective – has really begun in earnest.
And what is a fight without a worthy opponent?
Look out for the good folks in Pleasanton to weigh in with their perspective very soon. I imagine announcements coming from this year’s Workday Rising event in October will carry at least a nugget or two on what they’re thinking.
A l’occasion de l’ouverture de la conférence annuelle France Digitale Day, Emmanuel Macron a rappelé mardi soir ses ambitions pour la tech tricolore. Le chef de l’Etat a ainsi annoncé la mobilisation d’investisseurs à hauteur de cinq milliards dans les trois prochaines années pour accompagner le développement des startups françaises.
Plum, a software-as-a-service company that provides enterprise organizations with the data they need to quantify the potential of their workforce, announced today that it has raised $4.2M in seed funding. In combination with their previous Angel round, Plum has raised a total of $6.1M to date.
The $4.2M round was led by Real Ventures, a Venture Capitalist firm dedicated to future-focused startups that create new categories. “Over the next decade, people will need to be assigned and trained for new jobs on a scale that has never been seen,” said Janet Bannister, Partner at Real Ventures. “McKinsey claims that 400 to 800 million jobs will disappear due to automation in the next 15 years. At the same time, 85% of jobs that will exist in 2030 do not exist today.”
Bannister went on to say, “Plum is the only provider of scientifically-validated, predictive data that can scale to get every person in the right job for the future of work – which is why we believe that Plum is posed to not only be a huge company, but also make a significant, positive impact on millions of lives.”
Other investors include SAP.iO and BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Venture Fund. Plum’s app integrates with SAP® SuccessFactors® Recruiting, which is a part of the human capital management suite.
“An employee’s success in a role depends not only on an employee’s hard skills but also their intangible characteristics,” said Dr. Ram Jambunathan, SVP & Managing Director of SAP.iO. “But today, businesses still rely on traditional measures and assessments that are often prone to subjective biases. The SAP.iO Fund invested in Plum so our customers could build the full picture of their employee’s capabilities. Through Plum’s integration with SAP® SuccessFactors®, businesses can now drive the complete talent management experience that employees want and need for long-term success.”
BigID, the leader in data-centric personal data privacy and protection, today announced the BigID Momentum Value Added Reseller (VAR) Program. The program enables resellers to easily add BigID’s data discovery, intelligence and privacy automation products to their portfolio to capture new revenue streams as companies comply with global privacy regulations like California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The BigID VAR program will enhance the company’s market presence globally, accelerating sales growth in critical territories like Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
Inaugural VAR partners include Optiv, SHI, Navilogic, NextID, GDM Sweden, Optimitri Mexico and Dunlap, Bennett & Ludwig.
BigID will support VARs with a full enablement kit, facilitated by a dedicated portal. VARs will gain immediate access to deal registration program, training, sales management tools, and joint marketing program support for webinars, events, and related activities and collateral.
We are excited to welcome these entrepreneurs to the SAP.iO family and help them accelerate their business with SAP,” said Alexa Gorman, head of SAP.iO Foundries EMEA (Europe, Mideast, and Africa). “We recognize that Israel has a dynamic high-tech ecosystem and our Tel Aviv Foundry reflects our commitment to the Israeli ecosystem.” The selected startups will have SAP’s support and access to its technological expertise, the multinational said in a statement.
“We believe in their ability to offer a variety of advanced solutions for SAP’s customers,” said Orna Kleinmann, managing director at SAP Labs Israel and SVP Technology & Innovation Cloud Experience, of the Israeli startups.
The seven selected startups for the 12-week program are:
- ARpalus, a Caesaria-based AR and predictive analytics retail technology startup founded just this year. ARpalus is building a platform for the automatic collection and deep analysis of shoppers’ behavioral data.
- EasySend, a Tel Aviv startup founded in 2016 that helps financial enterprises improve customer experience and increase operational efficiency through a platform that enables businesses to present customers with digital forms in a simple interface.
- GrowthSpace, a startup developing a tailored online coaching platform for enterprise employees.
- Outgage, a SaaS “marketing first” direct mail platform for email marketing and analytics.
- Silverback, a Tel Aviv startup founded in 2014 that built a sales intelligence platform for online marketplaces.
- Supersmart, a Rosh Ha’ayin-based retail tech startup founded in 2014 that provides a “Scan&Go” solution with advanced loss prevention capabilities, enabling consumers to instantly check out their fully- loaded cart or basket.
- YOUTILIGENT, a Petah Tikva startup founded in 2016 that developed a connected consumer solution for connected appliances using machine learning and IoT tech.
סאפ השיקה היום (ג’) בתל אביב את האקסלרטור שלה, SAP.io Foundry, שמיועד לסטארט-אפים שמפתחים פתרונות לארגונים על בסיס של תוכנה כשירות (SaaS), ושהטכנולוגיה שלהם יכולה להתממשק עם הפתרונות של החברה הגרמנית. התכנית הראשונה של המיזם החלה בחודש זה ותסתיים בדצמבר, ובכוונת החברה לקיים שני מחזורים בכל שנה. בסאפ כבר עובדים על המחזורים שיתקיימו בשנה הבאה, ומחפשים חברות. כל מחזור מיועד לחברות מתחום אחר, כשהפעם משתתפים בו סטארט-אפים בתחום הדיפ טק.
