2020 witnessed a plethora of changes, particularly with tech companies cementing their place on the market. I expect more of the same as I head into 2021. Before discussing the 15 companies to look for in 2021, you ought to be aware of four major industries that have drastically affected online presence, leads, and revenue generation. These four industries are Email Marketing, eCommerce, CyberSecurity, and Customer Experience.
Sompo Japan (Tokyo), the second-largest non-life insurance company in Japan, has selected EasySend (Tel Aviv) to introduce the vendor’s no-code digital customer journey platform into Sompo’s marine insurance accident notification system.
To meet customers’ evolving needs and expectations, Sompo Japan reports that it has devoted three digital labs, in Tokyo, Tel Aviv, and Silicon Valley. Sompo Digital Labs focus on promoting digital transformation, exploring innovative, emerging start-ups, and conducting joint proof-of-concept projects with SOMPO Holding’s different business units. According to a joint statement from Sompo and EasySend, Sompo Digital Labs played a key role in introducing EasySend’s no-code development platform to Sompo Japan, resulting in a commercial agreement between the two companies aiming to improve Sompo Japan’s customer experience (CX) and work efficiency.
EasySend provides a cloud-based, no-code development platform to insurance and other financial service companies in Europe, the United States, and Israel. The company says it transforms paperwork into digital journeys in a very short period of time. EasySend says its platform does not require any programming expertise and allows non-developers to create digital journeys quickly and easily with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and pre-made templates. The firm asserts that its platform greatly improves CX and reduces time-to-market as well as operational costs. By continuously developing digital journeys to improve customer experience and operational efficiency, EasySend says it enables businesses to flexibly respond to the ever-changing business environment and customer needs.
Procurement software company Archlet offering an AI-based strategic sourcing platform, today announces that it has completed a $2.8 million oversubscribed seed round led by Munich-based Senovo and Berlin-based La Famiglia. The funds will fuel growth and allow the startup to democratize data-based decision making in strategic sourcing.
Alongside Senovo and La Famiglia are further investors including Nicolaus Schefenacker, David Nothacker and Julius Köhler, the founders of unicorn start-up sennder. Existing investors Wingman Ventures, Flavio Pfaffhauser (Founder of Beekeeper) and Karin Hagen-Gierer (Chief Procurement Officer at Ardagh Group) also participated in the round.
The capital will enable Archlet to address supply chain challenges as companies are under increasing pressure to create bottom-line savings through their procurement departments while also incorporating non-price parameters in order to diversify risks, increase sustainability and improve supplier diversity. This pressure was greater than ever in 2020 when global supply chains were put under unprecedented stress due to the global pandemic crisis. Existing sourcing software solutions are mainly focused on simple price analysis, and they are complicated to use, making sourcing a tedious experience for company buyers.
The combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and internet of things (IoT) technology may be the biggest disruption to the industrial refrigeration industry since the invention of the first commercial ice-making machine two centuries ago.
In this second year of a modern pandemic, startup Youtiligent has developed an AIoT-based technology to help companies keep vaccines cold across complex distribution supply chains. Moving far beyond sensor-based temperature monitoring, Youtiligent’s promise is to securely capture real-time electric power anomalies in onsite commercial refrigerators, allowing distributors to take action before vaccine spoilage.
“Sensors that capture when a product’s temperature has decreased below the acceptable degree range are not effective when it comes to distributing something like the coronavirus vaccine,” said Avichai Belitsky, co-founder of Youtiligent. “We combined AI with IoT technology to deliver real-time alerts for cost-effective predictive and preventive maintenance. Organizations can act faster in making data-driven business decisions based on what’s happening in real-time, such as sending in a repair technician, before it’s too late.”
EKG for cooling appliances
Based in Israel, Youtiligent is piloting its offering with healthcare organizations in that country. Belitsky also expected high interest from refrigeration manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies, as well as medical and other institutions with clinics, pharmacies, and research labs, such as hospitals and universities. The startup continues to serve customers in its original target markets that include the food and beverage and retail industries.
“This is what we call ‘EKG for appliances,’ tracking electric current across compressors, engines, and pumps that power any cooling machine, whether it’s making ice cream to be sold the next week, or cooling expensive chemicals that researchers safely store and use over many years,” said Belitsky. “Every machine action has a unique fingerprint, and being able to track each one with algorithms yields valuable, actionable insights.”
In episode 50, you’ll hear insights on top skills needed in the tech world, what’s driving leadership in global supply chains, the common threads of success in scaling innovation, and how to leverage the SDGs in your partnerships and hiring practices.
Listen as Sallie Jian shares why she decided to lead the SAP.iO NY foundry.
Shippeo, the European leader in real-time transportation visibility (RTTV), today announces a $32 million investment. This new round is co-led by Battery Ventures, a global, technology focused investment firm and existing investors (NGP Capital, ETF Partners, Partech and Bpifrance Digital Venture). Shippeo will use the investment to strengthen its market-leading position and continue delivering on product innovation.
The Covid-19 crisis has highlighted the need for supply-chain visibility, with major shippers across industries needing enhanced transparency more than ever before. With many countries in lockdown and with unpredictable border closures, companies with advanced visibility solutions managed to mitigate transport delays and the associated operational inefficiencies. Beyond tracking shipments, visibility platforms now give supply chains the data-driven transparency to meet varying customer demands in uncertain and challenging market conditions.
Despite the unprecedented global economic impact of Covid-19, Shippeo has more than doubled its subscription revenues year on year, while successfully increasing its customer base in 2020 with major industrial brands and fourth-party logistics providers such as Kuehne+Nagel, Total, Hager or Krone. Last October, Shippeo acquired the French company oPhone, bringing major customers in the retail and manufacturing sectors into its community. Finally, Shippeo’s total workforce has more than doubled in the last 12 months, now totaling 160 employees, of which 45% work in R&D.
UNICEPTA and Ubermetrics will in future drive forward their technological development based on a joint strategic mission. Both companies will team up and further expand one of the best AI-based intelligence platforms for communication and marketing on the international market.
In episode six of the Ascent podcast, Andrew Tarvin speaks with Vanessa Liu, Vice President of SAP.iO Foundries North America. They discuss topics including diversity and inclusion in the start-up community, habits of successful entrepreneurs, and Vanessa’s experience working with founders at SAP’s accelerator. Andrew and Vanessa also discuss thoughts on their outlook for 2021 and the changing nature of the start-up community.
SAP’s newest employee-led venture, Paid Pronto by SAP, is an application that automates accounts receivable processes. It has received seed investment and officially joined SAP.iO Venture Studio with the goal of building a new growth business to impact SAP’s business and customers.
SAP.iO Venture Studio cultivates an environment for in-house innovation by investing in small, entrepreneurial teams to build, launch, and scale products that address some of the biggest problems in enterprise. SAP employees are encouraged to tap into their entrepreneurial spirit to pitch product ideas to the program. After a competitive selection process, the founders can develop their product inside the company.
The idea for Paid Pronto came out of an understanding of how difficult and time-consuming the process of collecting money can be for businesses. In the U.S., Atradius reports that 47% of invoices are not paid on time, and approximately two of every three late invoices still are not paid after another 30 days. Typically, to get a customer to pay these invoices, teams have to manually follow up to understand why customers aren’t paying, help them work through issues like billing disputes and invoice updates, and update internal teams on progress.
At enterprise scale, this is a massive undertaking. Keeping up with all of these processes for thousands of invoices and customers can often prove to be challenging. Therefore, improving accounts receivable operations can provide significant benefits for working capital management.
Paid Pronto aims to drive cash into businesses faster by accelerating receivable processes through automation. It does this by automating standardized tasks, like customer correspondence, to support receivables teams in covering their large book of customers. Through the automated communication solution, customers receive personalized and easy-to-digest reminders beginning when an invoice is first released until payment is received. These communications help ensure customers have full transparency into what they owe and can flag issues or questions earlier in the process.
Paid Pronto aims to deliver value to enterprises in three ways. First, it increases the total cash collected by improving customer response rates and getting more customers to pay their invoices. Second, it decreases the days of outstanding sales by surfacing issues sooner. And third, it helps reduce the total number of open invoices, limiting the number of items a collector needs to follow-up on.
Josephine Monberg interviews Tobias Buxhoidt, Founder and CEO at parcelLab and Max Kissel, Founder and CEO at Soley.
COVID-19 has caused disruption across the global economy, forcing companies to alter tried-and-true business processes and meet customers where they are.
With in-person interactions no longer the default option, companies are investing in digital commerce sites for business and consumer transactions.
SAP Commerce Cloud is aiming to make it easier for businesses to open these digital storefronts and customer engagement platforms to support B2B, B2C and direct-to-consumer sites all on a single platform, said Paula Hansen, senior vice president and chief revenue officer for SAP Customer Experience.
Cultivate was initially founded through Samsung NEXT’s ‘Entrepreneur in Residence’ accelerator program. In 2019, SAP’s early-stage venture arm, SAP.iO, participated in the AI company’s Series A funding where it raised $8 million to grow its go-to-market team and product offerings. Since then, Cultivate has accumulated a total of $10 million in venture capital and partnered with multiple leading academic institutions to further its mission of a digital leadership platform.
Cultivate was founded with the vision of empowering next-generation leaders through an AI-based leadership development platform that supports them in improving their teams’ employee experience. The platform uses the latest techniques in Machine Learning (ML) and Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) to derive social insights from digital channels to help leaders realise their full potential.
According to Joe Freed, co-founder and CEO of Cultivate, the company aims to address a leadership development gap to help managers self-evaluate their digital communications with insights on their own behaviours. He comments:
“Managers are overloaded with email and chat, but they still have to be managers of people. When it comes to things like well-being, burnout, inclusion, and engagement, a lot of how you can influence your team can be through digital communication. But we don’t have a lot of tools to help us with this.”
Enterprise leaders who opt-in to the AI coaching platform get access to a digital coach that scans and analyses the words and the metadata collected from various digital communication channels such as Office 365, Google Suite, Teams and Slack. The Cultivate AI for leaders then delivers personalised, continuous and easy-to-execute actionable leadership insights to managers themselves, helping them strengthen their workplace relationships and ultimately improve the employee experience.
According to Cultivate, a manager using the digital leadership coaching platform can also give feedback to the Cultivate AI to adjust the feedbacks being generated based on the context of their relationships with their team members.
Companies using the Cultivate AI for leaders include:
At SAP, the Cultivate platform was deployed at an initial small pilot. After confirming that the AI’s feedbacks were highly beneficial, the SAP team did a larger roll-out to approximately 250 sales managers, where 79% of those eligible to participate chose to do so.
Today, SAP has deployed Cultivate to over 500 managers. The German multinational company reports that 96% of managers have remained engaged with Cultivate since the initial roll-out.
Adverity, a leading marketing data intelligence platform, has ranked number one in the Momentum Grid Report for Big Data Integration in the G2 Winter 2021 Report. It also continues to be recognised as a momentum leader across four other categories – Marketing Analytics Software, Data Visualization Software, E-commerce Data Integration and ETL Tools.
Top for product satisfaction in the Big Data Integration category with a score of 96%, Adverity also holds second place in the ETL Tools category; boasting a higher product satisfaction score than the category leader.
It maintains third position in the E-commerce Data Integration category, while solidifying its status in the top five Data Visualizations products and remaining in the top ten Marketing Analytics Software products.
G2 rankings are based on data provided by verified users that share their experiences and feedback on software. The platform has more than one million independent user reviews and is read by over four million users each month. Every quarter, G2 Crowd publishes its Grid report, ranking software by extracting data from multiple online sources to determine market presence, satisfaction scores from customers, and market leadership.
The latest recognition follows a positive year for Adverity where it was previously named a Momentum Leader for ETL tools in the G2 Summer 2020 and Fall 2020 reports respectively. During this period it also moved into, and remained, in the Grid Report for Marketing Analytics top ten.
SAP.iO Foundry Paris lance un nouvel appel à candidatures pour son programme d’accélération de startups orientées agri-business. Cette 6ème promotion de l’accélérateur de startups de SAP retiendra 6 à 10 pépites tech et Agtech pour son programme de 10 semaines débutant en avril 2021. Les startups françaises mais aussi européennes peuvent candidater dès aujourd’hui jusqu’au 31 janvier 2021. Un autre appel à candidature est ouvert aux startups Greentech Françaises pour ses programmes de Berlin et Munich.
Gtmhub, a multinational startup that builds software to help other companies manage their corporate planning, announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B. The round was led by Insight, and included both participation from new investor Singular and prior investors LauncHub and CRV.
Gtmhub raised capital around 13 months ago, a $9 million Series A. At the time, the new capital was larger than the aggregate of its preceding funding efforts. The startup’s new funding round, like its 2019 Series A, towers above its prior fundraising totals in a similar manner.
How has Gtmhub managed to raise so much money? In a word, growth.
TechCrunch reported at the time of its Series A that Gtmhub had managed 400% growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) heading into the round, on a year-over-year basis. Similar levels of topline expansion have continued, with Gtmhub COO Seth Elliott telling TechCrunch that the company grew its ARR by a multiple of three last year (measured December 2019 through December 2020).
Around the time Gtmhub raised in 2019, a number of other startups focused on the same software market raised as well, leading to TechCrunch asking “why is everyone making OKR software?“
The acronym OKR translates to “objectives and key results,” a planning method that has become popular among American technology firms, and, according to Elliott, is becoming more popular internationally and among non-technology companies.
The startup executive also told TechCrunch that he sees Gtmhub growing alongside two business trends. The first, the rise of OKRs themselves, is a wave that his company is riding, he told TechCrunch. The second, one that he thinks his startup is leading, deals with large companies pursuing corporate transformations to boost their agility; those firms are adopting Gtmhub, he said, which can help them execute their digital transformation, or similar efforts, successfully.
