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In Fund, Tel Aviv, Press Coverage, Portfolio News

Israeli startup Revuze raises $5 million Series A for customer analysis software

Israeli market research startup Revuze has raised a $5.1 million Series A round led by Maverick Ventures (Israel), with support from existing investor Prytek.

Revuze has built a machine-learning system to analyse customer opinion, providing market insights on a user’s own products and brands, as well as any competitors. Standard reports such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and consumer satisfaction (CSAT) are also included.

The startup says the software allows business owners to make decisions without the help of specialists such as analysts, data scientists, and information technologists.

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In Foundries, Paris, Press Release, HR & People Engagement, Portfolio News

SAP Kicks Off SAP.iO Foundry Paris for HR Tech Startups

PARIS — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) announced that SAP.iO Foundry Paris today kicked off its new accelerator program focused on human resources (HR) technology and the future of work.

Over the next 12 weeks, SAP will accelerate eight HR technology startups that will revolutionize recruiting, talent management and collaborative learning for human resources.

The selected startups will have access to technical integration guidance, curated mentorship, exposure to SAP technology and opportunities to collaborate with SAP SuccessFactors customers. Five major SAP customers also will collaborate with and help guide the participating startups.

“Digital capabilities and new ways of working are shaking up companies and HR departments,” SAP.iO Foundry Paris Director Sébastien Gibier said. “To remain attractive, companies today are looking to create a unique end-to-end employee experience. This is the first time that we have mobilized these many customers to engage with startups from the beginning of the program. It presents a unique opportunity for companies to create new experiences for their employees.”

The SAP.iO Foundry Paris cohort includes the following startups:

  • 5Feedback is an application for employees to receive continuous, real-time feedback from their professional contacts. This strengthens team commitment, promotes development and improves the company performance.
  • 360Learning is a collaborative learning platform that in just minutes creates impactful courses for collaborative learning across the enterprise workplace.
  • eLamp is an AI-driven, business-oriented solution that identifies and maps employee skills in real time, improving HR processes and operational performance across a company.
  • Firstbird, the leading employee referral program for recruiters, connects people with companies worldwide.
  • RandomCoffee is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that facilitates employee meetings according to predefined company rules.
  • Timeular helps users and companies gain powerful insight into how they spend their time to more productively manage it.
  • Workelo is an SaaS platform that creates an innovative, engaging and collaborative experience for onboarding and offboarding, while saving managers and HR professionals up to 68 percent of their time.
  • Yogist is a complete and innovative method co-developed with psycho-ergonomists and osteopaths for addressing health and well-being at work.

Visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @SAPNews.

In Foundries, Paris, Press Coverage, Portfolio News

SAP : Kicks Off SAP.iO Foundry Paris for HR Tech Startups

SAP announced that SAP.iO Foundry Paris today kicked off its new accelerator program focused on human resources (HR) technology and the future of work.

Over the next 12 weeks, SAP will accelerate eight HR technology startups that will revolutionize recruiting, talent management and collaborative learning for human resources.

The selected startups will have access to technical integration guidance, curated mentorship, exposure to SAP technology and opportunities to collaborate with SAP SuccessFactors customers. Five major SAP customers also will collaborate with and help guide the participating startups.

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In Fund, Portfolio News

Deepgram Raises $12m in Series A funding

Deepgram, a San Francisco, CA-based speech recognition platform for the enterprise, raised $12m in Series A funding. The company, which has raised $13.9m to date, intends to use the funds to expand operations and its business reach. Founded in 2015 by Scott Stephenson, CEO, Deepgram uses end-to-end deep learning technology built with GPUs to provide companies and individuals with automatic speech recognition (ASR) that is powered by advanced, multi-layered machine learning technology. Its current product, Deepgram Brain provides transcription and audio search capabilities for individuals and enterprises. Since going to market, Deepgram has amassed more than 30 customers across the call center, retail and tech industries.

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In Press Coverage, Portfolio News, Fund

Enterprise Speech Recognition Startup Deepgram Raises $12M

Speech recognition technology startup Deepgram has closed a $12 million Series A funding round led by Wing VC along with NVIDIA, Y Combinator, and other investors. The funding comes as the company debuts new features for its enterprise-focused automatic speech transcription and analysis platform.

Deeper Learning

Businesses are growing to rely on artificial intelligence to record, transcribe, and analyze phone calls, meetings, and other audio. The speed and low cost of using AI can make up for the errors and sometimes imprecise analysis that results. Deepgram claims its approach can outperform the industry standard without sacrificing the speed and cost benefits.

“The old way of doing speech recognition is not going to be the same as future versions,” Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson told Voicebot in an interview. “The heuristics model of speech recognition has too many flaws; it’s why I wanted to start Deepgram. When we began, we decided to start from scratch with end-to-end deep learning.”The AI now can learn their jargon, learn the background noises at their meetings, and learn their natural cadence of speaking.”

Almost five years after its founding, Deepgram’s platform now offers multiple price points depending on just how precise the client wants the transcription and analysis to be. Stephenson explained that because Deepgram is built on deep learning rather than heuristics, adjusting precision is relatively straightforward, and the standard version platform can outperform most other options.

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In Fund, Press, Portfolio News

Deepgram raises $12 million to train custom speech recognition models for businesses

Deepgram, a Y Combinator graduate building tailored speech recognition models, today announced it has raised $12 million in series A financing. CEO and cofounder Scott Stephenson says the proceeds will bolster the development of Deepgram’s platform, which helps enterprises to process meeting, call, and presentation recordings. If all goes according to plan — if Deepgram’s scale eventually matches that of the competition — it could save organizations valuable time by spotlighting key results.

Deepgram leverages a backend speech stack that eschews hand-engineered pipelines for heuristics, stats-based, and fully end-to-end AI processing, with hybrid models trained on PCs equipped with powerful graphics processing units. Each custom model is trained from the ground up and can ingest files in formats ranging from phone calls and podcasts to recorded meetings and videos. Deepgram processes the speech, which is stored in what’s called a “deep representation index” that groups sounds by phonetics as opposed to words. Customers can search for words by the way they sound and, even if they’re misspelled, Deepgram can find them.

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In Fund, Portfolio News

Deepgram Blog: We raised $12 million to solve speech recognition in the enterprise

The excitement around speech recognition is real: it has the potential to power the next wave of modern applications and give businesses and vendors a competitive advantage. But, with excitement comes misaligned expectations. Speech recognition is a messy, tough and persistent problem for enterprises, one that has languished under existing technology providers for decades. At Deepgram we have been working to change that by rebuilding speech recognition from the ground up. Today, we celebrate a key milestone on our path with a $12 million Series A round led by Wing VC, with participation from NVIDIA, Y Combinator, Compound and SAP.iO.

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In Foundries, San Francisco, Portfolio News

SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco B2B travel technology accelerator Launches

SAP has launched the SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco business-to-business (B2B) travel technology accelerator, with eight early-stage enterprise startups.


The program aims to improve the travel and expense management experience for SAP’s customers, and includes the SAP Concur portfolio. Startups in the program will have access to curated mentorship, exposure to SAP technology and application programmable interfaces (APIs), and opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers.

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In Service Industries, Network & Spend Management, Uncategorized

SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco Launches Accelerator Program Focused on Travel and Expense Management

SAP) kicked off the SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco business-to-business (B2B) travel technology accelerator, with eight early-stage enterprise startups.

This program is geared to improving the travel and expense management experience for SAP’s customers, and includes the SAP Concur portfolio. Startups in the program will have access to curated mentorship, exposure to SAP technology and application programmable interfaces (APIs), and opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers.

“Collaboration with SAP.iO will help foster an open innovation ecosystem and will help us deliver new emerging technologies that bring value to our customers,” SAP Concur President Jim Lucier said. ” We look forward to working with the rising stars in the travel technology industry and helping them scale.”

The following startups are participating in the SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco Spring 2020 program:

  • Bacarai is launching the world’s first group airfare marketplace — providing travelers the ability to shop, purchase and manage group trips online.
  • Hotailors is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that provides enterprises with full visibility over contingent worker travel, ensuring that bookings meet travel policies, expense limits and safety standards.
  • Jet-Set Offset provides technology that enables companies to offset their carbon footprint generated from flying with an automatic one-cent-per-mile donation to an environmental nonprofit organization chosen by the individual or company.
  • Jojonomic is the first mobile expense management system in Southeast Asia connected to the region’s financial and tech ecosystem, serving tens of thousands of users across hundreds of enterprises.
  • Lumo is a platform that uses machine learning to predict flight delays. Lumo’s APIs and SaaS products are used by travelers, travel management companies, airlines, travel insurance and travel technology companies to help proactively manage disruptions hours to weeks in advance.
  • RoadGoat is a location-technology platform that enables businesses to integrate critical data consisting of about 4.3 million travel destinations, driving rich user experiences that translate to higher engagement and increased bookings.
  • Tripgrid is a flexible project-based workspace that helps businesses automate and streamline travel workflows, such as travel documents and reports, data normalization and cost reconciliation.
  • 30SecondsToFly produces software employing artificial intelligence for the travel management industry to help automate call centers, providing greater service at lower operational costs.

The accelerator program will conclude with an SAP.iO Demo Day presentation at the beginning of June.

In Uncategorized

SAP : Welcomes New Employee-Led Ventures to Product Incubator

SAP has chosen two new employee-created businesses to join the SAP.iO Venture Studio. GreenToken and OwnID won funding with the goal of scaling to impact SAP and its customers.

In-house innovation has been one of SAP’s recipes for success since its founding days nearly half a century ago. Driving transformative innovation inside the company demands going beyond innovating upon existing products by actively scouting for new ideas. Once identified, these innovative ideas can build and grow upon SAP’s unique strength and assets such as the company’s technologies, data and customer relationships.

‘It’s our job to keep our eyes on the future,’ Max Wessel, chief innovation officer of SAP, said. ‘But it’s more than just having the ideas. We have to put an operating model in place to facilitate innovation for our customers.’

Venturing inside of SAP – also known as intrapreneurship – is one of the ways SAP accomplishes the task by reimagining how products and services can be delivered from the ground up.

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In Article, Tokyo

Startup Guide Tokyo: how this global tech hub is reinventing itself for a new wave of entrepreneurs

With a GDP of $5 trillion, Japan’s market is the third-largest economy in the world. Japanese customers are known to be sophisticated, and demand high standards of proof of concept. Greater Tokyo – with a population of over 14 million – accounts for a major chunk of Japan’s GDP.Japan was the sixth-largest market in terms of venture-capital investment in 2017, and the University of Tokyo graduated around 250 startups that year. Notable startups in recent years include Preferred Networks, Nihon Kotsu, CrowdWorks, Mercari and Line.

SAP Japan aims to be a “lighthouse of innovation” for customers, and is developing the Business Innovators Network. It also runs the SAP.iO Foundry Tokyo accelerator programme and SAP Leonardo Experience Center.

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In New York, Portfolio News

Startup Brings Personalized Coaching To Every Employee

Professional coaching is no longer an exclusive perk for select employees courtesy of Bravely, a cloud-based platform that delivers workplace guidance on-demand to more workers. The New York-based startup provides coaching to employees in numerous industries, including professional and financial services, hospitality, retail, and high technology.

Everyone should have a trusted, skilled coach to help them navigate important make or break moments at work,” said Toby Hervey, co-founder and CEO at Bravely. “Supporting an employee at moments that matter fundamentally transforms their long-time success and viability, as well as company culture.”

Business benefits from coaching for all

Sarah Sheehan, co-founder and president at Bravely, said the coaching platform reflected people-first workplace trends.

“Forward-thinking leaders know employees need hard skills and relationship-building expertise to achieve goals together,” she said. “Using technology, companies can cost-effectively give more employees access to coaching. This reduces employee stress and prevents burnout for improved mental health leading to higher productivity. “

Not surprisingly, Bravely helps companies address business commitments to inclusion and diversity. This is something that the co-founders live every day; Hervey is a gay man, and Sheehan is a new mother.

“We see strong usage of our coaching among groups such as women, LGBTQ workers, and people of color who are underrepresented the higher up you go in many organizations,” said Hervey. “We want to be a force for behavioral change across the board, and equitably support people at every level.”

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In Foundries, Paris, Interview

Et si l’Europe revenait dans la course à la technologie ?

Qu’il semble loin, le temps où Alcatel, Nokia ou Ericsson faisaient partie des entreprises parmi les plus puissantes du secteur des technologies. Place aujourd’hui aux GAFAM, à Alibaba, Huawei ou Tencent, une course sino-américaine dont l’Europe semble aujourd’hui exclue.

La compétitivité technologique est pourtant une nécessité, à en croire les deux intervenants présents lors de la table ronde “Wargames” de la Maddy Keynote du 31 janvier : Sébastien Gibier, Directeur de SAP.iO Foundry Paris, et Tristan Nitot, Président de Qwant. 

La course technologique

Ce dernier lance d’emblée un message d’espoir « Je ressens un profondément sentiment d’urgence à accélérer sur le secteur technologique en Europe. Ce n’est pas trop tard, mais il faut agir vite ». Mais d’ailleurs, pourquoi agir ? Pourquoi l’Europe doit-elle reprendre sa marche en avant dans la course à la technologie ? 

D’abord parce que son retard est réel. À titre d’exemple, en 2019, l’ensemble des licornes (entreprises non côtées valorisées à plus d’un milliard de dollars) américaines étaient valorisées à plus de 1600 milliards de dollars, leurs homologues asiatiques à plus de 900 milliards de dollars, et les européennes a à peine plus de 300 milliards.

Ensuite  parce que l’Union Européenne a les moyens de cette ambition. Fort d’un marché porteur, deuxième PIB à parité du pouvoir d’achat mondial derrière la Chine mais devant les Etats-Unis, l’Europe est un terrain fertile quant à l’essor des nouvelles technologies. Ce que résume ainsi Tristan Nitot : “L’Europe présente le double avantage d’avoir une population relativement riche en Europe de l’ouest, et un marché très prometteur en Europe de l’est”.

Enfin, le risque est grand d’aboutir à une situation de trop forte dépendance vis-à-vis des modèles chinois ou américains, comme le précise Sébastien Gibier : « Tant pour l’emploi que pour la protection des données, notamment en matière de sécurité ou de santé, il est nécessaire d’avoir une Europe forte et dynamique sur les marchés de la nouvelle économie ». Sur des sujets aussi sensibles, on ne peut que comprendre la crainte émise par le Directeur de SAP.IO Foundry Paris. Les récents scandales, notamment celui de Cambridge Analytica, rajoutent s’il en était besoin la question de l’éthique et du traitement des données personnelles à cette préoccupante équation. 

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