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SAP.iO Venture Studio makes a €1 million follow-on seed investment in Brilliant Hire, a bias-free, skill-based pre-screening platform that helps digitize recruiting to provide faster and greater insights
In most hiring processes, hitting the buzzer to catapult candidates to the next round does usually not occur as quickly as on prime television shows. Talent is nevertheless what both are looking for.
There’s a strong connection between achieving business objectives and hiring the right talent, hence increasing the quality of candidates within the hiring funnel is fundamental to success. Tech is promising a shortcut to identifying the best candidates for job offerings, by also eliminating (un-)conscious bias towards applicants, and improving hiring efficiency. Will software be the next recruiting manager you meet in an interview? Not quite, but it could make all the difference.
Brilliant Hire offers skills-based job applicant screening, providing faster and greater insights without bias. The latest funding allows the venture to proceed with the recently released Brilliant Expert Network. Brilliant Experts is a complimentary service to Brilliant Hire, providing experts who evaluate candidates at any skill level and any discipline. With this service, recruiters simply send candidates the Brilliant Hire link and subsequently receive a full breakdown of a candidate’s skills from the expert. On the backend, the Brilliant Hire teamensures the quality and availability of the evaluating expertsremains high. The platform is unique across the screening industry by combining both machine learning with human evaluators.
Brilliant Experts has been used at SAP by the Silicon Valley Next Talent program over the past few months. With the addition of Brilliant Experts, Brilliant Hire removed the burden of assessment evaluation and decreased the wait time of applying candidates by more than 50 percent:
“We went from a one to two weeks response time to just two days. This resulted in over 400 candidates screened and only 100 qualifying ones to be interviewed – all without burdening recruiters or managers.”
Caitie Sullivan, program manager, Silicon Valley Next Talent Program, SAP
The team has shown early successes, including helping software company SAP SuccessFactors hit their ambitious 2019 hiring targets. This includes hiring over 100 engineers across the San Francisco and Bangalore offices. Beyond SAP, Brilliant Hire has been used by Mercedes-Benz R&D and the Second Harvest Food Bank.
Today, Brilliant Hire is offering a 3-month trial allowing companies to screen up to 300 candidates evaluations for just $1. Simply head over to the SAP Store to start your trial today.
To continue delivering their vision of screening-as-a-service, the new funding enables the team to grow in key areas. During the second half of 2019, Brilliant Hire will add Go-To-Market experts, designers and various engineering resources across San Francisco and Bangalore — hence hiring themselves! If you believe in the team’s mission and are interested in joining, reach out to their General Manager, Ryan Phillips, at ryan@brillianthire.io or check out the team’s career page.
About Brilliant Hire
Your hiring process is biased, we can help you fix it. Be brilliant in the way you hire. Try Brilliant Hire via the SAP Store and find more information on brillianthire.io.
About SAP.iO Venture Studio
The SAP.iO Venture Studio invests in small, entrepreneurial teams inside SAP and helps them build and launch successful products that attack some of the biggest problems in enterprise software. More information on sap.io/studio.
SAP invests in a lot of promising startups, and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of them all. 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 Footprint Technologies, which has an app listed in the SAP store.
Matthias Brendel’s is the CEO and co-founder of Footprint Technologies. He founded his first company at the age of 17 and has been working as a “sidepreneur” ever since. After finishing his degree in environmental engineering, Brendel became interested in reducing carbon emissions in combustion engines and joined Audi in 2007. He later had the opportunity to create and lead an innovation unit for new business development in Berlin’s startup ecosystem from scratch: Audi Denkwerkstatt. In November 2020, he joined his early-stage start-up, Footprint Technologies. Since then, he has contributed to the transformation of online shoe shopping into a more individual and sustainable experience. In this interview, he mentions what Footprint Technologies has to offer, how his solution works, and what’s next for the startup.
What is Footprint Technologies and what do you offer?
Footprint Technologies transforms online shoe shopping into a sustainable and individual experience: our software enables online shoppers to precisely measure their feet via smartphone and receive our perfect size and fit recommendation for the selected shoe model. The whole process is seamlessly integrated into their shopping experience: it starts directly in their favorite shop and ends up with the perfectly fitting shoe in the shopping cart. Thus we are avoiding shoe returns for a more profitable and sustainable e-commerce. Our team is based in Berlin, Germany but serves clients from all over Europe, Japan, and the USA.
How does your solution work?
Our software enables people to measure their feet easily with their smartphone and a standard sheet of paper (DIN A4 or US Letter). Using the latest cloud-based computer vision technology, we can determine the length and width of the foot to the millimeter. But measuring the exact foot size is only half the solution. In order to give the best possible size recommendation for the chosen model, we use our unique shoe database. In cooperation with the shoe manufacturers, we have identified and stored the relevant size and fit information for each shoe model here. Knowing feet and shoe dimensions and integrating the latest scientific research from University of Gothenburg Sweden, we recommend a comfortable fit that makes the user happy and prevents returns.
Fast Company Magazine named Censia to this year’s list of most innovative companies in Data Science for its AI and machine learning-driven talent intelligence solutions. Censia’s technology organizes and structures enormous amounts of talent, company, and industry data. It then delivers it through lightweight, easy-to-use solutions that deliver superior executive intelligence, talent, and workforce planning results.
“Censia’s mission is clear – we are committed to helping the world’s best organizations unlock their potential through transformative talent,” said Joanna Riley, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder. “Our AI-driven talent intelligence solutions lead the industry in identifying and engaging outstanding executive talent and delivering critical insights for any organization’s talent landscape. We’re thrilled to have our efforts recognized by Fast Company.”
Censia provides talent technology solutions for all aspects of the talent lifecycle. Censia’s platform enables its best-in-class customers to build multidimensional search models to rapidly discover the most optimal candidates, substantially increasing the inclusion of diverse candidates while improving recruiting efficiency more than sixfold.
Censia’s Executive Intelligence solution dramatically improves the efficacy of the executive search, identifying the absolute best talent for a given need while reducing the executive search cycle by more than 60%.
Specright a leader in Specification Management software, has been named to Fast Company’s prestigious annual list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for 2023, honored at No. 3 in the Enterprise category. Specright participated in SAP.iO Foundry New York’s Sustainability & Consumer program and SAP.iO’s Rising stars program in 2022.
This year’s list highlights the businesses at the forefront of their respective industries, paving the way for the innovations of tomorrow. These companies are setting the standard with some of the greatest accomplishments of the modern world. In addition to the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies, 540 organizations are recognized across 54 sectors and regions.
“At Specright, our vision is to live in a world without waste, and we believe the best opportunity to do so is to empower people and companies across the globe with the data needed to make products and packaging sustainably,” said Matthew Wright, Specright Founder and CEO. “It is such an honor for Specright to be named alongside so many incredible, innovative companies and this award is a testament to all of the great work our team has done in driving the Specright mission forward.”
Specright helps companies digitize product and packaging specification data and share and collaborate on that data with supply chain partners to reduce costs and errors, drive efficiency, and increase speed to market. This past year, the company surpassed two million products on its platform globally, supporting Fortune 500 and challenger brands and boasting a 99 percent customer retention rate. Specright also received a patent for its Specification Data Management™ platform, validating the uniqueness of Specright’s spec-first approach to product and packaging development, quality management, and above all – sustainability tracking and reporting. The patent also covers Specright Network, which enables brands, suppliers, retailers, and manufacturers to share live, digital specifications with one another.
Getting food from the field to the table is a complex process. Exposure to pests, disease, or harsh weather can impact the quality of the crops. At the same time, climate change is leading to soil degradation and loss of biodiversity while insufficient land increases the pressure to produce more on less space.
At the recent SAP.iO Foundries Sustainable Agriculture Latin America Demo Day, three startups presented solutions that can help farmers improve the quality of their crops, optimize farming strategies through personalization, and improve biological capital by managing soil more efficiently. These tactics can all play a role in successfully feeding 9 billion people for the next decades.
Improving the quality of raw materials
“In the agricultural industries production plans are based on the quality of raw materials,” said Madeleine Valderrama, CEO and Founder of AI Bruna, a supply chain planning solution powered by artificial intelligence developed by AltumLab Chile. She explained that producers expect the quality of raw materials to be consistent, but reality is different. Because it’s impossible to predict quality with complete accuracy, planners deal with variability by improvising, which can lead to increased use of water and energy and up to 20% loss in profitability.
After eight years working in Chile’s salmon farming industry, Valderrama knew what kind of tools would be required to tackle this issue. AI Bruna uses artificial intelligence and genetic algorithms to factor operational restrictions, deficiencies, and defects into strategic harvesting plans. It connects Planning, Harvesting and Commercial areas, providing a strategic view of the entire operation.
Valderrama used the example of Caña Brava, a sugar cane producer in Peru that is using the tool. In the first stage, months before the harvest, AI Bruna uses historical data such as climate, performance, soil type, water usage, and fertilization patterns to predict the expected concentration of sugar in the harvested cane.
Next, it suggests modifications in irrigation or fertilization as the plants are maturing to make sure the cane will satisfy the commercial contract after the harvest. Thanks to AI, Caña Brava was able to reduce water and energy consumption by over 4% and costs by 11%, and increase production capacity by 7%, and the value of the cane as raw material by 17%.
An industry-wide shift to greater use of conversational AI, often in the form of chatbots and voice assistants, is clearly underway. However, the success of these interactions depends on the quality of conversation design, a new domain for most developers and one that may hinge on subpar or outdated tooling. This is the challenge San Mateo, CA-based Yellow.ai seeks to address with its conversational AI platform.
Yellow.ai suggests that problems in this burgeoning area often reside in the design process itself. Though design is a crucial step in developing conversational AI, the process is often hindered by the use of flowchart-based tools that result in clunky and complicated designs. This not only slows development, it creates a disjointed experience for users, who encounter inconsistent design choices and interactions across different conversational interfaces.
One of the key pain points in conversation design is in the basic approach. Most designers are relying on flowchart-based tools that are not optimized for designing conversations. This makes the design process time-consuming and cumbersome, leading to subpar outcomes. As well, replicating design flows in development is a tedious and inefficient process.
With the launch of its Dynamic Conversation Designer, Yellow.AI looks to improve the design process for chat and voice conversational workflows using generative AI. Integrated within the Yellow.ai conversational AI platform, this conversation design tool allows teams to design chatbot conversations without writing any code, saving significant development time and effort.
The Dynamic Conversation Designer creates development flows automatically from design flows, eliminating the need for developers to start from scratch. Moreover, there is instant auto-sync between design and development flows. With this, the company claims to deliver a 50% faster time to market, along with reduced development and training time.
Many businesses struggle with demand forecasting. Whether you run a small business or a large enterprise, the challenge of predicting customer behavior and stock levels never gets easier. Even major organizations like Target and Walmart that are able to afford teams of data scientists have recently reported struggles with excess inventory due to poor demand forecasting.
During this time of global uncertainty, many businesses have adopted a just-in-case mindset. They’ve relied on archaic methods of forecasting, scouring old data and drawing poor conclusions based on past problems.
But understanding demand accurately shouldn’t be so much of a struggle in 2023. Even as we battle post-pandemic turmoil, we now have clear alternatives to legacy forecasting tools — thanks to artificial intelligence (AI). And we don’t need endless reams of historical data to access the real-time patterns necessary to accurately forecast demand. In fact, AI-driven demand sensing has been shown to reduce inventory errors in supply chain management by up to 50%, according to McKinsey & Co.
Every company produces data, of course, but it’s almost all trapped in siloes and walled-point solutions that have evolved for specific tasks over many decades. Siloes emerge for noble reasons — they represent a business’s attempts to organize and become structured.
Truthfully, siloes are useful in many scenarios, but if the boundaries between them are too sturdy and there’s a lack of effective communication, siloes will negatively impact business, putting more pressure on processes. Inaccuracies are most common in silo-heavy organizations because teams and departments just don’t have enough of a shared language. Rigid siloes also make data, even good data, less credible.
When working with ThroughPut’s clients, I’ve seen AI make all the difference in demand forecasting. That’s because it can pull from disparate datasets, using real-time patterns to sense the demand around the corner rather than just assuming future demand from past events.
Using an AI-driven system will pick out time-stamped data — regardless of barriers — and rapidly stitch together a global vision of your virtual supply chain network. Supply chain AI processes the best signals from the noise that is constantly being generated by your disparate data systems and turns the din into a song you can understand.
Furthermore, AI is superior at analyzing and making sense of data in vast quantities; yet it also doesn’t need much information to learn. AI trained for real-world applications already intuits which data signals to extract from an ocean of noise, so it can solve needs before they cause problems.
The quality of data is most important, not the quantity, and delaying the use of AI to sense demand is only going to cause current supply challenges to stagnate and potentially get worse. From there, share prices and shareholders suffer. We are seeing this today across industries: innovation laggards and slow adopters paying the price for relying on old forecasting methods.
Through a partnership with SAP, Obsess integrated the e-commerce platform within its virtual stores to create an interface that engages young consumers.
A virtual store platform looking to provide retailers with an entry point into the metaverse has partnered with e-commerce provider SAP.
The goal of Obsess, a New York City-based startup, is to change online shopping in a way that reaches the younger generation and enables retailers to sell most of their core products through virtual environments.
Obsess worked with SAP to integrate an e-commerce platform within its virtual stores and create a discovery interface that engages young consumers.
Through the partnership, Obsess and SAP customers can create digitalized shopping venues that could be different from or similar to actual stores. Consumers enter a 3D world online and can engage more immersively with a retailer in the comfort of their home or outside of their home.
“We are bringing that gamification-like interface to the shopping experience,” Obsess CEO and founder Neha Singh said.
Not all Obsess customers have 3D models of all their products. Instead, the company has a proprietary and patented technology that can take e-commerce images from Google APIs and create an immersive experience. Once a consumer clicks on a product, they get the same information they would see on a typical product detail page.
“The purpose of these virtual experiences primarily is to aid discovery,” Singh said. “If you think about when you go to a retail store, you are looking around — you’re immersed in the brand, you’re browsing. All of those elements are what we are trying to bring into the e-commerce experience, because today that discovery is typically not happening on a retailer’s e-commerce website.”
SetSail, the sales data platform that helps revenue teams do what wins, has been named to G2’s 2023 Best Software Awards on the Sales Products list. As the world’s largest and most trusted software marketplace, G2 is visited by 80 million software buyers each year. Its annual Best Software Awards rank the world’s best software companies and products based on authentic, timely reviews from real users. SetSail received G2’s Best Software Award recognition for helping revenue teams see every rep activity, know what’s effective, and drive behaviors that accelerate growth.
“This award is a testament to the success our customers are having,” said Haggai Levi, CEO of SetSail. “With tougher selling environments, revenue teams have to maximize the performance of their sales teams. Using a sales data platform helps them see what wins and quickly build a formula for faster revenue.”
An increasing number of utilities are offering time-of-use rate plans and other incentives to encourage EV owners to do their charging during off-peak hours. But what if a utility had a way to single out the troublemakers, identifying individual EV drivers who often charge during peak times in order to educate them about available incentive programs?
That’s what software provider Bidgely is offering with its Active Managed Charging feature, part of its UtilityAI EV Solution. Active Managed Charging (direct load control) is now part of Bidgely’s end-to-end EV Solution, which also includes EV Detection and Targeting, EV Passive Managed Charging (behavioral load shift) and EV Grid Analytics.
The company says Active Managed Charging can be launched in just weeks without data integration, as a turnkey standalone application. Over 25 OEMs are available for data connection, and 7 are available for active control: Ford, Hyundai, Jaguar, Land Rover, Toyota, Tesla and VW.
Bidgely’s EV Solution targets high-peak charging customers for incentive programs using its proprietary EV disaggregation technology. The company says its system can identify customers with EVs on the grid with 90-percent accuracy, and provide behind-the-meter visibility into their charging behaviors. This allows utilities to target their highest-value customers for load-shifting programs.
During last month’s NRF Big Show, executives from Puma and Mention Me took to the SAP Theatre stage to discuss marketing strategies in this post-pandemic period. The session, titled, “How Smart Brands Future-Proof Growth through Customer Advocacy,” featured David Witts, senior manager, CRM, Puma, and Darren Loveday, vice president, business development and solutions consulting, Mention Me.
Yuki Kishi, the chief financial officer of Sustainable Lab, a financial technology startup that gathers companies’ ESG data and provides it to investors and banks, was the guest at The Japan Times Sustainable Roundtable No. 27, hosted by Ross Rowbury. Sustainable Lab participated in SAP.iO’s Foundry Tokyo Data & Analytics Program.
The company wants to become a recognized platform in the quest for worldwide sustainability and contribute in a meaningful way to sustainability-based decision-making. In the coming years, they hope to expand their business operations outside their base of Japan to include Singapore, Europe and the United States. Kishi and Rowbury discussed a range of topics including diversity, Sustainable Lab’s initiatives and issues facing the sustainability transition today.
Wandelbots, the German-based no-code robotics software firm, recently opened a U.S. headquarters in Chicago to expand its global operations and accelerate human-centered robotics solutions in the manufacturing industry. Its signature software, Wandelbots Teaching, works the same with any robot, allowing users to control various models with no prior programming knowledge.
As the industrial robotics market continues to grow, developers and end users need an easy-to-use platform for robotic automation. The Wandelbots’ no-code solution is built to provide users of all competencies the ability to program a robot for maximum efficiency and automation.
“Our product is tailor-made for the U.S. market, which is ideal as a prerequisite for successful expansion,” said Christian Piechnick, Wandelbots founder and CEO. “The labor shortage in the United States is severe right now and is getting worse. Wandelbots can help to face this challenge and support U.S. companies on their way towards automation and digitization of manufacturing processes.”
Ultra-high-capacity and enhanced user experience ideal for broad range of industries, including couriers and distribution centers
Wise Systems unveiled an expanded version of its delivery automation platform that offers industry-leading, high-delivery capacity combined with further improvements to the easy-to-use interface. This latest edition gives route planners and dispatchers across industries an ideal mix of power, speed and automation to seamlessly manage large-scale delivery operations.
This enhanced edition of the Wise Systems platform is ideally suited for large-scale, high-volume last-mile delivery fleets across a range of industries, including couriers, retail, food, beverage and others. It is featured in the Wise Systems booth (Booth # 320) at Manifest 2023, a leading conference focused on the ecosystem of innovation and transformation in supply chain and logistics.
The Wise Systems platform expands the ability to route, visualize and manage stops to include large volumes, offering the most intuitive user experiences for planners and dispatchers. It also offers resource flexibility, easily accommodating hybrid workforce models such as a combination of gig workers and FTEs.
“Next-generation delivery software requires the perfect balance of automation and control,” said Chazz Sims, Wise Systems CEO and cofounder. “With additional capacity for high-volume industries, we’re streamlining planning and dispatcher roles, and complementing that with robust tools for managing the delivery day. This platform integrates with our clients’ last-mile ecosystems, and empowers their teams to improve operations while ensuring excellent customer service and driver experiences.”
Sounding Board, the first cohesive Leader Development Platform created to address the leadership gap, has made its latest research, “Coaching for Success: A New Wave of Offerings for a New Breed of Leaders,” available. Coaching is a proven high-value investment leveraged by high-performing companies, according to Josh Bersin, global industry analyst, and Nehal Nangia, director of Research for The Josh Bersin Company.
According to Bersin’s research, coaching and mentoring are the most important developmental and talent management needs for HR professionals, accounting for 48%, followed by in-depth courses (42%), more responsibility (39%), rotational assignments (36%), and external networking/conferences (36%). (32 percent). Coaching is particularly unique in that it helps develop leaders through experiences, exposure, and constructive evaluation.
Sounding Board Co-founder, President and Chief Coaching Officer Lori Mazan said, “Not only is continuous leadership development foundational to business success, it’s also a desirable developmental growth opportunity for employees. This research validates how Sounding Board’s ability to integrate both personalized and group coaching into leadership development programs helps to drive significantly higher talent and innovation outcomes.”
Labor Market Shift from Quantity to Quality Hiring Increasingly Escalates in Importance
Crosschq continues to drive the fundamental shift using outcomes to optimize talent acquisition. As market conditions fluctuate in response to global economic pressures, labor shortages and supply chain challenges, Crosschq is expanding and changing the paradigm for hiring.
Last fall, Crosschq published the industry’s first Quality of Hire research report, designed to help employers hire better. “More than 80 percent of talent leaders still believe they don’t have adequate data to optimize talent acquisition,” said Michael Fitzsimmons, CEO of Crosschq. “Talent acquisition leaders are shifting their mindsets from hiring quickly to hiring quality. That’s why whether during times of high-volume hiring or highly specialized hiring, organizations rely on Crosschq to save time and money while ensuring data-driven quality of hire.” To date, Crosschq has supported talent leaders in more than twenty-five million hiring decisions across its suite of applications.
During 2022, Crosschq’s revenue grew by 308 percent, and it welcomed its 400th customer, including market leaders Deloitte, WPP, Pinterest, Allegis, Saks Fifth Avenue and Roku. The company also forged new partnerships with Lattice, Sterling, Paradox, Teamable and Goodtime and expanded integrations with Workday, Greenhouse and SAP.
To further increase its analytics capabilities, Crosschq acquired TalentWall, the popular recruiting platform built by recruiters that enables them to collaborate productively through the use of data. TalentWall Co-founder, Jake Paul, joined Crosschq’s leadership team as Chief Product Officer. In his new role, Paul has been instrumental in driving deeper analytics capabilities to include more than seventy-five readily available Quality of Hire reports and added global capabilities in localizing infrastructure in the EU to support GDPR and support for Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin and other languages.
