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In San Francisco, Featured, Service Industries, CRM & Customer Experience, Announcements

SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco Kicks Off B2B Innovation in Sales & Service Program

May 11, 2023 — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today launched the 2023 program focused on innovation in B2B Sales & Services at SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco. The 11 startups have been selected by a jury of SAP experts, partners, customers, and investment funds to join the program.  

This program is for startups with innovative solutions for B2B sales and service processes and experiences to help improve the customer journey. Customer Experience (CX) is SAP’s largest addressable market with a strong demand for more CX partner solutions that SAP customers can leverage.

During this 5-month program, the selected startups will build and develop long-term partnerships with SAP by defining joint use cases, product integration and various business development opportunities. SAP customers have been involved in the cohort selection and will be supporting by evaluating opportunities for proof of concepts.

The following startups are participating in the SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco 2023 program: 

  1. Aisera is a leading provider of ChatGPT and Generative AI solutions for customer and employee experiences covering IT helpdesk, customer service/support, HR, sales, and finance.
  2. Ascendo connects human and machine to achieve proactive support.
  3. AmplifAI is the AI-driven performance enablement platform for employee-centric enterprises, helping hybrid teams maximize business outcomes, boost productivity and improve engagement.
  4. Bounti AI-driven growth operating system turns customer data into real-time alerts and hyper-personalized actions for sales and customer experience representatives to drive customer expansion and retention.
  5. InsideBoard is a digital success platform powered by AI, which brings business value to digital transformation programs. InsideBoard engages users to adopt digital solutions and processes, while also making sure they continue to perform optimally over time.
  6. Knowmax works with Fortune 500 brands to help improve knowledge management capabilities for customer experience organizations by moving knowledge from being static to a guided-assist based approach, helping create a single source of truth.
  7. Lucy serves as an ultimate AI Answer Engine℠ across the enterprise—getting users the right answer, at the right time, no matter where they sit in the organization.
  8. Neuron7 provides AI-generated resolution intelligence for complex service organizations that need fast, accurate issue resolutions at scale.
  9. Pryon rapidly transforms organizations’ untapped wealth of approved content into AI-powered experiences that greatly increase the productivity of customers, employees, and partners. By leveraging proprietary computer vision and large language models, the company fuses disparate sources to then deliver fully attributed and trusted answers that accelerate workflows.
  10. Quiq helps enterprises deliver great digital customer experiences using its asynchronous messaging platform to automate 30-80% of customer issues with AI and handle the remainder with human agents working in Quiq’s digital contact center.
  11. Salesroom is an AI-based meeting intelligence platform that gives customer-facing teams real-time coaching cues, suggests meeting agendas, automates note-taking, and generates highlights so sellers stay present, creating a lasting impression with buyers. 

About SAP.iO
SAP.iO curates a relevant and diverse startup ecosystem that extends the value of SAP solutions and meets the continuously evolving needs of our customers. Our programs provide dedicated support to the most promising startups as they launch and scale relationships with SAP and our global network of customers, partners, and employees. Since 2017, we have connected thousands of SAP customers with innovative enterprise software startups, helping them find solutions to their unique needs. For more information, visit http://sap.io/.  

In HR & People Engagement, Foundries, Blog, Article, San Francisco, Featured

Meet 4 SAP.iO startups working to make the Future of Work more diverse

SAP prides itself on making its customers and the world run at its best. In no other area is this more apparent than within its New Ventures and Technologies (NVT) organization, where teams across the company work together to bring new, innovative technologies into the company’s core portfolio. NVT has committed itself to developing teams and solutions that align with SAP’s overall goals – whether they are tied to the company’s business goals, sustainability goals, or more notably, its diversity and inclusion (D&I) goals.

One example of that commitment to diversity and equity is the SAP.iO No Boundaries initiative to accelerate more than 200 startups founded or led by women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ and others from underrepresented groups in tech by 2023. The program is the first comprehensive inclusive entrepreneurship initiative for underrepresented entrepreneurs in the business software industry. Each SAP.iO Foundry location follows a different theme within respective No Boundaries cohorts, with themes ranging from Professional Services to the Future of Work, and more.

The SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco’s Spring 2021 cohort was built around the topic of the Future of Work. Here are four startups from the most recent program that aren’t just founded by underrepresented entrepreneurs but have also dedicated themselves to increasing diversity and equity in the workplace.

Gapsquare (Acquired by XpertHR)

Founded in 2015 by Dr. Zara Nanu and Ion Suruceanu, Gapsquare is building a world where work is inclusive, pay meets value, and diverse talent thrives. Through its SaaS platform, Gapsquare offers insights into salary equity for gender, race and/or disability, inbuilt consultancy, and data-driven recommendations for change. By focusing on these key areas, companies will be able to compete in today’s job market and adequately address the concerns of employees and prospective hires.

With Gapsquare’s fair pay analysis, companies can approach pay equity with a clear understanding of root causes of issues and help focus their resources to implement sustainable change. Not only that, but the startup also utilizes the data on its platform to support organizations with pay gap reporting legislation and equal pay audit work.

Gapsquare integrates with SAP SuccessFactors so customers can analyze their people and pay data to better understand inequity in their organizations. According to Nanu, understanding pain points and actioning sustainable change helps users build more flexible, engaged, and happy workforces.

HumanlyHR Inc

Based in Seattle, Humanly was founded in 2019 by Prem Kumar and Andrew Gardner and aims to create more equitable and efficient job interviews through conversational analytics.  The startup automates job candidate interactions and provides hiring teams with voice analytics to not only make interviews more efficient but also less biased.

Today’s hiring teams handle a high volume of applicants per role, where they have to sift through hundreds of applications and resumes. Such an influx means a lot of qualified candidates may not be engaged with at all – falling into what the Humanly team calls the “black hole” at the top of the hiring funnel. Humanly works to solve the issue by using data to ask the right candidate the right question, thus replacing the need for large teams of recruiting coordinators. Not only that, but Humanly automates top-of-funnel hiring tasks and provides interview analytics to hiring teams so that they can focus on improving areas of the hiring process that should remain human-driven and empathetic.

In addition to interview analytics and insights, Humanly also automates note-taking for interviews, screening and scheduling for high applicant volume roles, re-engagement of silver medalist candidates, reference checks, and two-way applicant tracking system integrations.

Humanly integrates with the SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting Module so that all candidate conversations and associated efficiency and equity analytics are synced into candidate records in SuccessFactors, including adding interviews analytics, adding new candidate records, updating, and moving screened candidates to the right place in the SF Recruiting Module and attaching interview notes.  

Mentor Spaces

For many employees of color, corporate allyship and career mentorship may be a feat easier said than done. Mentor Spaces is working to solve this challenge through its community-driven membership for Black and Latinx professionals.

Founded in 2017 by Chris Motley the startup works to help companies scale D&I efforts while advancing the careers of underrepresented talent by encouraging mentorship among community members. In doing so, diverse talent acquisition and retention are streamlined within companies.

One charge that Mentor Spaces wants to take on is bridging the gap between siloed HR teams and employee networks, or Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). The startup posits that ERG members want to support HR teams but are unable to due to lack of bandwidth and visibility into the hiring process. Partnering with Mentor Spaces enables both HR and ERGs to connect, and in doing so they can build diverse talent pipeline, improve retention, and enhance corporate culture.

Mentor Spaces’ platform has a plethora of features, including native mobile apps that facilitate mentorship conversations. Not only that, but they have launched community partnerships with national nonprofit organizations and Historically Black Colleges and Universities to provide direct access to the largest pool of underrepresented professionals that Mentor Spaces helps cultivate on behalf of its clients.

The Mom Project

Called the “career destination for moms,” The Mom Project provides companies with consistent, scalable access to the most comprehensive community of highly skilled gender and ethnically diverse moms (but they also include dads and allies) in the United States.

According to founder Allison Robinson, The Mom Project was built with moms in mind, and has become a two-sided marketplace and community that connects companies with highly skilled and professionally relevant talent. This marketplace facilitates all work types, ranging from short-term staffing needs to customized talent programs and is now comprised of more than 500,000 professionals with strong backgrounds in the core suite of business functions including: marketing, sales, finance, technology, legal, and HR.

Every aspect of The Mom Project has been designed on the core insight that juggling work and family is hard. With that in mind, the team wanted to make them feel supported throughout every step in the journey. Thus, The Mom Project’s platform isn’t a job posting platform, but one that actively supports moms throughout the entire application process. Profile and resume crafting, job search programs, covering childcare so candidates can prepare for interviews, and community generated support are only a handful of the platform’s features.

The Mom Project’s API complements SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting by shortening the hiring process and allowing organizations to have one system of record for talent process that consider high-skilled moms with the willingness to return to work.

About SAP.iO
To learn more about how SAP.iO is helping innovators start up and scale with SAP, please visit https://sap.io/.