Introducing the Paris Six: Why An AI Foundry in ‘Paris Is A Good Idea’
When Bill McDermott, CEO and Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, met with Emmanuel Macron, President of France, at the #ChooseFrance summit earlier this year — the meeting resulted in one of the largest investments in the French tech ecosystem!
Part of SAP’s five-year and €2 billion commitment was the creation of a SAP.iO Foundry, focused on supporting B2B start-ups developing internet-based cloud services and other edge technologies, such as machine learning, AI and blockchain in France.
Why Paris?
In her famous role as Sabrina Fairchild in the film Sabrina, Audrey Hepburn said: “Paris is always a good idea,” and I couldn’t agree more! It’s my great pleasure to announce that last week — we kicked off our first cohort consisting of 6 startups all hailing from France, in none other than: Paris, the next big European Tech hub! For one thing, VC investments in France outperformed those in Germany in 2016 ($2.7 billion compared to $2.1 billion Germany). Some of the brightest minds in AI and Data Science attended universities in France, which even boasts a highly funded INRIA initiative to promote AI sciences.
The #ParisFoundry will accelerate the growth of startups offering innovative B2B SaaS solutions in the area of AI to deliver the future of the intelligent enterprise. As our second SAP.iO Foundry location in Europe, the aim of this unique program is to provide startups with mentorship, technology and access to the vibrant SAP ecosystem.
The startups, led by audacious and highly motivated entrepreneurs, play a critical role in delivering unparalleled value for over 400,000 SAP customers across the globe!
I would like to give a warm welcome to our new family members and to thank Séverine Kichou and and Sébastien Gibier for heading the team in Paris and for putting this impressive program, group of mentors and workshops together. A big thank to Gérald Karsenti, Managing Director for SAP France and his team for their great partnership and for helping us launch the Paris Foundry in record time! It takes more than the sum of hours to bring about a program of this caliber to the tech world.
Over the next ten weeks, the six startups will start working on integration use-cases, business development and Go-To-Market workshops, as well as tailored sessions on growth and fundraising. SAP customer meetings will take place regularly, as well as one-on-one mentoring sessions carried out by French startup ecosystem superstars such as: Jasmine Antenus — CEO of Recast.ai, Guillaume Walline — CEO of Indigo Connected Retail, Pierre Khoury — CEO Shippeo, and Quentin Guilly — CEO of Andjaro amongst many others!
Here’s an in-depth look at the ‘Paris Six- The 2018 Paris Cohort’:
Brennus Analytics: a price optimization SaaS relying on AI technologies, which helps companies get their prices right, boost their profit margins and stay ahead of competition. Pricing is the #1 profitability lever for most companies: a solid pricing usually translates into a 5 to 15% margin increase.
CITODI: an artificial intelligence solution for route optimization that takes into consideration all variables of a delivery. By building an artificial intelligence capable of deciding in real time the best assignment of deliveries to resources.
Energiency: provides a data science & AI algorithms that learn from data (energy, production, maintenance, weather) and identifies real time energy savings in the process of big manufacturing companies (automotive, chemistry, food, paper, raw materials…etc), generating from 5 to 15% energy savings and manufacturing excellence.
Scortex: is a Quality Intelligence Solution which allows for the automation of complex visual inspections on production lines. By combining their deep learning software and hardware platform at the edge, Scortex provides a significant productivity and cost optimization for factories.
Supervizor: a unique Plug&Play technology for internal audit and finance teams, based on machine learning, that helps companies of any size to automatically control their accounting and operational data.
Wakeo: is SaaS platform bringing real-time visibility to B2B multimodal transport flows (sea, air, and road). Their solution guarantees data quality by leveraging providers’ data and enriching it with independent information (AIS & satellite data, IoT) to provide predictive times of arrival based on their in-house algorithm. Wakeo helps shippers and forwarders improve anticipation capacity, customer experience and optimize last-minute costs and inventories.
Interested in reading more about our the Paris Foundry “en français”? We’ve got you covered:
-L’accélérateur de startups SAP.iO Foundry ouvre ses portes à Paris
-L’éditeur allemand de logiciels d’entreprise inaugure son accélérateur de start-up parisien ce mardi.
