Skip to main content

Wethos raises $3M to help meaningful brands adapt to fast-paced demands of digital

Wethos Founders

Wethos, the leading platform for rapid-response creative and marketing teams, announced today that it has successfully raised an oversubscribed round of $3 million in ninety days, led by NYC-based Laconia Capital and with the participation of Flybridge Capital, Loup Ventures, Higher Ground Labs, and other strategic investors. This latest round follows a year of substantial growth, in which the three-year-old company deployed over one hundred agile, on-demand teams and increased its revenue by five hundred percent.

The company’s tech-enabled “pop-up departments” leverage agile methodology to build brands, websites, digital content, awareness, and growth campaigns in real time based on each client’s unique needs. Recent leadership hires in sales, marketing, and customer experience will enable Wethos to keep up with the demand of its most popular teams, and expand into new verticals.

“As brands struggle to cut through the noise in a rapidly-evolving digital landscape, we need business and creative minds to come together at 100x the speed they do today,” said Wethos co-founder and CEO Rachel Renock. “Legacy operating systems put unnecessary obstacles in the way of brilliant and diverse people who are hungry to help accelerate progress.”

Unlike big agencies with siloed departments, expensive overhead, and opaque pricing, proprietary technology enables Wethos to rapidly scope complex work and curate teams based on each customer’s unique needs. With a growing database of over 4,000 U.S.-based specialists, Wethos pairs together vetted talent from the best brands in technology, politics,
fashion, education, and more.

“The best founders are compelling storytellers, and the most successful companies are the ones who can align a community of customers, partners and advocates around that brand story,” said Jesse Middleton, General Partner at Flybridge Capital and founding team member at WeWork. “The Wethos team has built a platform that offers this “super-power” to companies of all sizes, bringing unlimited, top-tier talent and execution to help solve pressing challenges around customer acquisition and movement building.”

Wethos is also leading the fight for a more ethical gig economy, with standards like guaranteed on-time payments, transparent pricing, and protection from retaliation.

“No matter your location, gender, race, or skill-set, people should be paid fairly for the value they deliver,” said Renock. “With a workforce that’s increasingly remote, flexible, diverse, and craving purpose, we believe treating talent the best will attract the best talent — period. By putting our community of specialists first, and allowing them to connect in real-time, we’re working toward a more distributed and collaborative future.”

Learn more about Wethos here

Heuritech raises $4.4 million for AI that uncovers what’s hot in fashion and beauty

With social media and data transforming commerce, Paris-based Heuritech has raised $4.4 million to help clients in fashion and beauty stay abreast of rapidly changing tastes.

Version:1.0 StartHTML:000000278 EndHTML:000176866 StartFragment:000176452 EndFragment:000176794 StartSelection:000176452 EndSelection:000176794 SourceURL:https://venturebeat.com/2019/09/03/heuritech-raises-4-4-million-for-ai-to-discover-whats-hot-in-fashion-and-beauty/ Heuritech raises $4.4 million for AI that uncovers what’s hot in fashion and beauty | VentureBeat

The company uses algorithms and computer vision to scan and analyze large volumes of images and text across the internet to understand trends as they emerge, mutate, and then vanish. With social media accelerating the rise and fall of mini-fads, companies are struggling to stay current in industries where falling behind can be fatal.

Read more…

Why emerging tech is relevant to enterprise

Tech Crunch is kicking off a conference in San Francisco September 5 and will include interviews with enterprise software leaders, rising founders and VC’s ahead of the game. Yahoo Finance’s Zack Guzman and Sibile Marcellus discuss with SAPIO Senior VP and Managing DIrector, Ram Jambunathan, and “Wall Street Journal” Wealth Reporter, Veronica Dagher.

More…

So will SAP die Vielfalt in der Gründerszene fördern

Düsseldorf Rania Reda hat bereits mehrere Start-ups gegründet, groß gemacht und verkauft. Derzeit baut sie mit Augmania eine Plattform auf, die die Erstellung von Inhalten für Augmented Reality deutlich erleichtern soll.
Trotz ihrer Erfahrung tut sich die 46-jährige Gründerin schwer, im Silicon Valley von den namhaften Risikokapitalgebern eine Finanzierungsrunde zu bekommen – und das, so ist sie überzeugt, liegt weder an ihrer Geschäftsidee noch an ihrer Präsentation.

Mehr…

Augmania’s SAP.iO Journey in Berlin

Dear diar….Sorry got caught away here! In a way, though, this blogpost will be akin to a diary entry. It’s an open expression of our thoughts at Augmania throughout every stage of our SAP.iO Foundry program odyssey. 

Oh yes, earlier this year, the good people of SAP invited us to participate in their ultra-ambitious accelerator program. Launched by SAP in 2017, SAP.iO aims to bolster multiple entrepreneurial ecosystems around the globe. That’s through supporting and investing in early-stage startups working in SaaS. 

A major focus of SAP.iO is the aforementioned Foundry program which we received an invitation for. Generally, the program is about 12 weeks and has taken place in entrepreneurial hubs, from New York to Tokyo. Mentorship sessions, engaging workshops, and funding opportunities are just a few perks of a Foundry program.

However, our invitation was for a rather unique SAP.iO Foundry program. In fact, it was a program with heaps of added pressure. 

Read More…

Exclusive: Maggie Buggie, SVP and Global Head of Innovation Services and Solutions, SAP SE

This year, we’re celebrating the 30thanniversary of SAP in APJ and I’m so excited by what the future holds for our customers, as the pace of innovation continues. I’m so inspired by the pace of innovation within our own organisation in the region. For instance: the first SAP.iO Foundry in Asia was launched in August in Tokyo, followed by SAP’s first start-up accelerator in Singapore, SAP.iO Foundry Singapore. SAP ANZ hosted its first innovation experience event, e’ffect in August and the first partner-run SAP AppHaus in the region was launched in Australia earlier this year.

Read More…

Accélération de startups : Le Village by CA, Microsoft et SAP lancent un appel à candidatures dédié aux femmes entrepreneures

Le Village by CA Paris lance un appel à candidatures dédié aux femmes entrepreneures en partenariat avec Microsoft, SAP via son programme SAP.iO No Boundaries, et avec le soutien de Capgemini pour la sélection des startups. Cet appel est soutenu par sept réseaux féminins : Girls In Tech, Femmes Business Angels, Professional Women’s Network Paris, #JamaisSansElles, IWF France, StartHer et Rezoé.

AI-based chatbot Niki.ai Raises Funding

Founded in May 2015 by IIT Kharagpur graduates Sachin Jaiswal, Keshav Prawasi, Shishir Modi, and Nitin Babel, Niki.ai is a vernacular conversational platform where users can simply talk to ‘Niki’ in order to pay their monthly bills, book bus or movie tickets, browse plans, prepaid recharges, find local deals and much more, while its personalisation helps one choose the option best suited for them.

Backed by Ratan Tata, Unilazer Ventures, and SAP.iO among other investors, with over 4.5 million users (80 percent of whom are living in Tier II, Tier III India), Niki.ai hit a GMV run rate of about $30 million and a revenue run rate of over $1 million in FY18. After adding Hindi language capabilities, it also witnessed 300x growth in Hindi GMV since October 2018, annualised at $40 million.

Read More…

Revuze Attracts Investment From the SAP.iO Fund

Revuze, the SaaS provider of the first self-service consumer product feedback analytics solution, announced today that the SAP.iO Fund made an investment in the company, as part of a funding round that included existing and new investors.  The SAP.iO Fund joins other well-known investors in Revuze, including Nielsen, NPD, TIC Group and Prytek.

The funding comes on the heels of fast international adoption of the Revuze solution across multiple industries and geographies, from China to US and Europe.

Revuze’s artificial intelligence solution is the first in the market to transform how brands consume customer experience (CX) insights. While other solutions are typically requiring experts and manual labor to deliver insights, while being limited to specific feedback channels like Social Media or Surveys, Revuze allows any role in the organization to gain deep insights from any data sources and without any manual labor or experts involved. With Revuze organizations distribute decision making, making better decisions, faster across the board.

Read More…

SAP.iO Fund invests in Isreali big data and consumer analytics startup Revuze

Revuze, a startup that offers a product experience management cloud based solution for consumer brands, announced it has received investment from the SAP.iO Fund made an investment in the company, as part of a funding round that included existing and new investors. The total amount of funding was not disclosed. The funding comes on the heels of fast international adoption of the Revuze solution across multiple industries and geographies, from China to US and Europe.

Revuze was founded in 2013 by Eyal Strassburg, Ido Ramati, and Yair Almagor. It’s the first provider of SaaS based self-service consumer product feedback analytics solution. It was founded with a vision of finding the “wisdom of reviews,” aiding e-Commerce sites by providing stellar insights about products and customers, thus increasing their conversion rate and repeat customers.

Read More…

Experience is everything.

Launching our next SAP.iO SF XM Cohort

SAP is a company that has always been very customer centric and embraced a Listen — Learn — Act approach. In the same spirit we are excited to announce our next SAP.iO SF Foundry program. The upcoming SAP.iO San Francisco cohort will be focused on Experience Management, in close collaboration with SAP Business Units, including SAP Customer Experience and Qualtrics.

We are excited to collaborate with cutting edge startup innovation and improve the experience for SAP’s customers, partners and end users. We are looking forward to welcoming the following startups to be a part of the next SAP.iO SF Foundry —

  • 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 market insights for brands and retailers while increasing consumer engagement via mobile games.

Read More…

Meet the 7 Startups Selected for SAP’s First South East Asia Accelerator

Dubbed as SAP.iO Foundry the program aims to accelerate Southeast Asian startups, providing them access to curated mentorship, exposure to SAP technology and application programmable interfaces (APIs), and opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers.

The first cohort will consist of seven early-stage Intelligent Enterprise startups focused on business-to-business (B2B) technology.

Read More…