It’s safe to say that for most consumers, any thought of “manufacturing” lives and dies on whatever store shelf they decide to grab their shampoo from. But there’s a lot — LOT — more that goes into any good reaching that shelf in the first place. Unfortunately, the process is so complex that a lot of important data gets muddied thanks to the often outdated process used to track it. David Klein, Co-founder and President of Inspectorio, is out to change that.
wagely, Asia’s fastest-growing financial wellness platform has raised $8.3 million in an oversubscribed pre-series A funding as the company scales its platform to help workers access their earned salaries on demand in Indonesia and Bangladesh. The funding comes in just seven months after securing its seed funding.
The oversubscribed round was led by East Ventures (Growth Fund) with participation from existing backers, including Integra Partners, the Asian Development Bank, Global Founders Capital, Trihill Capital, Blauwpark Partners, and 1982 Ventures which brings the total funding raised to $14 million in less than two years.
wagely also disclosed that it secured the backing of Central Capital Ventura, the VC arm of Indonesia’s largest private bank, Bank Central Asia (“BCA”). The investment into wagely underpins the commitment to expand the digital financial ecosystem and drive financial wellness solutions across Indonesia.
With stagnant incomes, rising costs of living, and lack of savings, workers are under daily pressure staying afloat financially. The options for this segment are very limited when faced with an urgent need for cash. The result is a vicious cycle of repeated reliance on payday loans and other costly financial products leading to omnipresent financial stress among the workforce. Launched in 2020, wagely is building a holistic financial wellness platform with earned wage access (“EWA”) at its core that lets workers of partner employers access their earned wages in real-time. The concept, which has been proven in several markets across the globe, has been adopted by some of the most renowned organizations, including Walmart, Pizza Hut, and Visa, to reduce turnover, enhance productivity, and increase business savings.
Flowlity, an innovative AI-based supply chain planning and forecasting solution, has secured £5 million in funding, led by Fortino Capital, to expand throughout Europe. The funding will be used to accelerate its development with the aim to becoming an industry leader by providing innovate ways of reducing waste across the entire supply chain – enabling companies to save money and reduce their carbon footprint.
Wilhelm Myrer of Empower.eco talks about his blockchain tech to digitize the journey from linear to circular economies on Vinnie Mirchandani’s Analyst Cam blog.
The US EPA defines a circular economy as one which “reduces material use, redesigns materials to be less resource intensive, and recaptures “waste” as a resource to manufacture new materials and products.”
Immerse, an Irvine, CA-based provider of a virtual reality language teaching and learning platform, raised $9M in Series B funding.
The round, which brings total capital raised to $11.5m, was led by Eagle Venture Fund and Mustang Creek Capital.
The company intends to use the funds to grow its team, to invest in continued product innovation and to launch its VR app onto other major VR platforms. Immerse plans to grow its global team from 12 to 35 over the next four months and is already hiring for a variety of education, engineering and marketing roles.
Led by CEO Quinn Taber, Immerse is a virtual reality language teaching and learning platform in the metaverse used in partnership with the world’s top language schools to deliver VR English language learning experiences to students in the Asian, European and Latin American markets.
For the time being, the focus of the collaborations is on expanding their offerings in the area of electric mobility. The power grid was not built with today’s demand for e-mobility in mind – but with gridX’s AI-based charging management, seamless charging can become a reality.
With the installation of charging infrastructure in buildings, underground garages and parking areas, the load on the grid or at house connections increases enormously. Dynamic load management enables efficient distribution and control of energy. In this way, sufficient charging infrastructure can be implemented without expensive grid expansion.
With the four new partnerships, gridX is consolidating its role as a platform solutions provider in the field of e-mobility.
Electris
With the Luxembourg-based energy supplier and grid operator, Electris, gridX gains another international customer. gridX and Electris already implemented their first joint pilot projects in the field of home energy management in 2019. The new partnership enables cost-efficient, comprehensive solutions for charging infrastructure in Luxembourg, including hardware, billing services and dynamic load management (DLM). Electris customers receive a full service package that encompasses planning, installation and operation. In addition, the gridX platform will enable comprehensive management for non-public and semi-public charging infrastructure (CPO).
SMART/LAB Innovationsgesellschaft mbH
SMART/LAB works with more than 245 utilities and over 100 companies to realize innovative services, products and concepts in e-mobility. With “ladenetz” for municipal utilities and “ladebusiness” for corporate customers, SMART/LAB currently offers the largest municipal publicly accessible charging network. By working with gridX, SMART/LAB can continually extend their solutions to include things like DLM, standardize the user experience (front-end integration via API), put together complete packages for tenders (for billing and DLM) and implement further research projects in the field of e-mobility (electrification of transportation).
DEW21 GmbH
The Dortmund energy supplier DEW21 already has many years of experience and has realized numerous projects in the field of charging infrastructure. With DLM, DEW21 complements its product portfolio and establishes it as the only solution for e-mobility projects in the catchment area. In the first year of the cooperation, at least 17 locations are to be equipped with DLM. The focus of the partnership is on scaling concepts, such as public charging infrastructure and multi-site customers. By using the API interface to gridX, DEW21 also opens up the possibility for data-driven business development and can thus continue to offer suitable solutions tailored to charging behavior in the future.
eliso GmbH
Throughout Germany, eliso supports companies, commercial and residential properties on their journey to building their own charging infrastructure. With a fully comprehensive service, the Stuttgart-based charging infrastructure specialist plans, installs and operates holistic and suitable charging solutions. A network of regional project managers and certified installation partners across Germany allows eliso to offer holistic and suitable charging solutions for companies, from planning and subsidy consulting, to installation and operation. With a specially developed DLM solution from gridX, eliso aims to become the full-service provider for cross-industry, intelligent and, above all, future-proof charging infrastructure in Germany. In addition, the platform solution enables a simple, central overview of all sites under its own operational management for optimized (multi-) site management.
David Balensiefen, Co-Founder and CEO of gridX, says: “We are really looking forward to working with our new partners, as each of these companies is driving the energy and mobility transition. To take e-mobility to the next level, dynamic load management is essential. Equally important are manufacturer-independent end-to-end solutions, which is possible through a long-term partnership with us. Our partners are able to deliver lasting benefits to their customers, easily expand and adapt their offerings, scale projects more easily, and reduce both costs and emissions.”
Matthew Wright of Specright presents on the huge payback from precise specifications in products, formulas and packaging.
Specright was one of the startups in their Sustainability cohort last year but as you will hear precision in specifications can have an impact in every process which touches raw materials, ingredients, formulas, packaging and finished goods.
Matthew’s passion comes from a couple of decades in the packaging industry. As he describes in his book The Evolution of Products and Packaging, we have seen an explosion in SKUs and complexity in supply chains. As he says, existing ERP, PLM and other software were designed before complexity grew exponentially, and the lack of focus on specifications is the root cause of many supply chain issues we are seeing. BTW, Gartner identified them as a Cool Vendor in their Supply Chain category in 2020.
The serial entrepreneur Amir Haramaty reveals his new startup, which aims to organize the information of the organization. Haramaty describes how he will perform this in a different manner, why he opened an office far away from Tel-Aviv and why he prefers to employ combat soldiers without a technological background.
Tell me if this sounds familiar: you are concluding one more meeting, whether through Zoom, in or out the office – and you want to summarize the meeting.
After all, a large amount of important information is discussed during these meetings. When will you be able to do this? When you return to the office, in the evening, or perhaps even the next day? And what amount of that critical information will be included in the email summary, which will then be concealed in the mountain of emails? And what happens when you, or the person who receives your summaries, leaves the organization? Where does all this information end up?
It is estimated that only 10% of the critical information is stored in the organization, and even less is documented and shared with the rest of the organization.
The Israeli startup aiOla, which we are revealing today for the first time, wants to address exactly this agonizing problem, and to do so without complex interfaces or the application of new software.
aiOla is not just another tool which forces all your employees to learn the new interfaces and menus, not to mention the headaches that could cause you to postpone the on-the-job training, but a solution which connects to the main communication sources currently being used in the organization, whether it be WhatsApp, Slack, Microsoft Teams or more or less any other communication app. Amir Haramaty, the serial entrepreneur behind the startup, assured me that “If you know how to work with WhatsApp, you will know how to work with aiOla”.
The concept of aiOla is both simple and complex. Have you just finished a meeting or a session? You simply send an audio message to an aiOla bot that is connected to one of your communication services, and describe in your own words everything that occurred and everything you experienced.
Despite embracing new remote and hybrid work, employees fear being left behind in career advancement if they are not working onsite. A third of employees (32%) prefer the hybrid environment but nearly half (43%) believe in-person work is best for their career advancement. That’s according to a new survey of 912 full-time U.S. workers, “The New Hybrid Workplace, Built on Resilience, Transparency, and Trust,” co-authored by Jan Bruce (meQuilibrium) and Jeanne Meister (Executive Networks).
“It is no longer true that being physically present in the office results in more opportunities for career advancement, as the past two years of remote and hybrid work have shown,” said Jeanne Meister, Executive Vice President, Executive Networks. “For those employees working hybrid or remotely, the avenues for increasing their visibility within the organization are not always clear-cut.”
HR policies have largely focused on supporting on-site workers, because they traditionally have comprised the majority of the workforce. In fact, before the pandemic, only 6% of those employed worked primarily remotely and about three quarters of workers had never worked remotely, according to NCCI. But as more employees experience the value and flexibility of hybrid work, leaders must re-imagine the business landscape and communicate these changes to every employee.
PS27 Ventures, an early-stage investment firm founded by Jim Stallings, hosted the Female Founders Forum on March 4, 2022, which among the speaker line up, included a panel of venture capitalists, as well as Ellen Latham, founder of Orange Theory Fitness, an exercise franchise that hit $1 billion in sales in 2018.
There were multiple takeaways specific to entrepreneurship — from what makes a good pitch deck to how to appeal to investors. However, many of the insights were also relevant for solopreneurs who don’t intend to raise money or even in-house professionals who don’t plan to start a business.
Tailor your message
“What can you do to make it easy for the investor to preview the company? Write up the email so it embeds the top 3-5 things to see right away. Make it easy to click on your website….If you’re on a pitch night, tailor to the audience. Create a 30-second, 1-minute and 5-minute elevator pitch, plus the pitch decks. You want different formats for audiences, for an initial introduction, for detailed in-person meetings. Accommodate…” — Sallie Jian, SAP.iO New York
SAP.iO is an incubator within SAP, the software company. Jian’s advice to make it easy on the investor is transferable to any relationship you’re trying to nurture—current boss, prospective employer, customer, colleague or other collaborator. While Jian’s example focus on good email writing (so important!), it also applies to your LinkedIn profile (include an easy way for people to get in touch) or even email signature (include your website or LinkedIn URL so people can easily learn more about you).
Creating multiple pitch formats depending on where you are is another gem applicable to both business owners and professionals. You want to have different ways of introducing yourself (the networking pitch) because, depending on the situation, you will have more or less time and your audience will want to know or need to know different things about you. Accommodating your audience, as Jian rightly puts it, is a way of showing you understand and respond to their needs.
This week Lisa Skeete Tatum meets with Tom to celebrate IWD. Lisa is founder and CEO of Landit, a personalized career pathing platform created to increase the success and engagement of women and diverse groups in the workplace.
Walmart Canada is the first major retailer in Canada to offer carbon-neutral last mile delivery for e-commerce purchases sold and shipped by Walmart, including online grocery.
This Walmart-funded program will offset an estimated 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of taking over 5,000 cars off the road, in its first year. This program is incremental to Walmart’s global ambition to achieve Zero Emissions by 2040 without the use of offsets for scope 1 and 2 emissions. Funding carbon offsets for last-mile delivery of e-commerce purchases, including online grocery, allows Walmart Canada to make an immediate impact while working with our third-party carriers to reduce emissions along with us.
Carbon offsets allow companies and consumers to fund projects that reduce the effects of climate change, compensating for the emissions created from actions like transportation. Walmart has engaged EcoCart, a sustainability technology company, to calculate and validate the emissions created from online orders and to purchase carbon offset credits from high-quality projects in the exact dollar amount required to reduce or avoid those emissions.
“Funding carbon offsets for last-mile delivery in our eCommerce operations is an opportunity for Walmart to make an impact today as we work towards becoming a regenerative company and eliminating emissions across our business,” explains Laurent Duray, SVP, eCommerce, Walmart Canada. “Minimizing the environmental impact of the last mile has been top of mind as customer behaviour has shifted towards increased reliance on our fast, easy and convenient delivery options for grocery and online orders.”
The projects Walmart’s offsets will support are aligned with the company’s journey to becoming a regenerative company and will support a portfolio of Canadian-based initiatives that work to either actively remove carbon from the atmosphere or prevent future carbon from being emitted. The project portfolio is projected to include initiatives that protect forests, enable composting and waste diversion, aid with refrigerant management, and turn biomass into fuel. These Walmart-supported projects will also ensure they benefit the communities as part of their scope with key economic and environmental elements such as providing jobs, education opportunities, or protecting endangered species and biodiversity.
EcoCart is proud to collaborate with Walmart Canada as they become the first major retailer in Canada to offer a carbon-neutral last-mile delivery,” said Peter Twomey, COO, EcoCart. “It’s so exciting to see industry leaders like Walmart work toward a more sustainable future that benefits everyone. By funding offsets on behalf of their customers for last-mile delivery, Walmart is making a positive impact on our collective efforts to regenerate the environment.”
Along with calculating and validating Walmart’s last-mile emissions and sourcing and vetting high-quality carbon offset projects, EcoCart will also be providing quarterly impact and emissions reporting. This reporting will allow Walmart to track estimated emissions and establish benchmarks for its third-party carrier partners.
Saara Inc CEO and Founder Sachin Garg have joined Forbes NEXT 1000 fueled by nominations from worldwide and screened by top business leaders and entrepreneurs. The evaluation was made based on parameters such as revenue, business model, funding, impact the business creates, and story behind the start of the business.
“I would like to thank Forbes for acknowledging and supporting what we are trying to do here at Saara, especially with market-disrupting products like EcoReturns. It motivates us to push ourselves further towards making eCommerce more sustainable, both economically and ecologically,”
He plans to leverage the listing to market the brand to a wider audience to help them gain profits and meet their sustainability goals, simultaneously staying connected to future partners and investors.
Analyst Cam: Carlos Oliveira of Algramo presents on a different way to package and consume CPG products. Reduced plastic pollution, bite size economics, other benefits.
Algramo’s delivery mechanism is a vending machine dispenser where consumers refill in their reusable smart containers. Carlos says these containers can last up to 250 uses. RFID IDs in the containers and mobile apps help track consumption, container life and reuse patterns and also have a gamification angle. Carlos goes into some of the dispensing and sanitation technology.
The value propositions – Retailers save on shelf space. Producers like Unilever, Nestle, Colgate and Clorox are some of their customers who ship in bulk and save on packaging. Consumers pay for bite-size purchases at their point of need e,g, detergents are sold in public laundromats. The world benefits from reduced plastic pollution. Carlos presents on data on their plastic, water and C02 savings.
GenLots uses machine learning SaaS to optimize supply planning, saving up to 30% on inventory values and 50% on inbound logistics costs. The startup has received investment from the global accelerator Plug and Play.
With the launch of its Safety Stock Optimizer in 2020, GenLots’s founder and Co-CEO Simon Schenker introduced the first platform fully dedicated to supply planning aiming to transform existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that have barely changed in the past 30 years.
The Geneva-based startup combines a new costing model and proprietary reinforcement learning algorithm, which builds optimal supply strategies, breaking down the financial impact of planning decisions in real-time and drawing simulations on purchasing parameters and more. With their approach, GenLots achieves up to 50% reduction in inbound deliveries (which positively impacts the CO2 footprint), up to 30% reduction in inventory, and leverages discounts negotiated by procurement departments. These results become visible within three months as GenLots is served by rapid integration – as SAP Silver Partner. Furthermore, GenLots enhances the experience for supply planners and their colleagues in related departments and helps create a standard throughout the company.
Players in consumer goods, pharma, chemicals and industrial goods use the platform. Among them are large companies like Barry Callebaut, a global leader in chocolate production, Huber + Suhner, a major Swiss manufacturing company and pharma company Merck.
