Disrupted
Main takeaways from Tech Crunch’s Disrupt Berlin

Cool fact: there are more than 100.000 dogs living in Berlin. You can thank me after your office’s next quiz (which you’ll now indisputably win).
I stumbled into this precious piece of information while searching for the number of bridges in the capital of Germany (serendipity, I know). Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a definite answer for this (surprisingly heated) online debate — some sources report that Berlin has around 1700 bridges (beating Venice), while others fiercely argue that the number is close to 1000.

Whatever the real number is, the favorable environment to connect the dots is definitely one of the reasons why so many tech startups, entrepreneurs and general innovators are moving to the second most populous city in the EU.
Berlin represents Europe’s bridge to the future and to the rest of the world and that makes it the perfect setting for the European edition of Tech Crunch’s Disrupt Conference (which I was very lucky to attend). Here are a few of the things that happened there.
Damage Control
It was simple math for Anne Kjaer Reichart, CEO and co-founder of ReDi School of Digital Integration: in 2015, there were 890.000 registered asylum seekers in Germany; with an estimated 1 million software development jobs (US) expected to go unfilled by 2020, there was an opportunity waiting to be addressed.
The idea of helping refugees learning to code turned into a win-win situation as it boosted integration and uncovered a socially sustainable way of filling the tech jobs gap.
“We apply positive psychology. If you treat people like victims they’ll start acting like victims (…) If you treat people like tech talent, or if you treat them as transformation experts and they get the support that is necessary — we’ll see them hopefully becoming startup entrepreneurs.”
In an era of “damage control”- as described by Aline Sara, CEO of NaTakallam — events like the Refugee Crisis or Brexit are shaping the future of the tech ecosystem as they represent both new challenges and new opportunities.

On that note, Localglobe’s Founding partner, Saul Klein, explained how his VC firm is optimistically preparing for the impact that the UK leaving the European Union will eventually have on the country’s startups. Rocking a very cool shirt, Klein analyzed the immigration debate in the UK:
“The UK is thinking about how do we get more highly skilled talent to the UK. Not less.”
Combined with optimism and positive psychology, technology can be the key to solve the challenges of our current days of “damage control”. That’s exactly what the Nairobi-based startup, Gravity Earth, is doing by helping refugees claiming and validating their identity through a platform powered by blockchain tech.
The Internet people may actually end up saving the world.
Startup Alley

There were over 400 startups showcasing their proposition for the future in the Startup Alley. From Retail to Gaming, companies from all over the world presented their solutions powered by Artificial Intelligence, Virtual/Artificial/Augmented/Mixed Reality, Blockchain, and many more.
Giving special attention to retail-oriented solutions, I met with some really interesting startups from all over the world.
- RetailQuant: Big Brother is watching you, but you already knew that. What you probably didn’t know is that it may not be such a bad thing. Using AI, this German-based startup is tracking customers’ emotions in-store: either if you’re smiling over a chocolate bar or crying about someone else cutting in line in front of you, their algorithm will recognize it and report it to the store. Gordan Volaric, the Founder, explained me that the startup aims to help brands understand the “wants and needs” of their customers thus creating the perfect shopping experience. He even suggested that someday, we might be able to quantify happiness as a KPI;
- Qopius: Depending on store configuration, this startup integrates camera capsules into shelves, shopping carts, cleaning equipment, or robots to continuously monitor the store. Powered by Artificial Vision, this technology helps always keeping the shelves properly stocked;
- Livello: why make you read when you can just watch a video? Yes, this paragraph is as seamless as Livello’s tech. Enjoy!
Startup Battlefield

First, there were 13, but only 5 companies made it all the way to the Tech Crunch’s Startup Battlefield Final.
A lot of good ideas were shared, addressing issues from male fertility to diabetes or cyber-security.
Please meet the finalists: Polyteia, Kalepso, Spike, imago AI, and the big winner, Legacy.
Legacy’s founder, Khaled Kteily, started his pitch by delivering an interesting promise: “I’m going to talk about assets, investments, and deposits without ever referring to the financial industry”. And indeed he didn’t. This Swiss-based company is tackling a problem of the utmost importance: the fact that “infertility affects 1/7 couples globally” and that “30–50% of the time, it’s due to the man”.

More than a sperm bank, the company aims to make the process of storing “man’s most important asset” an easier an much safer experience. After the sample is stored, Legacy will analyze it and provide an accessible and easy-to-read report on its quality. The users will also receive some advice in order to boost their fertility.
“Our unique at-home solution allows men to have their sperm analyzed and frozen at a clinic without leaving their home or having to meet with a physician (…) All clients receive a full fertility analysis, including personalized recommendations using our machine learning-driven technology.”
Legacy was the fastest swimmer of the competition (pun intended) and ended up receiving the Disrupt Cup.
The Runner-Up

imago AI, the Indian company from New Delhi, is addressing another one of the world’s biggest problems: food waste.
Using computer vision, the company co-founded by Abhishek Goyal is reducing the time it takes for producers to measure crop traits.
By identifying patterns faster than a human being ever could, this technology helps growing more disease-resistant crop varieties.

Goyal added:
“In the pilots that we have done with companies, they compared our results with the manual measuring results and we have achieved more than 99 percent accuracy (…) In manual measurement, an expert is only able to provide a certain percentage range of disease severity for an image example; (25–40 percent) but using our software they can accurately pin point the exact percentage (e.g. 32.23 percent)”
The other co-founder, Shweta Gupta, explained that this technology can solve the food-wastage problem by using computer vision and machine learning algorithms to identify crop diseases and assess how much a plant has been damaged.
“Because in food companies a lot of food is wasted on their production lines (…) So that is where we see our technology really helps — reducing that sort of wastage.”
Tech Crunch will host its next Disrupt Event in Lagos, Nigeria in December 2018.
