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In Press, New York

Four Finalists Named to the 2019 Autumn HITLAB Women’s Health Tech Challenge.

Finalists present their FemTech Women’s Health Innovations on Pitch Day, Thursday, Dec. 5, in NYC. Mitigating discomfort and improving diagnostic accuracy and outcomes are the overarching goals of the four projects selected to compete in the 2019 Autumn HITLAB Women’s Health Tech Challenge. The finalists’ winning innovations were designed to treat different conditions in the women’s health spectrum: fertility, long-term breastfeeding, pelvic organ prolapse, and endometriosis.

Each team is now in the running for the $10,000 first-place prize, to be awarded at Pitch Day on Thursday, Dec. 5, at the SAP.iO Foundry in New York’s Hudson Yards. All four teams will compete for other awards (described below) from McKinsey & Company, Horizon Government Affairs, and the HITLAB Breakthrough Alliance, as well as incredible exposure and networking opportunities with HITLAB and high-profile sponsors.   All are welcome, tickets available at www.hitlab.org/world-cup.

Following are the four finalists and the health issues they aim to address based on their applications:

Kegg , San Francisco, CA

  • The Problem: In the U.S. alone, infertility affects 1 in 10 women—6.1 million—and the number is rising. Moreover, usage of hormonal contraception is on the decline by 11% year after year due to 70% of women reportedly suffering from side effects. Many current fertility monitors focus on side effects that may or may not correlate with what is happening inside a woman’s body.
  • The Solution: The inaugural product from a women-centric company, Kegg is a fertility kegel device that collects and analyzes previously difficult-to-attain data from a woman’s cervical fluid to better diagnose and monitor fertility cycles. The device may quadruple the chances of natural conception and replace the pill for pregnancy planning.

LuulaTech’s LuulaPump, Brooklyn, NY

  • The Problem: The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that babies are fed breast-milk until two years of age. Most mothers try it, but by 6 months, 75% feed formula to babies. Existing breast pumps are in part to blame. Most lactating mothers consider them essential, but also conspicuous, uncomfortable, unintuitive, painful, isolating and degrading.
  • The Solution: LuulaPump by LuulaTech is a revolutionary science-based wearable pump: spill proof, dishwashable, and intuitively used with one hand, allowing gentle and discreet pumping in public and in any position. Instead of repackaging existing technology, LuulaTech stepped back and redesigned the pump based on breastfeeding science and with an emphasis on a mother’s experience.

Reia Health, Hanover, NH

  • The Problem: Prolapse, a condition affecting 50% of women over the age of 50 to some degree, is characterized by weakened pelvic floor muscles that allow the uterus to descend and, in extreme cases, protrude outside the body. Current non-surgical treatment options are painful or impossible for women to use without the assistance of a practitioner, limiting women’s independence and requiring regular time-intensive and costly doctor appointments.
  • The Solution: Reia is developing a novel collapsible pessary that is designed for comfort and enables women to self-manage their prolapse. Alongside this pessary, Reia plans to launch a digital platform to further enhance personalized care.

Oratel Diagnostics’ Endo-Tek , Hammondsport, NY

  • The Problem: Endometriosis, a fertility problem affecting 10% of all women, costs the U.S. health system more than $15 billion and continues to be under treated and misdiagnosed in adolescent girls because the current diagnosis is an invasive and costly laparoscopy. Adolescents with endometriosis have an earlier age at menarche, and longer diagnostic delay, resulting in poorer quality of life.
  • The Solution: Oratel’s ENDO-Tek is the only saliva-based, easy-to-use, low-cost diagnostic for endometriosis that gives instant results at the time of testing and through a proprietary phone-based app, links the patient to a specialist who counsels on next steps. The technology has demonstrated over 84% sensitivity and up to 92% specificity in three studies.

“We were thrilled with the high-quality submissions we received for the 2019 Autumn Women’s Health Tech Challenge,” said Savira Dargar, Challenge Director. “Judging was intense but in the final analysis, these four disruptors showed the strongest promise of empowering women to improve their health outcomes in cost-effective ways.” Applications were evaluated on impact, innovation, sustainability, feasibility, team and quality of work.

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In Public Services, Article, Portfolio News

One Doctor’s Mission to Solve a $300 Billion Dollar Healthcare Problem

“This has been my mission for the last 20 years,” says Dr. Rajiv Shah of MyMeds, the company he founded in 2012. MyMeds is a medication management tool that helps consumers get a complete picture of the medication they have been prescribed and encourages adherence through a comprehensive “Digital + Human” approach.


Accessible as an app on the phone or a web-based tool on the desktop, consumers using MyMeds are able to auto-import their prescriptions, identify better prices for their medications, set up reminders and chat with expert pharmacists. MyMeds is also the only medication adherence platform to have connectivity with Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), enabling real-time data exchange between insurers, clinical teams and patients, providing new engagement insights that health systems never had access to before.
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In Press, San Francisco, Portfolio News, Foundries

SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco Customer Experience Cohort Caps Off with Demo Day

The 12-week program provided the startups with access to curated mentorship, exposure to SAP technology and application programmable interfaces (APIs), and access to SAP customers. It concludes with an invite-only Demo Day event for customers, partners and industry guests — such as Ronan Dunne, Verizon Consumer Group executive vice president and CEO; Beverly Parenti, The Last Mile executive director; angel investor Dan Scheinman and others — to meet the founders and hear about their collaboration with SAP and its customers.

“We are very excited about what has been achieved in the past three months and that we were able to help these startups deliver winning outcomes and incremental value to our customers,” said Ram Jambunathan, SAP.iO managing director and SAP senior vice president head of Corporate Strategy.

The cohort consists of the following startups:

  • Constructor.io is an artificial intelligence (AI) commerce search and discovery solution that learns from usage to increase personalization and conversation rates. Constructor personalizes results from users on-site and online and optimizes them for business metrics relevant to the retailer.
  • Breinify is a time-driven AI platform that predicts and acts on an individual’s highly dynamic interests. The technology blends traditional machine learning and AI techniques with complex temporal algorithms to make granular intelligent decisions that vary for each individual at any time.
  • FINDMINE increases commerce orders by using machine learning to generate and display product collections that can be used together. FINDMINE ensures shoppers are able to see full product sets that answer the question “How do I use this?” It can be employed for every product and customer, and across every channel (e-commerce, e-mail, in-store, and for associates and customer support).
  • Wisy is an engagement platform that gathers unique consumer and market insights for brands and retailers while increasing consumer engagement through mobile experiences.
  • Idiomatic identifies top product and service issues by analyzing large amounts of customer interactions with AI and machine learning. Idiomatic helps companies turn customer feedback into customer intelligence through its voice-of-customer platform, which identifies and tracks all issues and trends in customer support inquiries, Net Promoter Score survey responses and app reviews.
  • Askdata is a natural language engine that turns text questions into queries that search across enterprise data for the best answer. Business users with no technical skills can search for data in natural language with convenience and productivity.
  • SetSail accelerates pipeline and flexibly drives strategic priorities in weekly sales incentive systems with machine learning and natural language processing. Customer events and e-mail sentiment are analyzed to objectively measure and reward true deal progress, allowing sales leaders to reward their representatives every week

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In Foundries, Blog, San Francisco

Just the beginning…

Nov 14th, 2019 marked the culmination of our three months long Experience Management accelerator program, in close collaboration with SAP Customer Experience & Qualtrics. However this is just the beginning of a long term relationship with these startups. Over 100 people gathered (regardless of the rain!) to celebrate the graduation of SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco’s Experience Management Cohort. It was a great moment for our startups to present in front of an audience that was a mix of SAP Executives, SAP Customers, Startup Founders, Ventures Capitalists & industry experts. The following startups presented:

  • Askdata: Powerful Natural Language engine turns text questions into queries that search across enterprise data for the best answer.
  • Breinify: Makes any marketing system smarter by adding individualized & time driven predictions to drive spur-of-the-moment purchases.
  • Constructor: AI-first Commerce search and discovery solution that learns from usage to increase personalization and conversion rates.
  • Findmine: Increases Commerce basket sizes by using ML to generate and display product collections that can be used together.
  • Idiomatic: Easily identify top product and service issues by analyzing large amounts of customer interactions with AI/ML
  • Setsail: Accelerate pipeline and flexibly drive strategic priorities using SetSail’s weekly sales incentive system
  • Wisy: Gathers unique consumer and market insights for brands and retailers while increasing consumer engagement via mobile experiences.

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In Foundries, Press, Portfolio News

Cultivate Raises $8M to Bring Scalable AI-Driven Leadership Coaching to the Enterprise

People mingling in conversation

Cultivate, a digital leadership coaching platform that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to provide in-the-moment feedback and management coaching within the enterprise, today announced an $8 million Series A investment to grow its go-to-market team and product offerings. Trinity Ventures led the Series A round with participation from previous investors Bloomberg Beta, Silicon Valley Data Capital and SAP.iO. Karan Mehandru from Trinity Ventures will be joining the Cultivate board of directors. Cultivate has raised a total of $10 million since the company exited from a Samsung NEXT accelerator program in the summer of 2018.

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In Foundries, San Francisco, Portfolio News

Reimagining Retail: How FINDMINE is using AI to enhance customer experience

“As a consumer, I was always frustrated that when I’d buy a product, there was always more work for me afterwards. If I bought a skirt, I’d have to figure out how to wear it in an outfit. If I bought a couch I’d have to figure out what rug and throw pillows would look good with it and then buy those things. If I bought a new set of trims for my bathroom I’d have to search for the valves that would fit,” says Michelle Bacharach, founder and CEO of FINDMINE.

She discovered that when it came to recommending products to customers, retailers still relied heavily on manual processes. For instance, while brands know which products might be complementary — which pair of shoes would look great with the bag you’ve just added to your cart and which scarf, jeans or shirt would complete the look — they were just not very good at prompting the customers towards the right purchase. That’s where FINDMINE comes in.

FINDMINE uses AI to help customers “complete the look” and provides retailers an easy, efficient and scalable way of communicating that to customers. “Our engine shows consumers a little recipe for how to use each product they’re buying.” For brands and retailers using FINDMINE, the impact has been incredible. “For our customers the value is threefold. First, we’re helping them gain efficiency in their operations by spending fewer manhours in merchandising. Second, the overall brand experience is augmented for the customer, building loyalty. Third, FINDMINE helps generate revenue, in some cases as much as $60 million for a customer — because we help consumers make the right buying decisions.”

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In Article

B2B Growth Opportunities in Southeast Asia

Asia’s startup ecosystem had been on the ascendance over the past few years. According to a study backed by Vertex Venture Holdings and Preqin, Asia could overtake North America as the epi-center for venture capital funding next year. Asia VC funds had USD 323 billion worth of assets under management (AUM) at the end of last year vs North American VC funds which had USD 397 billion. With more unicorns in China than the US, it is not surprising that the bulk of the Asian funds are focused on China. However, Southeast Asia already have USD 28 billion AUM and attracting Chinese and Japanese investors to the region.

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In Singapore, Portfolio News

Making innovation real at Intelligent Enterprise Demo Day

Innovation is currently a hot topic on the agenda of all corporates. Nearly all of them want to ‘make innovation real’. That is, they desire to harness innovation as the catalyst for achieving real business value, business outcomes, and better experiences for their customers.

Even before the term exploded in the ecosystem and beyond, SAP has always nurtured a culture of innovation by building an infrastructure that provides a foundation for growth and innovation.

To this end, SAP.iO Foundry Singapore was launched to help startups build innovative enterprise software solutions that deliver value to SAP customers. Startups accelerated in the program have integrated their solutions with various SAP products.

The first SAP.iO Foundry Singapore includes the following startups:

1.) Adaface — Enables and automates first-round tech interviews to identify the best engineering talent faster.

2.) Flowcast — Uses patented machine-learning algorithms to harness untapped, complex data to automate credit decision-making. This provides greater visibility to customers to address underserved markets.

3.) LuxTag — Provides an anti-counterfeiting and anti-theft solution that uses blockchain-enabled traceability to deter product counterfeiting and fraud.

4.) Notarum — Provides a modern workflow tool designed to reduce busywork by automating corporate due diligence. Notarum makes performing due diligence analysis and sharing work with teammates easier than ever.

5.) Pulsifi — Predicts workplace outcomes to identify, retain and develop great people. By using artificial intelligence to incorporate multiple data sources across hard skills and soft traits, this HR analytics platform derives employee success profiles to improve HR decisions across the employee lifecycle, from hiring to development.

6.) SizeNFit — Helps online shoppers find apparel that fits. This e-commerce add-on aims to increase sales and reduce returns.

7.) TADA — Offers data-driven customer advocacy and engagement platform that helps brands moving from transactions to relationships and customers to advocates. This enables businesses to attract, engage and retain customers.

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In Foundries, Paris, Portfolio News

Launching the 3rd SAP.iO Foundry Paris Cohort on GreenTech and Sustainable Enterprise

One year after its opening, the SAP accelerator unveils the startups selected for its third GreenTech-oriented promotion

After a first startup promotion focused on supply chain, and a second focused on retail solutions, SAP is putting the spotlight on GreenTech for its third promotion. The selected startups all have in common that they offer their customers technologies to reduce their environmental footprint and enter the circular economy in order to have a positive impact on the world.

The objective of this GreenTech-focused promotion is to address a central issue in the economy, as Sébastien Gibier, Director of SAP.iO Foundry Paris, explains: “SAP has chosen to put its technology at the service of its customers to help them have a positive impact on society and the environment. One of the goals of our digital solutions is to optimize the use of their resources in response to the 17 sustainable development objectives set by the UN. We are convinced that, combined with SAP solutions, the technologies of the selected startups will help companies to respond even more effectively to these challenges. And we can positively respond to the 48% of French people who believe that massive investment is needed in more environmentally friendly technologies.

The 8 startups of the new SAP.iO cohort will be supported for 10 weeks, 3 days a week, by mentors and coaches from SAP and the startup ecosystem who will hold workshops on different themes.

Here are the French GreenTech startups selected by SAP.iO Foundry Paris:

  • Circunomics: uses big data to recycle and put back on the market the various battery components.
  • Uzer: offers digital solutions to reduce waste and improve recycling performance. The startup developed Eugène, a small box equipped with a screen and a scanner that you can set up near your kitchen bin. All you have to do is scan the barcodes of the packages when you throw them away and Eugene displays the right sorting instructions directly on its screen. This avoids confusion and wasted time when recycling.
  • Evolution Energie: startup specialized in the management of energy purchases for manufacturers. It offers a software solution called “Flexinergy” that provides customers with additional tools and resources to independently control their operations on their contracts and on the energy markets.
  • Hiboo: helps the construction industry to re-invent the way field operations are managed. Hiboo captures and centralizes data from multiple sources, providing strategic insights to optimize processes and unlock new business models.
  • Harold Waste: develops software assistants for waste management and circular economy actors. The startup develops artificial intelligence capable of identifying and qualifying flows of plastics, metals and cardboard.
  • Trinov: offers a SaaS platform to collect and analyze data to reduce at source and optimize waste management of economic activities.
  • Ubleam : designed a new generation bar code, called “bleam”, which facilitates the use and maintenance of objects. This connected 3D tag, once attached to an object, can be scanned on a mobile device and gives access to interactive content, including all the technical documentation for the product concerned.
  • iNex Circular: European industrial waste exchange platform to promote the circular economy on the ground. The company ensures that one company’s waste becomes another company’s resource.

14 startups accelerated by SAP.iO Foundry Paris, 10 of which are directly integrated into SAP solutions, in just 1 year

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