Using machine learning and human metadata to identify global shifts early and throughout the trend lifecycle, nwo.ai enables corporations and governments to get insights on sectors ranging from consumer products to global war. Low, a Westpac Bank Trust Scholar, ran SAP’s Machine Learning efforts in APAC at age 17. Jaiswal, a drone pioneer and serial entrepreneur, developed geopolitical trading signals for hedge funds. The company has $3.5 million in seed funding.
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.
The COVID-19 pandemic put retailers in a challenging and unchartered situation to navigate. Businesses everywhere have had to learn how to stay afloat while keeping up to date with government guidelines – taking care of both customer safety and satisfaction with the service provided.
In many ways, retail tech has become crucial in fostering retailers’ relationships with their customers, helping businesses to operate in innovative, socially-distanced ways throughout 2020-2021. Celebrating this area of tech, TechRound have created our list of the top retail tech startups for 2021.
Mercaux, an SAP.iO startup participant, is on a mission to help re-invent physical retail stores by connecting them to the digital world. It’s new generation modular in-store platform connects stores to all the backend systems that ecommerce currently benefits from (such as order management, customer relationship management, product information management and payments), in addition to ecommerce itself. It then surfaces all this rich information into the hands of store associates through the Mercaux app, which is displayed on tablet or smartphone devices. This then allows the store associate to facilitate a much improved shopping experience by using assisted selling, digital styling, and mobile payment solutions to serve the customer.
Milk Moovement, which makes supply chain management software for the dairy industry, now controls about 10 percent of United States milk production and has bagged a $1.5 million grant from federal agency Sustainable Development Technology Canada.
CEO Robert Forsythe said in an interview that, in the wake of a United States expansion that saw the company move its sales office to Minnesota, Milk Moovement has inked deals with three of the country’s largest dairy cooperatives — including California Dairies, which includes more than 300 farms.
He said Milk Moovement’s revenue has grown about 350 percent on the back of the American deals, with annual recurring revenue set to hit $2 million by the end of this year.
In addition to a $4 million equity funding round last Spring, the money from SDTC follows a smaller, $100,000 grant from 2020.
“From there, they really looked at, ‘Okay, who’s high-performing and who’s growing really quickly, and who could benefit from further investment?” said Forsythe.
“They were just seeing traction and an ability to really double down on what we pitched for the $100K.”
Milk Moovement’s software is now used in the production of 23 billion pounds of milk annually — about a tenth of the 223 billion pounds produced every year in the United States. The technology is used by about 800 farms and Forsythe expects that number to double by early next year.
But he said $2 million of revenue from 10 percent of the market does not mean Milk Movement’s annual revenue from the U.S. will top out at $20 million. Dairy co-operatives are the company’s beachhead market, but next year, he expects to begin making inroads into the tenfold larger dairy processing industry.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stephanie Benedetto of Queen of Raw named a B2G 2021 Global Woman Supply Chain Leader in Sustainability alongside leaders from IBM, McDonalds, and Southwest Airlines.
An annual event, The Global Women Supply Chain Leaders Awards 2021 is here again. It is a celebration of women and achievement, honouring supply chain’s most accomplished female executives and next generational leaders. Women have worked hard to steadily carve their niche in the traditionally male-dominated supply chain industry.
Do not miss this opportunity to engage in new insights, participate in a wide-ranging and thought-provoking panel discussion, keynote & live Q&As, networking with peers and experts to further inspire and drive on key supply chain topics and themes related to women’s empowerment, equality, and excellence.
November 25, 2021 — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today launched a sustainability-focused virtual startup program at SAP.iO Foundry Singapore. Six international startups have been selected by a jury of SAP experts and partners to join the program.
New ideas and innovative solutions are essential to uncover the impact of emissions and waste across every facet of a business. The selected startups use next generation technologies to drive sustainability outcomes for companies across Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ), in areas such as climate action, circular economy, and socially responsible supply chains.
Over the next 13 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.
“Achieving our sustainability goals will require all of us to work together at pace, as our planet’s time is running out,” says Paul Marriott, President SAP Asia Pacific and Japan. “Initiatives such as this SAP.iO Foundry program are critical in identifying, enabling, and promoting innovative solutions that can change how our customers’ business is run, and ultimately the impact we have on the world. This program not only helps start-ups accelerate their growth, but it’s also one of the quickest ways to bring the latest innovation to thousands of our customers globally.”
The following startups are participating in the sustainability in APJ program:
About SAP.iO
SAP.iO delivers new partnerships and products for SAP by accelerating and scaling startup innovation as well as incubating employee ventures. SAP.iO brings together innovators from every region, industry, and line of business to transform how businesses run. Since 2017, SAP.iO has helped 330+ external startups and internal ventures accelerate their growth while enabling thousands of SAP customers to access innovation. For more information, visit https://sap.io/.
Companies that deal in fresh produce and are looking for more advanced quality control of their fruits and vegetables throughout the supply chain might want to check out Clarifruit’s mobile-friendly platform.
By simply taking a photo from a smartphone of their product, Clarifruit’s intuitive app can then autogenerate a report with data for more refined inspections and analysis. Officials say it can provide both reassurance and times savings for marketing teams, wholesalers, retailers and distribution centres.
“Clarifruit has built the only end-to-end automatic QC platform in the market, offering both automated, mobile data collection for the QC inspector as well as QC analytics for the sales and operational departments”, CEO Avi Schwartzer said. “Additional key differentiators are our proprietary technologies, including a patent-protected, deep-learning computer-vision engine as well as a rating algorithm that leverages an ever-growing database of produce photos and attributes.”
Clarifrut leaders say its platform can produce quality reports on nearly a dozen different categories, including apples, bananas, blueberries, cherries, grapes, lemons, mangoes, melons, oranges, peaches pineapples and plums as well as easy-peelers. More items may be added in the future as the business grows.
The cloud-based startup from Israel which had been in the works for several years, received a £4.5 million infusion prior to the pandemic, including a nearly £1.9 million investment from the European Innovation Council Accelerator.
After downloading the Clarifrut app, users can take a picture that they want analyzed. That photo then goes through a process aided by “computer-vision technology” that assesses its surface, size, stem, colour and imperfections. Those photos are then compared against Clarifruit’s Big Data library which contains millions of produce images. Clarifruit says “this information can be configured ahead of time to take the inspection type and your specific list of inspected attributes into account.”
As for getting beyond the skin or peel to the heart of the product, Clarifruit says its platform can be configured to work with any ERP solution and “intelligent integrations with third-party hardware devices” to provide more defined qualities such as Brix or firmness.
Users can track their products and reports and get real-time information through the app and their own management dashboard. That dashboard contains data on each inspection, include date, time and location. Reports can be uploaded and converted into Excel spreadsheet if users desire.
Among the applications Clarifruit supports are pre-harvest and final products, inbound and outbound distribution centers, coolers, intake, and front of stores.
3i Inc.’s Beamo, an enterprise-grade digital twin solution for mission-critical facilities and a member of Born2Global Centre, took home the trophy for Best Enterprise Solution at the AWE 2021 12th Auggie Awards in Santa Clara, CA. The Auggie Awards is an annual award ceremony that showcases the best of the best in augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. The Best Enterprise Solution award was presented by Christine Perey, Board Member and Founder of AR for Enterprise Alliance.
Travel retailer Paradies Lagardère will have more than 20 stores in airports around the U.S. and Canada deploying MishiPay’s mobile self-checkout technology in time for Christmas and the expected surge in holiday traffic.
The UK-based technology company’s in-house developed Scan, Pay & Go system has been selected by Paradies—part of the second-biggest airport retailer in the world Lagardère Travel Retail—after a successful test at two locations, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport in Florida and Charlotte Douglas Airport, in North Carolina.
The airport rollout includes some key hubs with high footfall such as Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles and Phoenix Sky Harbor, plus Vancouver and Toronto airports in Canada. A total of 26 Paradies stores will offer MishiPay from an estate of more than 950, including restaurants, in about 100 airports. Gregg Paradies, president and CEO at Paradies Lagardère, described the current expansion as “phase two” suggesting that further openings were possible.
The decision to expand was based on several factors including customer satisfaction levels in the test stores. They averaged 4.85 out of 5, with over 90% of shoppers making a purchase when they opened the app.
Need a new outfit for a party, a wedding, or an awards ceremony? Want something special to perk up a grey day? Don’t buy it – rent it. By doing so, you’ll be part of a circular economy revolution to use more and own less.
Imagine having a wardrobe full of clothes you only wear once or twice – but instead of discarding them in landfill, you just return them to the brand you got them from and rent a whole new set for the season ahead.
Imagine renting just about everything else you only use once in a while – equipment for camping, sports or home workouts, tableware for a Christmas bash, musical instruments and clothes your kids will soon abandon or outgrow anyway, medical devices, tools, luggage for your next world tour – you name it, if it’s not perishable, rent it.
That’s the vision of Lizee, a French startup providing eCommerce and logistics software as a service. They believe that the manufacturing of goods will be cut in half during the next 25 years.
“Together with our supply chain partners, we offer a turnkey solution for brands and retailers that want to quickly transition into the circular economy by renting and reselling their products,” said Tanguy Frécon, the company’s co-founder and chairman. “Brands are realizing that it makes business sense to produce fewer goods but make them more robust so they last longer. Producing for reuse derives a different type of margin. The products become the resources.”
Lizee’s offering comes just in time as retailers are facing groundbreaking regulations in France that forbid the destruction of clothing, cosmetics, electrical items, and other goods that haven’t been sold. The ban is part of a wide-ranging anti-waste law passed by the French parliament last year.
Tanguy Frécon is convinced sustainability and profitability go hand in hand. The rent and resell business model is a new channel for brands to interact with their existing customers and reach new target audiences.
“With these new circular business models brands and retailers can deliver their sustainable transformation, clear inventory without discounting, target new consumers, and boost margins,” said Frécon.
The market is massive. Back in 2019, Tanguy was inspired by McKinsey’s State of Fashion Report which named end of ownership as one of the key consumer shifts retailers should prepare for. The report stated that “the lifespan of fashion products is being stretched as pre-owned, refurbished, repaired, and rental business models continue to evolve and consumers have demonstrated an appetite to shift away from traditional ownership to newer ways in which to access product.”
Founded in Ingolstadt in 2016 by Dr. Fabian Rusitschka and now with headquarters in Munich, German arculus is revolutionizing traditional production line manufacturing as the world’s first software and robotics company to offer a complete modular production platform, from concept to operations.
Almost every company that sells a physical product has a production line, though these have hardly changed since Henry Ford developed the techniques of mass production in 1926. Using AI-powered software and autonomous mobile robots, arculus transforms manufacturers’ one-dimensional assembly lines into scalable, flexible assembly modules. Planning, simulation, operation, and optimization can all take place within this one software system. The platform’s core functions include digital route planning based on real-time traffic data and anticipatory route planning to prevent congestion.
Since its inception in 2016 arculus has grown from strength to strength. After receiving Series A funding amounting to €16 million in May 2020, its acquisition by Jungheinrich a little over a year later is a clear marker of the startup’s success. Having conducted a successful pilot project in Supermarket 2.0 with Aldi Ingolstadt, arculus has a proven track record in AMR (associated management resources) and smart logistics.
Commercetools, a Munich-based cloud-native headless commerce platform, announced that it has acquired Frontastic, developer of Composable Frontend Platform that unites business and development teams to build e-commerce sites on headless fast.
The acquisition comes two months after securing funds in a Series C round as the company focuses on broadening the reach of its commerce technology to support global enterprises and reinvent e-commerce.
“We’ve been partnering with the Frontastic team since the very beginning and see a huge market opportunity for their Composable Frontend Platform around the world,” says Dirk Hoerig, CEO and co-founder of commercetools.
“With this powerful combination, we’re bringing the MACH (Microservices, API, Cloud, and Headless) movement to the mid-market as well as to digital business teams so that more companies can benefit from modern commerce experiences,” he added.
Founded in 2017, Frontastic provides modern front-end technologies for commerce sites.
The company’s “Composable Frontend Platform” enables merchants and brands to build websites easily and fast on top of headless by removing complexity for developers. It is used by international brands such as Universal Music, Flaconi, and APG & Co.
“We’re excited to become part of the impressive commercetools growth story,” says Thomas Gottheil, CEO and co-founder of Frontastic.
He adds, “We created Frontastic to help enterprises build the best shopping experiences – regardless of which commerce platform they use. By joining forces with commercetools, we can support even more brands on a global scale.”
Berlin-based Jina.ai, an open-source startup that uses neural search to help its users find information in their unstructured data (including videos and images), announced that it has raised a $30 million Series A funding round led by Canaan Partners. New investor Mango Capital, as well as existing investors GGV Capital, SAP.iO and Yunqi Partners also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $39 million to date.
