Introducing the SAP.iO NY Foundry Cohort of Women-Led Enterprise Tech Startups
“Good luck — there are just not many out there.” “Are you sure you don’t want to aim for 5 instead of 10?”
This was the feedback I received when we announced our search for 10 women-led B2B enterprise tech startups to form SAP.iO NY Foundry’s first cohort. Again and again, we were told we wouldn’t be able to find so many quality enterprise-focused startups founded by women to join our unique, no-equity accelerator program.
We knew that it was not going to be easy. But we also knew that they were out there, ready for us to find if we looked hard enough. With only 17% of tech startups having one female founder, this percentage is even lower for startups focused on B2B enterprise tech. At SAP, we have decided to tackle this disparity head on —with a program that will provide deep support for female founders from the entire SAP ecosystem to lift up their businesses and create the path to hockey stick growth.
We proved the skeptics wrong. Over the last two months, we were blown away by the 100+ applications we received and the quality of the applicants, meeting one woman after the other who are each building strong companies that are fundamentally changing the landscape of technology and business.
Today, we are kicking off the SAP.iO NY Foundry — a highly curated, no-equity, 16-week accelerator program — with 10 exciting companies that are at or close to Series A. The companies in this cohort focus on using emerging technologies like Machine Learning, Blockchain, Augmented Reality, Computer Vision and Analytics to solve complex business problems for enterprise customers across multiple industries. And, the companies all have at least one incredibly talented female founder.
Between now and August, the startups will be based in our offices in Hudson Yards and will learn how to scale their businesses and deliver greater value to customers, through tailored mentorship with SAP experts, external industry and VC mentors, and startup veterans. They will get access to SAP APIs, access to SAP technologies, and opportunities for exposure to SAP’s network of 378,000+ customers.
The startups joining the program are:
- Amberdata (Co-founder and COO Tongtong Gong): Amberdata is the first advanced analytics platform for monitoring, searching, analyzing, and securing public and private blockchain.
- CN2 (Founder and CEO Margaret Martin): CN2 repurposes existing 2D, 3D and CAD assets into highly impactful and measurable Augmented Reality content.
- DMetrics (Founders Ariadna Quattoni and Paul Nemirovsky): DMetrics’ Artificial Intelligence platform, Minsky, reads text from any online and/or proprietary source and extracts what matters to business professionals into actionable intelligence.
- Donde (Co-founder and CEO Liat Zakay): Donde is using Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing to help retailers mimic the way their customers think about products.
- Lately (Co-founder and CEO Kate Bradley Chernis): Lately is a marketing SaaS platform that connects data, people and processes, saving time, creating smarter content and scalability for marketing teams.
- Narrativ (Founder and CEO Shirley Chen): Narrativ is democratizing the $60bn commerce content market with its patent-pending SmartLink AI, transforming static links in organic editorial to unlock their true value for advertisers, publishers and consumers.
- Nopsec (Founder and CEO Lisa Xu): Nopsec provides ML-based threat prediction and risk remediation solutions to help businesses prevent security breaches.
- Sundar (Founder and CEO Jag Gill): Sundar is facilitating global discovery and sourcing of raw materials and products between suppliers and apparel retailers, brands, and designers.
- StyleSage (Co-founder and CEO Jade Huang): StyleSage’s core AI and image recognition engine powers retailer’s speed in three ways: (1) faster decision making in pricing, promo, assortment; (2) faster product to market (rapid eCommerce product smart tagging); (3) faster price competitiveness (price matching based on image, in a world without universal product code).
- Ziggeo (Founders Susan Danziger and Oliver Friedmann): Ziggeo is an award-winning cloud-based video technology company that powers the recording/playback of videos — all with complete security and control — representing the next generation of data.
Our vision is that the SAP.iO NY Foundry will not only accelerate these companies, but also create momentum and opportunities for women all across the enterprise tech ecosystem here in New York. We will be hosting many events, office hours and workshops over the course of the next few months for the broader ecosystem so that we can amplify our work. If you are interested in learning more or getting involved with our efforts, please reach out.
Please join us in welcoming these terrific founders and companies!
