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SAP.iO In San Francisco, Funding Announcement, HR & People Engagement

Olivia From Paradox Now Available on SAP Store

Paradox announced that its Olivia solution is now an SAP endorsed app, available for online purchase on SAP Store. SAP Endorsed Apps are a category of solutions from SAP’s partner ecosystem that help customers become best-run, intelligent enterprises and are meant to deliver value with desired outcomes.

“Our partnership with SAP has always been about working together to help clients solve their biggest recruiting challenges,” said Aaron Matos, Founder and CEO, Paradox. “Through our SAP partnership, we’ve been able to amplify our reach across a global client base. Achieving SAP endorsed app status is a testament to our longstanding partnership with SAP to provide clients with a fast, streamlined, mobile-first experience for candidates, hiring managers, and talent acquisition teams.”

Supply Chain Technology Startup Verusen Wins Four 2022 Powderkeg Unvalley Awards

Verusen, a global innovator in supply chain data, inventory, and procurement technology, today announced it was recognized as a leading technology company and employer, receiving four awards in The 2022 Powderkeg Unvalley Awards.

The Powderkeg Unvalley Awards are bestowed upon the best startups and technology companies to work for in emerging communities beyond Silicon Valley based on various facets of the company, including company size, industry positioning, culture, perks, benefits, funding, and employee testimonials.

Breinify Accelerates Momentum in Second Half of 2021 for funding

Breinify, the leading lightweight personalization platform, is pleased to announce continued momentum following a $11 million round of seed funding in April 2021. The company has seen strong continued growth, meeting key milestones set for 2021 including tripling its headcount and 4.3x revenue, adding four new customers, and experiencing zero product downtime, among other drivers of operational success.

“It’s incredible to see how Breinify has grown,” says Diane Keng, co-founder and CEO of Breinify. “We’ve done an amazing job setting the foundations for scaling as we raised $11M in unheard of speeds. Our ‘crawl, walk, run’ approach really resonates with our customers and we’re beyond ecstatic to see how we’ve jump started their personalization journeys.”

New Notable Customers & Partnerships

In the last few years, retail/CPG brands have made quite a shift to become more digital-centric and data-driven. To successfully move the needle for these industries, these brands have to find ways to implement smart personalization. Unfortunately, unless you are Amazon, Google, or the top one or two brands in your industry, these companies face several challenges to enable even the most basic personalization capabilities. Breinify is democratizing data science by finding ways to make predictive capabilities accessible to non-technical, yet data-driven marketing teams. The company’s AI solution enables enterprise marketers to deliver predictive personalization at scale.

“2021 has shown us that brands are hungrier than ever for predictive personalization,” says Keng. “More of the brands we see in our kitchen pantries or bathroom cabinets embrace the importance of relevant personalization, but struggle to get effective experiences up and running. Through word of mouth, we organically quadrupled our customer base and expanded our partnership with more than 80 percent of our existing customers. The time to access data science powered personalization is now.”

Breinify customers include BevMo!, Duraflame, Sally Beauty, and many more to drive $125M in new revenue, 20x results (between split testing) for page visits, and +105% in CRM growth.

Sounding Board lands Series B to move coaching beyond services and into SaaS

Sounding Board, which started as a platform to connect leaders to coaches through a marketplace, realized early in the pandemic that mentorship needs a refresh.

“We’ve always delivered coaching in this traditional services format,” said Christine Tao, Sounding Board CEO and co-founder. “Well, we’re not in the office anymore so we actually have to speak differently about how we’re developing our talent and our leaders.” The insight led to the launch of a software platform that let users not only connect with coaches, but also track goals on an ongoing basis.

Now, nearly a year after landing a Series A with this vision, Sounding Board has closed a $30 million Series B led by Jazz Venture Partners and joined by Gaingels as well as angel investors such as theBoardlist’s Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Ancestry.com’s Deb Liu, Udemy’s Yvonne Chen and DocuSign’s Tammy Aguillon. Previous investors in the company include Canaan Partner and Precursor Ventures.

The round also saw JAZZ Venture Partners’ John Spinale join the board, an addition to Sounding Boards’ all-female team (and all-female board). “The joke is that we actually had to add diversity to our board … a man,” Tao laughed.

The fundraise comes off of solid growth for Sounding Board, which touts that it has had sequential growth for the past seven quarters. While Tao wouldn’t share specifics on revenues, the company said revenue was in the “multimillions” in the past and annual bookings have increased more than 350% year over year. Looking at stickiness, Sounding Board claims that net revenue retention is over 200%, meaning that existing customers continue to pay for the platform as time goes on.

SAP Startup Spotlight: Wisy

SAP invests in a lot of promising startups, and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of all of them. E-3 Magazine has selected the most interesting companies to showcase in our SAP Startup Spotlight Series. In this article, we will take a look at Wisy.

Min Chen is the CEO of Wisy, a startup that solves a $1.9T problem in the CPG and retail industry by optimizing operations, reducing out-of-stocks and waste with artificial intelligence. She is an award-winning serial entrepreneur and software engineer with 20 years of experience. In this interview, Min Chen will explain what problem Wisy is trying to solve, what makes her company different, and what’s next for the startup.

E-3 Magazine: What problem is Wisy trying to solve?

Min Chen: Wisy is solving a problem that affects everybody who shops at a store. All of us have had the inconvenience of not finding the product we want to buy, and this problem causes a $1.9T annual loss in the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) industry due to stockouts and waste. While stockouts can happen for several reasons, one of the most common causes is the lack of actionable data at the point-of-sale for CPG and retailer personnel to take timely, correct actions and prevent the problem in the future. Stockouts lead to losses in sales and waste as products are not sold before their expiry date because they are not being restocked on shelves in a timely manner.

Why is this such a difficult problem to solve?

Chen: Imagine a dairy company with over 100 different products sold at thousands of stores or the dairy department in a grocery store with thousands of products to choose from. Keeping track of product rotation, inventory, planogram compliance, assortments, and pricing of every product and every store is a daunting task that is still done manually. Manual retail execution processes rely on the memory and eyeballing capabilities of employees. It is no surprise that error margins are high, data are inaccurate and not actionable. High personnel turnover adds more challenges as new employees take longer to execute the same tasks and could make more mistakes due to their unfamiliarity with the company’s myriad of products.

How is Wisy helping to solve this problem?

Chen: Wisy has developed an artificial-intelligence solution that works in any mobile device to empower field employees to quickly identify retail execution issues and perform corrective actions quickly and consistently. Instead of verifying out-of-stocks manually, employees just have to snap a picture of the shelf and Wisy will identify issues such as out-of-stocks, planogram compliance, unauthorized products, and pricing issues. Employees won’t have to rely on memorizing the hundreds of products and their right quantities for each store to identify issues. Wisy will do that for them in a matter of seconds. It is likely to increase efficiency by at least 25 percent and accuracy to 90 percent, leading to potential combined benefit of 3 to 10 percent of revenue.

Sacramento Region Innovation Awards: Humanly.io develops software to make the hiring process more efficient

Humanly.io is the winner in the Software and Hardware category of the Sacramento Region Innovation Awards. CREtelligent Inc. is the runner-up.

Humanly.io has developed artificial intelligence software that helps companies get beyond bias in screening job candidates.

The company’s software also helps automate screening and scheduling of hiring for companies and recruiters, but the special sauce is a suite of software that helps recruiters and hiring managers be more efficient during job candidate interviews and virtual interviews over teleconferencing. In essence, the software helps the interviewer get out of the way of the interviewee.

Humanly.io is headquartered in Seattle and Sacramento, and it raised a $4.2 million seed funding round in September from investors including Moneta Ventures of Folsom and Growth Factory Capital in Rocklin.

Humanly.io was the first funding announced from Rocklin entrepreneur and investor Mark Haney’s Growth Factory Capital fund. Humanly.io is also in the first cohort of companies in the 16-week Growth Factory accelerator program that started in September.

The September funding was led by Zeal Capital Partners in Washington, D.C., and also included Spark Growth Ventures, Basecamp Fund and Y Combinator. According to venture capital tracking website Crunchbase, Humanly.io has raised a total of $5.3 million since its launch in 2019.

Paradox Ranks Among the Top 100 Fastest-Growing Companies in North America on the 2021 Deloitte Technology Fast 500

Paradox, the conversational recruiting platform helping global brands like Unilever and McDonald’s simplify hiring through automation with a human touch, announced that it debuted at number 86 on the prestigious Deloitte Technology Fast 500 — the annual ranking of the 500 fastest-growing companies in North America, now in its 27th year.

Paradox’s three-year growth rate of 1,955% is the highest of any recruiting technology company — an accomplishment founder and CEO Aaron Matos attributes to the company’s commitment to building world-class products that solve real-world hiring challenges.

“We’ve always pushed ourselves to make the hard stuff simple — and that starts with deeply understanding our clients and the challenges they’re facing,” said Matos, who started his career as a Human Resources practitioner before founding Paradox. “We’re fortunate to work alongside some of the biggest companies and smartest talent leaders in the world — and we don’t take that responsibility lightly. While recognition like this is meaningful, our responsibility is — and always has been — to maintain our insatiable appetite to build the most innovative solutions for our clients. Our goal is to keep doing that and growth will take care of itself.”

First launched in 2016, Paradox’s conversational assistant Olivia brings the experience people have come to expect from assistive technology like Siri and Alexa to recruiting — automating common recruiting tasks to get hiring work done faster and streamline the process for job seekers, recruiters, and hiring managers.

Across its clients, Paradox serves two primary — but distinct — hiring models in unique ways:

For high-volume hourly roles, Paradox is increasing candidate conversion by replacing cumbersome steps in the process with simple, mobile-first, conversational experiences — reducing time-to-hire by as much as 90% for some clients by automating tasks like candidate screening, interview scheduling, offers, new hire onboarding, and more.
For high-skill professional roles, Paradox’s conversational assistant Olivia does the work recruiting coordinators, recruiters, and hiring managers don’t have time for — like scheduling and rescheduling interviews, collecting candidate feedback, answering common questions, and creating truly personal 1:1 experiences for every candidate.

“To get recruiting right, we need to move from transactional to relational. Understanding that is one thing. Having a partner who can help you drive it is another — and Paradox has built technology to make that shift a reality,” said Jennifer Cotie Kangas, Director of Digital Experience and Talent Acquisition at Regis Corporation, a leader in the haircare industry that franchises more than 6,600 technology-enabled hair salons under brands like Supercuts, Smartstyle, Cost Cutters, First Choice Haircutters, and Roosters. “We didn’t buy Paradox only for the product it is today — we bought it for the company’s ability to listen, learn, iterate, and build the technology of the future. This company’s ability to sharpen its products over time to deliver for its clients is a real differentiator.”

Constructor brings project management for software developers back to basics

Constructor is a new, user-friendly task tracking and collaboration tool designed specifically for software development teams.

The solution offers features for developers such as assignable comment threads, dashboard card highlighting, hideable backlogs, and project checklists, which they can use to collaborate on software projects remotely, the company told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview.

Additionally, the company also reported to VentureBeat that it has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding.

Constructor cofounder and CEO Seth Purcell explained, “The way software teams work has changed massively over the past decade, as teams have become more distributed, chosen lighter processes, and adopted new practices and new tools like GitHub, Slack, and Figma. Tracking tools haven’t kept up because what’s required isn’t new features; it’s a complete rethink.”

Constructor was built from the ground up to fit the way modern teams are building software, Purcell said. Constructor designed its offering to support asynchronous discussions and provides features like checklists to increase transparency over the status of active projects.

Verusen Integration With SAP Solutions Simplifies Supply Chain Reliability With Intelligent Materials Management

Verusen, the Atlanta-based artificial intelligence (AI) supply chain innovator, today announced that its industry-proven Verusen Materials Management solution is now available on SAP Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings. The AI-driven platform works with the materials management module of SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) and SAP S/4HANA® , enabling businesses to digitally transform their connected supply chain and materials management.

“Our always-on, always-learning platform now integrates with SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA, including procurement and inventory business applications to provide one of the simplest, fastest and most sustainable materials management solutions for businesses using SAP solutions across all verticals,” said Paul Noble, founder and CEO of Verusen. “Our integration with SAP technology will help accelerate the operational reliability of any enterprise’s digitally connected supply chain to ensure the right materials are in the right place, at the right time; reduce supply chain risk to build supply network resiliency and help lower overall operating costs.”

Verusen’s AI platform reduces data complexity and improves decision-making processes to execute a faster, more efficient, and issue-free supply chain without the need for a slow and costly data-cleanse process. The Verusen platform includes network inventory, procurement intelligence, and strategic supplier alignment. By implementing Verusen’s platform, companies can transform their materials management approach and supply chain to better understand their data and balance operational and supplier risk at the most cost-effective level possible to find their Material Truth (™ ).

SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco Kicks off Sustainability in Utilities, Energy and Natural Resources Program

October 21, 2021 — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) launched a sustainability in utilities, energy and natural resources industries focused startup program at SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco. Six startups have been selected by a jury of SAP experts, partners, customers, and investment funds to join the program.

The startups in the program are using next generation technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and internet of things to help businesses become more sustainable by providing deeper insights into processes, greater transparency and reducing waste in the supply chain. Over the next 16 weeks, the startups will have access to curated mentorship from SAP executives, 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 San Francisco Fall 2021 program:

Bidgely accelerates a clean energy future by enabling utilities and consumers to make data-driven energy decisions.
Camus Energy empowers utilities and energy providers with system-wide visibility, forecasting, and advanced controls to balance local renewable supply with flexible demand for a distributed, zero-carbon future.
Empower incentivizes transparent and traceable collection, sourcing and recycling of plastic waste globally.
OilX is the world’s first digital oil analyst. It leverages satellite technology and AI to create a digital twin of the oil supply chain, from well-to-wheel.
Singularity Energy is a data and analytics company that helps customers reduce their carbon emissions.
SupplHi covers the vendor management activities from vendor scouting to vendor qualification, vendor performance evaluation and assessment of vendor financials, compliance and sustainability.

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/.

SAP.iO In San Francisco, HR & People Engagement

Humanly.io Now Available On SAP Store

HUMANLYHR Inc., doing business as Humanly.io, today announced that its Recruiting Automation and Interview Intelligence solution is now available on SAP® Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings. The company’s conversational AI for recruiting platform integrates with the SAP® SuccessFactors® Recruiting solution and delivers more efficiency and equity to a company’s candidate screening and selection process.

“Humanly.io’s solution integrates with SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting to help mutual clients use conversational AI to measure unconscious bias and what is happening inside the interview,” says Prem Kumar, CEO and co-founder of Humanly.io.

“It’s exciting to see Humanly.io apply linguistic theory to real-world problems. As someone who researches language and social bias, it’s especially gratifying to advise them in their efforts to improve equity during the hiring process,” comments Dr. Katherine Hilton, Linguist and Lecturer at Stanford University and Humanly.io Strategic Advisor.

Humanly.io offers two editions of its solution on SAP Store: Interview Intelligence Edition and Recruitment Automation Edition. Integrated with existing video conferencing solutions like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet, the company’s Interview Intelligence transcribes and analyzes each virtual interview meeting. Talent acquisition leaders use the weekly, monthly, and quarterly interview analytics to apply prescriptive coaching to improve communication behavior and deliver a more consistent and fairer candidate experience.

The Mom Project Secures $80M in Series C Funding

The Mom Project, the leading platform for moms to discover their economic potential, announced today an $80 million Series C funding round led by growth investment firm Leeds Illuminate. Additional participants include existing investors 7GC, Initialized Capital, OCA Ventures, Citi, High Alpha and Grotech Ventures alongside Silicon Valley Bank.

The Series C round represents the largest global investment ever made in female workforce technology.

“It’s long past time we stop underestimating and undervaluing mothers in the workforce,” said Stephanie Nieman, Managing Director at Leeds Illuminate. “We’re investing in The Mom Project because we believe the potential for continued growth within this business is extraordinary.”

The new funds will accelerate the company’s goal to connect moms on its platform with more than $1 billion in economic opportunity in the next two years through investments in product development, distribution and team growth.

“We’ve demonstrated to the market that betting on moms is good business,” said Allison Robinson, The Mom Project founder and CEO. “We’ve seen 20x growth over the last three years and are eager to leverage this momentum and the trust and equity we’ve earned with moms and our customers and partners to continue building and expanding the reach of category-defining solutions that reshape how work evolves to meet the needs of modern families.”

The investment comes at a crucial time for moms and their families, who were some of the hardest hit during the coronavirus pandemic. In 2020, 2.3 million women left the U.S. workforce—either through job loss or being forced to quit in order to care for their children—leading to the lowest levels of women in the labor force since the 1980s, prompting Vice President Kamala Harris to declare “a national emergency.”

The Mom Project has witnessed business leaders stepping up to the challenge, with companies identifying The Mom Project’s suite of hiring, upskilling and retention solutions as an effective way to solve pressing labor shortages while also addressing longer-term concerns around attrition, skill gaps and the need for greater diversity and empathy in the workplace.

Joanna Riley, CEO And Co-Founder At Censia, Wins Silver Stevie® Award In 2021 Stevie Awards For Women In Business

Censia has announced that CEO and Co-Founder, Joanna Riley, was named the winner of a Silver Stevie® Award in the Female Entrepreneur of the Year – Business Services – 11 to 2,500 Employees category in the 18th annual Stevie Awards for Women in Business.

Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award winners were determined by the average scores of more than 160 business professionals around the world, working on eight juries.

The Stevie Awards for Women in Business honor women executives, entrepreneurs, employees, and the companies they run- worldwide. The Stevie Awards have been hailed as the world’s premier business awards.

Winners will be celebrated during a virtual awards ceremony on Thursday, January 13, 2022.

Wisy participates in a “Shark Tank” in Las Vegas and wins audience award

Min Chen, CEO of Wisy, presented before a panel of experts at the “Shark Reef” Startup Pitch, the premier event for the consumer goods and retail industry. Wisy won the Audience Choice award given by the audience to the Startup that presents the best solution to the needs of companies in the consumer product good industry and supermarkets. The event organizers selected Wisy for being a resilient, agile, and visionary company.

Battling the great resignation? Startup Crosschq wants to arm businesses with AI to find and retain workers

Whether you’re looking for a new job or trying to hire new talent, everyone is a bit frustrated these days. Workers are burnt out and companies need to fill roles that are critical for their operations. Finding the right candidates is a perennial issue that has become even more pressing as businesses try to recover from the pandemic.

Exacerbating the problem is the so-called Great Resignation. According to polling from Gallup, around half of all workers are at least contemplating looking for a new job, a trend that speaks to an underlying dissatisfaction with the status quo as people reevaluate their priorities and personal goals.

Amid these dynamics, San Francisco HR platform Crosschq is trying to help businesses find and retain their best workers with a suite of cloud-based tools that leverage machine learning and AI systems for everything from reference checks to recruitment. The 3-year-old startup also offers analytics to predict retention rates to get an overview of patterns and how to change them.

Its mission has been aided by a recent expanded $30 million Series A round led by Tiger Global that brought its total funding to more the $40 million. Other investors include GGV Capital, Bessemer, SAP.iO, Rocketship.vc, NBA star Klay Thompson and Lattice CEO Jack Altman.