This article is originally published at https://blogs.oracle.com/startup/these-startup-pitches-were-so-good,-analysts-couldnt-choose-one-winner
It was a battle of the pitches.
Before an audience of global analysts, six startups presented and two walked away with kudos for ‘Most Innovative.’
The participants were members of Oracle for Startups, and the webinar was just one perk of the program, similar to our Dragon’s Den event in London in February. Each founder had just three minutes to impress a host of top analysts in virtual attendance, enabling founders to show how they are pushing innovation forward, and analysts to get a sneak peek into the future.
Most Innovative: Rocketmat and Supermoney
Rocketmat uses machine learning to enable human resources departments to fairly find and retain the best talent for companies. Its CEO and Cofounder, Pedro Lombardo, described the innovation as ‘a brain that you can put in existing AI.’
He believes that recruiter tools such as assessments and semantic search are outdated, and that adding AI to several points from ‘hire to retire’ helps with talent retention. “Our solutions range from our recruiting robot Sophia, to ranking candidates against future KPIs in selection and working with the internal company talent management,” he said.
In the last 100 days, many healthcare customers are using Rocketmat’s services in response to COVID-19. “Helping those companies recruit very much needed doctors and nurses gave us great press in Brazil,” Lombardo said.
He believes Rocketmat saves its customers time and money in selecting candidates. “But the most important and the foremost benefit is equal opportunities. Everybody gets their shot by our algorithms,” he added.
Supermoney is a blockchain business making it easy for its customers to build its own blockchain solutions. The technology is based on the Oracle Blockchain platform, which is a wrapper around hyperledger fabric that is the leading enterprise blockchain protocol.
“The magic that we bring is in the form of 40 smart contracts – the thing that does stuff in the blockchain – and we provide access to our smart contracts via a suite of APIs,” Joel Smalley, CEO of the London-based fintech explained. There are also user interface templates for iOS and Android, making it easy to build blockchain products to take care of payments and contracts, for example.
“Our biggest win at the moment is a partnership with HSBC, which has agreed to provide the payment structure for all of our solutions and … we have some big names in automotive finance too,” he said.
Supermoney is currently building on its success by engineering a front, middle, and back-office system for the insurance industry and has some ‘significant’ companies on-board.
Most Creative: Airfluencers
Airfluencers was awarded ‘Most Creative,’ and not just because CEO Rodrigo Soriano began his pitch with a Black Mirror clip.
“Anyone who’s a content creator needs to know how much they are worth when they post something. Any content has a price and metrics behind it. Our goal is to provide companies and marketing departments with all the information they need to create the most trustworthy content,” he said.
Soriano believes that influencers are the future. His company uses proprietary algorithms to estimate an influencer’s reach and value. The startup has 150 global clients so far and Soriano said the company’s benchmarks are “way, way higher than traditional media” in Brazil, sometimes exceeding 20 times traditional digital
The startup has two products. The first, a dashboard for marketing departments, allows them to run campaigns end-to-end – from discovery to predictive analysis and measurement. The second product is an analytics app for influencers so they can provide better content to their clients.
“Basically, we’re linking B2B with B2C and creating a huge, huge database of content and people where marketing depts can maximize,” Soriano said. “Social media and anybody who creates content is a target for us and we have probably the largest database in Latin America of influencers. We’re pretty happy with it.”
Best Overall Pitch: Complete Intelligence
Complete Intelligence CEO Tony Nash won ‘Best Overall Pitch.’ Packing plenty of examples into his three-minute presentation, he adeptly explained how Complete Intelligence is a cloud containerized platform for forecasting costs and revenues for better decisions.
The Texas-based startup overcomes the problem of inaccurate forecasts for costs and revenues by enabling customers to be specific. “In many cases, we’re significantly better than consensus forecasts,” he said.
The company’s products, CostFlow and RevenueFlow, provide context for companies during forecasting with a hierarchical view down to component level, where a CEO can manage the pipeline for procurement. “We take in data from ERP systems and procurement systems and process it on our platform for highly accurate context,” he added.
Finally, drawing on a real client with $2bn of revenue, Nash showed how Complete Intelligence can save millions on cost lines while adding millions in cash flow.
“So, this might seem like a very specific forecasting problem, but it leads to a better valuation for manufacturing firms,” he concluded.
The Best of the Rest
Analysts were also impressed with BotSupply and Gridmarkets’ pitches.
Francesco Stasi, CEO of BotSupply, explained how using Oracle’s chatbot platform, the Copenhagen-based firm helps customers build chatbots in up to 27 languages. He highlighted how relationships with Oracle’s sales reps can lead to a better product and big customers.
GridMarkets cofounder Mark Ross explained how his startup simplifies and accelerates computationally demanding workloads such as animation rendering, visual effects, and molecular simulations for drug discovery. He explained how the product saves costs and is integrated into the end user’s software and sets up in seconds. “There are no special skills and training required. Our pricing is competitive as we leverage the highly secure Oracle capacity,” he said. The startup has acquired more than 3,000 customers in over 90 countries including Fox Studios, the BBC, and Facebook.