Quantpaper — A startup analyzing and quantifying innovation strategies of competitors and future partners
Quantpaper has been an idea that Founder Jakub Bares has held on to for some time. He was to realize the potential for his insights discovery platform when successfully entering the Applied Data Incubator. After competing in the Applied Data Hackathon, the gateway to the six month program in Berlin, he would soon create a supportive team around him and begin to build his tool for technology adoption and maturity. This is their story so far.
Innovation is a buzzword, an overused word and, at times, a defunct word. Large players throw it around like it’s the solution to all their problems and plan out strategies to implement change, but rarely actually act upon that vision. It’s not always their fault, when something so large tries to change direction, it takes a lot of work and a lot of effort. So they look towards the real innovators to help and those often come in the form of startups (whether adopting their ideas or acquiring the startup themselves). It makes sense, the smaller player can pivot quickly, is usually agile and can bring with it the ideas for success. But how do businesses find these new ideas? This new talent? This needed, original thinking? They search. This is where Quantpaper steps into the light. Founder Jakub Bares, together with Robert Germaine Quarshie and Timur Tasdogan are building a tool which actively analyzes technological trends and one which offers the ability to watch trends from specific angles of a market, industry, technological use-case, business model or company strategy.
Applied Data Hackathon
But before we explore this further, let’s find out why Jakub wanted to enter the Applied Data Hackathon in the first place and compete to join the Applied Data Incubator in Berlin. “I have taken part in many hackathons and was really intrigued by this one. There was a challenge submitted by Itonics, a partner for the incubator. Itonics is one of the best innovation management platforms out there, and they asked for ideas on how to deal with too much information coming from their data ingestion and enrichment pipeline.” Jakub explains before concluding. “This was amazing, because this challenge was exactly what I had been dreaming to work on for a long time.”
Following a hack week and successful live pitch on stage at The Drivery, Jakub ranked high enough in the Applied Data Hackathon leaderboard and was invited to join the incubator in Berlin that empowers data-driven innovation. Next up was the exciting challenge of finding a team and Jakub shares how this went, “Timur Tasdogan was literally the second person I spoke with and joined as a marketing expert. I was exploring the Berlin startup scene and Timur was among the first five out of 50 people to reply to my online post. There was little time and, in honesty, few truly interesting candidates. People either had not enough experience or had problems with a visa or something similar to this. It wasn’t until the last minute as we were about to step into the incubator that I connected with Robert Germaine Quarshie who brings in the sales expertise. Robert impressed me, so he was in.”
Quantpaper were named Hyperspace during the hackathon in Berlin and the new team soon decided to rename themselves to align more on what they wanted to achieve. Timur explains more on the team dynamic, “Resourcefulness is a key part of what we are striving to achieve. We are all excited by innovation and also disruption. I would say none of us are afraid to take on a big challenge and are enjoying the journey.” This is good to hear and within the team Timur is responsible for every marketing effort for both the team and the branding of the startup. He shares, “We created the brand together, so everyone has a contribution. I’m then the person who implements the decisions. We generally decide on marketing efforts together.” Robert adds to this, “I think what makes this experience special is that we are coming in at such an early stage. Timur can build the brand and I can put the sales strategy in place. I believe that before you sell something, you need to engage with it. Coming from the grass roots helps any sales person with potential clients — because we have built everything together.”
Now the team is established, Jakub looks back at the experiences so far. “I feel like I have been waiting a while to build something like this. I’ve never felt convinced that the market for my previous startups outside of Germany were as interesting and as big as the one for Quantpaper. My experience revolves around working as CTO and AI architect specializing in graph algorithms and natural language processing. I am also a huge reader of everything about emerging technologies, so Quantpaper is very aligned and dear to my heart. In the past I have lead startups from idea to proof of technology, so I feel very strong about having a research heavy project such as Quantpaper and that we have enough experience and product vision in our team to build this.
Quantpaper — Explained
Jakub shares what Quantpaper is and does. “It’s an analytical tool that helps consultants and innovation managers analyze and quantify technology trends in order to have enough input when finding strategic partners. It extracts insights from news articles and scientific papers and uses our semi-automatically generated knowledge graph to understand the dynamics of research, global markets and concrete value propositions of companies. For example a client from the insurance industry may want to partner with a mobility startup to monitor their customers’ driving style and verify the data through blockchain. We aggregate insights about how their corporate competitors and startups from the relevant market approach this topic by breaking down the common strategies that characterize their approaches. Therefore we are a fast and information dense solution to the current method of manually searching on Google or being provided with a list of articles on blockchain for the insurance sector that the client would need to read themselves.” Robert adds to this, “The key word is insights. It is an insights discovery platform. In this example we inspire the insurance company to think beyond their current assumptions and understanding. Using the knowledge graph we can provide non-obvious but highly relevant ideas that none of our competitors can do. Timur concludes, “It’s market research, but better and faster.” As the three colleagues discuss, it’s clear they are aligned with their thinking and know exactly what Quantpaper is being built for.
Quantpaper therefore is a tool for companies who understand there is too much inspiration that could be missed if the research was completed manually. “That is simply a huge wasted opportunity to innovate smarter and more efficiently.” Jakub explains before Robert shares more on the inevitable challenges that come with building a data-driven startup for launching on the German market. “It’s not straightforward. As we build we need input from analysts, consultants and future potential users. We have therefore dedicated a large proportion of our time to gain insights ourselves. We need and want to give them a product that is exactly what they want. It keeps us moving and keeps the pressure on us. But as we talk to prospects, refine our value proposition and develop our prototype, we have constant input. We want precision and accuracy, and that takes time.”
Research, Research, Research
The team have so far spoken with over 60 people via interviews. Jakub shares why this is so important. “In order to validate the idea and so we can understand the research process from different perspectives and from different companies, we have spoken to many decision makers. Whether consultants, analysts, innovation managers, design studios, scientific research centers and others. They all have different needs and although they may not be our direct customer in the future, we need their experiences to understand their role in the ecosystem. We ask them for considerations, feedback, pain points — everything that can make us successful.” This research has led to the team building an internal application to help structure the knowledge graph. They are now playing with this to help improve the insights delivery.
The vision of Quantpaper is to help all companies innovate to their full extent. “We support them in understanding what future technologies are out there now and which ones will be there in the future.” Jakub concludes, “So much is happening in the world and at such high speeds that companies struggle to register the changes. That’s what we want to help people with, to help companies navigate the complex details and open their eyes.” Quantpaper hold this vision in all that they do and as they near the end of the program, you can watch them present in a Data Day live on stage at renowned Data Natives on September 1, 2022.
