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HEINEKEN announces winners of its HR-tech competition

The Dutch brewing company HEINEKEN concluded its first-ever HR tech-focused competition called HEINEKEN HR Brewhouse last Friday.

The winner of the Recruitment category was SAP, a team consisting of platforms Eightfold.ai, Sonru, and Plum. The final winner for the Wild Card category was Pulsifi, a Singapore-based company that uses data analytics for HR management. Pulsifi’s platform combines organizational psychology and artificial intelligence to help companies hire, retain, and develop talents.

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Plum raises $4.2 million USD, shifts focus beyond recruitment

Plum, the Waterloo-based startup that uses AI to help organizations hire and retain talent, has raised a $4.2 million ($5.57 million CAD) seed round.
This raise comes as Plum has shifted focus within the last year from talent acquisition to now offering tools to help companies understand and make predictions about their entire workforce. Plum is also focused on offering those services exclusively for large enterprise customers, rather small-and-medium-businesses (SMBs).

The round was led by Real Ventures with participation from BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Fund, and SAP’s venture fund SAP.iO. The seed funding brings Plum’s total funding to date to $6.1 million USD ($8 million CAD), with the previous financing coming from Plum’s angel investor round.

Plum works closely with SAP and integrates with SAP SuccessFactors, the company’s cloud-based human resource management system. MacGregor explained that the shift in focus was directly related to that partnership, and becoming a SAP.io portfolio company. She noted that SAP encouraged Plum to use its predictive AI to help address the needs of current, as well as incoming, employees.

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Talent Data Platform Plum Raises $4.2 Million in Seed Funding

Plum, a SaaS (software-as-a-service) firm specializing in providing enterprises with the data they need to quantify the potential of their employees, recently revealed that it had raised $4.2 Million in seed funding. Real Ventures, a Venture Capitalist company committed to future-focused startups led the funding for Plum. Adding in the funding it received in the Angel round, the total now moves up to $6.1Million.


The company made the announcement at SuccessConnect Las Vegas, the annual user conference from SAP SuccessFactors. The conference is aimed at helping HR professionals and Senior Business Leaders solve challenges relating to the workforce and predict future trends in order to take anticipatory actions. The other investors for Plum include SAP.iO and BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Venture Fund. Plum’s app integrates with SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting, which is a part of the HCM suite.

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Cracking the Code: From Startup to Scaleup in Enterprise Software with Ram Jambunathan (SAP.iO), Lonnie Rae Kurlander (Medal), Caitlin MacGregor (Plum), and Dimitri Sirota (BigID)

The startup journey is hard. Data shows that 70% of upstart tech companies fail, while only 1% of these startups will go on to gain unicorn status. Success in enterprise software often requires deep industry experience, strong networks, brutally-efficient execution, and a bit of luck. This panel brings together three successful SAP.iO Fund-backed enterprise startups for an open discussion on lessons learned, challenges of scaling, and why the right strategic investors or partners can be beneficial even at early-stages

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Talent Data Platform Plum Raises $4.2M to Prepare Organizations for the Future of Work

 Plum, a software-as-a-service company that provides enterprise organizations with the data they need to quantify the potential of their workforce, announced today that it has raised $4.2M in seed funding. In combination with their previous Angel round, Plum has raised a total of $6.1M to date.

The $4.2M round was led by Real Ventures, a Venture Capitalist firm dedicated to future-focused startups that create new categories. “Over the next decade, people will need to be assigned and trained for new jobs on a scale that has never been seen,” said Janet Bannister, Partner at Real Ventures. “McKinsey claims that 400 to 800 million jobs will disappear due to automation in the next 15 years. At the same time, 85% of jobs that will exist in 2030 do not exist today.”

Bannister went on to say, “Plum is the only provider of scientifically-validated, predictive data that can scale to get every person in the right job for the future of work – which is why we believe that Plum is posed to not only be a huge company, but also make a significant, positive impact on millions of lives.”

Other investors include SAP.iO and BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Venture Fund. Plum’s app integrates with SAP® SuccessFactors® Recruiting, which is a part of the human capital management suite.

“An employee’s success in a role depends not only on an employee’s hard skills but also their intangible characteristics,” said Dr. Ram Jambunathan, SVP & Managing Director of SAP.iO. “But today, businesses still rely on traditional measures and assessments that are often prone to subjective biases. The SAP.iO Fund invested in Plum so our customers could build the full picture of their employee’s capabilities. Through Plum’s integration with SAP® SuccessFactors®, businesses can now drive the complete talent management experience that employees want and need for long-term success.”

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Predicting Job Success and Preparing Enterprises for the Future of Work

Everywhere I turn, I hear concerns about technology and workforce automation causing job losses. For employers, however, it seems that the real worry lies not in eliminating but retaining their workforce.

How can they prepare their existing talent pool – and their organizations – to thrive in the new economy? How can they deal with the impending mass migration of jobs toward those requiring new skills?

Those are the fundamental questions that emerged from my discussion with Emily Lambert, Content Marketing specialist at Plum, Inc. Plum offers a solution, also called Plum, that is now available on SAP App Center. It uses the precepts of industrial and organizational psychology combined with – you guessed it – artificial intelligence (AI) to help organizations hire, grow, and retain top talent.

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