Introducing the 2018 Berlin Cohort: Are Accelerators the ‘Real Life’ Roller Coaster Ride?
Meet the teams — Out of the hundreds of startups that applied to the program this year, only 10 were invited to join the 2018 cohort.
We are on a journey here at SAP.iO Foundry, Powered by Techstars Accelerator, all of us, not just the startups but also the associates, the team and the incredible mentors. The flagship SAP.iO Foundry in Berlin offers tailored mentorship, access to SAP APIs, access to SAP technologies, and opportunities for exposure to SAP customers.
This is the second run of our full accelerator program, and although things are running smoothly and according to schedule, we’re not a cookie-cutter accelerator. There’s structure, advance technical knowhow, adherence to best practices (provided by our partnership with the prolific Techstars organization), but this is not a scientific experiment based on controls and variables with the aim of churning out identical business clones. We’re dealing with living organisms.
At the program’s core are the mentors who provide invaluable insights and guidance to the startups throughout their time in the program and beyond. We have over 80 mentors joining us this year for the famed “mentor madness” weeks and over 20 customer interactions scheduled for the first 4 weeks! It’s safe to say: the machine is well-oiled and in-motion.
The 10 startups will undergo the same conditions, same heat, but the pressure is different. At the end, each will emerge with a unique business, go-to-market strategy, sales targets and killer pitches — in short a unique diamond, shaped by what they make of the next 13 weeks. As the head of the SAP.iO Foundries in Europe, I have had the true pleasure of meeting so many talented and enthusiastic entrepreneurs with undeniable drive and passion for the world of AI and Machine Learning for Enterprise Solutions.
This year, we’re excited to welcome 10 machine learning startups to our growing family.
Here’s a closer look at the startups joining us this year:
SegmentStream: manage the entire marketing stack
Location: Moscow, Russia
Team: Constantine Yurevich, Pavel Petrinich
What they do: they have created a customer data platform based on a single unified API to integrate and unify all the customer data, manage data stream across the entire marketing ecosystem.
AxiomAI: process automation via AI assistant (Like connecting Alexa to Zapier + UiPath)
Location: London, United Kingdom
Team: Yaseer Sheriff, Simon Williams, Alex Barlow
What they do: Axiom automates business processes via an AI browser assistant, making these processes sharable /sell-able to others in an app-store.
WeView: authentic video reviews for retail
Location:Munich, Germany
Team: Anna Ritz, Christoph Pröschel, Jakob von Egidy
What they do: Weview is a video platform for product reviews that allows retailers to source, embed and optimize brand safe product review videos in their product pages.
Konolabs : AI Scheduling Bot Platform
Location:San Francisco, United States
Team: YJ Min, Jaehoon Choi, Jung-hee Ryu
What they do: the machine learning based engine, Kono, allows customers to have their own email-bot/chat-bot for scheduling appointments. Based on the automated scheduling & booking services — they’re integrating into CRM systems.
Voyc.ai: visualize and organize conversations
Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Team: Matthew Westaway, Lethabo Motsoaledi
What they do: Voyc.ai is a web platform that processes and synthesizes natural language conversations. Allowing our customers to search and index conversations. Their “proprietary” language processing algorithms perform Sentiment Analysis, Topic Modelling, Semantic Searches and Custom language models.
Softcube: automatic video ad creation and optimization
Location:Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine
Team: Oleg Lesov, Roman Zakharov
What they do: Softcube’s neural network searches through numerous YouTube video reviews and picks the best scenes of products in use. With their own video library (derived from YouTube video reviews and neural network results), they are able to match to a store’s product catalog. The algorithm then predicts which clips of products will have the highest CTRs. Those clips are used to automatically render video banners and Facebook and Instagram ads.
Clarisights: end-to-end BI for marketing
Location: California, USA
Team: Arun Srinivasan, Ankur Gupta
What they do: Clarisights is a SaaS Platform which gives Marketers access to data across their entire marketing stack in a single place. Marketing teams are able to create their own dashboards, add the metrics they care about, comment and share across departments/business units.
BeeInstant: AI-powered application monitoring platform for large enterprises
Location:Dublin, Ireland
Team: Trung Nguyen, Phuong Vu
What they do: BeeInstant applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate IT operation process at scale. Their proprietary technology empowers Tech organizations to double efficiency, cut down operational cost up to 50% and generate actionable insights into user experience at large scale.
Recotap: AI driven content recommendation/personalization engine for content publishers
Location:Bangalore, India
Team: Bargava Subramanian, Ganesh Chithambalam
What they do: Recotap analyzes structured and unstructured content across various internal and external data sources and delivers personalized text, audio, images and video content across digital platforms such as retail kiosks, digital displays, websites, mobile apps and virtual assistants. Their deep learning models understand the content (text, video, images, sound) to provide a rich set of personalization features.
Datarade: helping data buyers to find quality data that drives results
location:Berlin, Germany
Team: Thani Shamsi, Florian Rösler, Richard Hoffmann
What they do: Datarade is a cloud-based data procurement platform that is bringing back the power to those who are spending million of dollars on marketing data. Unlike other services in the ecosystem, they are a neutral software provider and empower marketers in: discovering what data is out there, knowing what data is in there (it’s usually a black box) and target a relevant audience at ease.
A big thank YOU.
We would like to thank all of the amazing 100+ mentors. Without your help, none of this would be possible. The support from our Techstars and SAP mentors as well as the Berlin ecosystem has truly been unbelievable.
In addition, we want to thank SAP’s customers, CIOs and Digital Officers, who are taking time out of their very busy schedules to visit us at the Berlin Foundry in order to see how SAP is driving open innovation.
I am very grateful for all your hard work and for sharing this incredible journey.
Here’s to another year and to another world-changing roller coaster ride. Stay tuned for updates on the progress and big announcements around #DemoDay2018.
