No Boundaries In Action

Meet the Berlin Startup Teams And See How They Are Changing The Tech Enterprise Status Quo

SAP.iO

Published in

SAP.iO

5 min readJul 3, 2019

Written by Astrid Freier

Looking at complex markets and industries holistically is one of my personal drivers and where I’ve accumulated over 20 years of experience. My background is in B2B sales with focus on financial strategy, internationalization and digitization. I’ve built a career out of helping B2B companies scale and I’m proud to be continuing this path with the latest SAP.iO Foundry cohort in Berlin.

The why?

In early 2008, I was part of the New Economy boom and had a front-row seat to the rise of ‘mobile apps’ in Japan. When I moved back to Berlin in 2014 for Deutsche Bank and for my own company focusing on regulatory technology, I was delighted by the strides that were being made to include innovative topics and social issues. Berlin is truly a thriving hub for diversity and inclusion. In my last 10 years in this exciting world of cutting-edge startups and corporate innovation, I’ve learned that success is made of many ingredients, such as a good business model, high-end tech, global scalability and great teams.

At SAP.iO Foundry Berlin, all these aspects coincide and make my current role as Foundry Head my dream job. SAP.iO Foundries offer founder-friendly, no-equity-ask programs, providing access to curated mentorship, exposure to SAP technologies APIs, and opportunities to meet and collaborate with SAP’s customers. This is a unique opportunity for B2B startups to dive into the world of software integration within SAP. Every year we define topics based on pressing needs from our customers to focus our acceleration program on. Then we select startups for a 12-week acceleration program which we design individually to help the startups scale their businesses. Of particular note, I am proud of the diversity of backgrounds possessed by the high performing entrepreneurs. SAP recognizes the challenges that many entrepreneurs face, and in 2019 launched SAP.iO No Boundaries, an initiative dedicated to supporting B2B software businesses founded- or led-by entrepreneurs from underrepresented groups in tech.

What we want to achieve is threefold:

Contribute to make Berlin THE B2B Hub within the European context
Help connect SAP customers with the most relevant startup innovation that enables them to get highly incremental value out of their investments in SAP solutions and platforms
Drive inclusion by supporting great entrepreneurs who come from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds in enterprise tech

Here are the 6 startups we have had the privilege of working with over the last 3 months. Come and meet them live on Demo Day on August 7, 2019.

Augmania: Augmented Reality without Engineering

Augmania helps organizations execute their digital transformation plans through augmented reality and machine learning in the most speedy, easy to implement and cost-effective way.

Unique approach: Augmania provides an engaging interactive content creation tool without coding, where the content is published in weblinks without the friction of downloading apps. Currently working on their first patent.

Team: Rania Reda, Hesham Kanany, Hania Ghannam and Rihab Zaidi

Hardskills: Global enterprise learning platform focused on behavioral skills

Hardskills is a digital learning platform for enterprise customers. It helps them train global teams across different markets around the world to develop practical behavioral skills such as selling & influencing, collaboration, critical thinking, decision making, delegation and more.

Unique approach: Hardskills has codified behavioral training through original, proprietary content, technology and analytics that deliver mindset and habit change. The solution includes certification and facilitates career-length re-skilling and up-skilling. They are able to measure training impact and efficacy and provide personalized coaching and feedback. By integrating ML and AI, they will be able to provide a feedback loop at scale and link training to business performance to provide a ROI — measurement that has not been possible before.

Team: Anthony Hayward, Shoba Purushothaman and Krish Menon

Jobful: Online recruiting platform based on efficiency and gamification

Jobful is the ideal online recruiting platform, supporting both recruiters and candidates on their journey to find each other.

Unique approach: Candidates just need to play Jobful games and complete tests which evaluate their skills and competencies like communication, adaptability, critical and logical thinking, emotional intelligence and many others depending on the needs of the recruiting companies. Every user has gamified elements including levels, rankings and a personal leaderboards in order to gain higher engagement.

Team: Mihai Cepoi, Ioana Cepoi and Binca Ene

MoBerries: Candidates sourcing API. Germany’s largest shared talent pool

MoBerries is an automated candidate sourcing channel, connecting actively looking candidates to companies via AI-based matching. Providing the ability to source more candidates faster, the AI engine adjusts sourcing based on recruiting managers feedback.

Unique approach: With MoBerries you can filter candidate quality and can directly be integrated into companies’ application tracking systems. This enables companies to hire candidates almost in real-time! It allows recruitment agencies and individuals to refer candidates for success fees.

Team: Terence Hielscher, Andre Zayarni, and Mo Moubarak

ScanTrust: Trust, Transparency & Traceability powered by blockchain

ScanTrust enables brand owners to protect against counterfeits, monitor unit-level traceability of products, and drive end-user engagement through secure digitalization.

Unique approach: Through secure patented QR codes, a cloud-based software and blockchain technology, ScanTrust securely digitalizes physical products, enables supply chain traceability, and helps brands directly engage with end-consumers.

Team: Nathan Anderson, Jennifer Wu and Tobias Kars

ZkSystems: Scalable Blockchain Protocol for Industrial IoT

ZkSystems is empowering their customers with the right technology so that they can create innovative business models for autonomous IoT ecosystems such as smart factories or smart cities.

Unique approach: ZkSystems provides thousands of transactions per second with a full integration into ERP and enterprise payment systems for a frictionless plug-and-play integration of our blockchain. ZkSystems’ blockchain is used for tamper-proof asset tracking, pay-per-use servitization of factories and industrial machines, dynamic pricing, track and trace solutions, and other innovative use cases for Industry 4.0.

Team: Diana Rees and Amine Ünal