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Startups Helping Businesses Understand What Customers Want

This article first appeared and originally published at https://blogs.oracle.com/startup/post/startups-customer-experience.

The concept of personal customer service is nothing new. Good bartenders have always remembered their regular patrons’ favorite drinks. Shopkeepers are trained to anticipate their customers’ needs.

The skill of identifying customers’ wants and desires to drive sales remains important to businesses, and now there is a raft of high-tech tools to help them gain new insights.

Here’s how companies in the Oracle for Startups program are helping their clients deep dive into analytics so they can understand customer needs better than ever before. 

Helping companies listen to customers

How we speak gives listeners all sorts of clues about what we really want. DataKlout uses Voice AI to analyze customers’ intentions. Its next generation analysis software provides consumable insights for decision making and results.  For example, it can be used to identify customers’ positive reactions to marketing and sales calls, allowing a sales team to focus on closure, or be used to train employees to deliver more delightful customer service, among other use cases.

Using the tool helped a client cut the cost of customer acquisition by 75%, leading to a 500% increase in opportunities for closure in a tele-sales and tele-marketing campaign, while it also increased opportunities for a car insurance company, which used the tool to identify prospects from a cold calling campaign, resulting in a jump from 2% to 8%.

While DataKlout’s Voice AI gives its customers a new technique to understand their customers’ deepest desires, it intends on going further, by equipping its clients with another in-depth tool by integrating the facial expressions in a video calls.

Understanding the whole customer

Customers are complex creatures, making predicting our actions and needs difficult. FirstHive uses a machine-learning driven algorithm, allowing its platform to ingest data from nearly every kind of customer interaction and transaction, including ERP, CRM, website, social, PoS, app, and customer care groups.

It can even absorb offline and unstructured data like social comments. The tool then builds unified customer identities and makes recommendations on what the next best action should be to enhance the customer’s experience. 

The startup has worked with companies like Singapore Airlines and Unilever and has shown its tool can help enterprises earn a sixfold increase in their marketing ROI, with the right content being sent to razor sharp customer segments at just the right time. 

Similarly, Pryon helps employees of enterprises find important information easily so they can do their jobs, including customer service. The startup behind the technology that powers Alexa allows users to ask an assistant a colloquial question and receive an answer in just a second. The solution applyies natural language processing to unstructured content automatically ingested from a vast range of content types.

Using AI for super forecasting

As any good service provider knows, the best way to meet a customer’s needs is to anticipate them. (Just think of that brilliant bartender or stellar hotel worker.)

Complete Intelligence runs more than 15 billion data points through an AI platform, making trillions of calculations across 1,400 industry sectors. This allows it to provide its customers in industrial manufacturing as well as the oil and gas, chemicals, electronics, food and beverages industries with a fully automated, globally integrated artificial intelligence platform to help purchasing, supply chain planning, and revenue teams make accurate forecasts.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1U9haAa5gc7pgBjl7tojyw

Helping startups meet customer needs

Oracle for Startups exists to support growing companies and help them serve their customers’ needs. We know startups need reliable cloud services; that’s why we offer them a 70% discount on OCI.

We know young companies need to embrace new tech tools and scale, which is why we have a dedicated CAT team to help with migration and other goals.

We also know marketing support and introductions to enterprise customers are invaluable, and we strive to make these perks of our program a reality.

We’re also hoping to know even more about our customers by launching a global customer survey. After all, who better to inform our strategy than the startups we serve?

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Sustainable startups help companies go greener

This article first appeared and originally published at https://blogs.oracle.com/startup/post/sustainable-startups.

“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make,” said Dr. Jane Goodall. 

From high tech waste management solutions to tools that make the making of consumer products more ethical, startups are innovating solutions for a greener future. To empower their sustainable solutions, many tap into the benefits of Oracle for Startups to gain exposure, more customers, and stronger infrastructure. 

Startups and enterprises working together can help the business world lead the change toward greater sustainability. While some businesses are naturally greener than others (and not all of them are focused on combating climate change), every company can make adjustments to reduce its carbon footprint or mitigate negative environmental effects. 

If everyone makes small changes, they end up making a big difference, or as Sir David Attenborough puts it: “If working apart, we are forces powerful enough to destabilize our planet, surely working together we are powerful enough to save it.”

This Earth Day, we’re celebrating how some of the more eco-focused members of Oracle for Startups help other businesses make a positive impact on the planet. 

Waste not, want not

One of the simplest ways to make a positive impact is to waste less. Startups help other businesses minimize waste and maximize efficiency in several ways. 
Complete Intelligence, for example, uses AI and strong predictive analytics to help companies waste less – whether that’s materials, time, or money.  “It might not be as intuitive a sustainability play as, say, building solar panels, but it is important nonetheless,” said analyst Jeremy Cox in a report about the startups bringing sustainability to energy and utilities.

Tracifier created a blockchain-based traceability application to reduce food fraud and, therefore, food waste. “Blockchain allows for an accurate and transparent record of each of several certification processes, making forgery nearly impossible,” said Mina Kordi, CEO and cofounder of the startup, which is based in Hamburg. 

Faradai (formerly Reengen) turned rooting out energy waste in stores, offices, and other commercial properties into a global business. Their hardware agnostic IoT platform analyzes sensor data to uncover energy and operational insights. One of our favorite success stories involves the company’s work with a bank that found that ATMs with high energy usage often had outdated exterior lighting. A simple change in lighting reduced the site’s energy consumption by 59%. 

Buying better

More consumers are making purchases based on ethics and environmental concerns, and startups are serving up clever tech to the companies selling us greener products from clothes to cars.

Circulor makes it easier for automobile giants and other businesses to spot the weakest links in their supply chains so they can improve them and attract conscientious consumers. The London-based startup specializes in tracking raw materials using blockchain and artificial intelligence. It provides ‘traceability-as-a-service’ to verify responsible sourcing, underpin effective recycling, and improve efficiency, so consumers can buy new products with confidence. 

When it comes to the fashion industry, green is the new black.

Fashion houses are keen to embrace the public’s appetite for everything eco-friendly. The blockchain-based supply chain transparency platform offered by retraced gives fashion brands a boost for their inventory efficiency and sustainability credentials. The German startup uses the Oracle Blockchain Platform to create a supply chain management tool, enabling companies to map and verify their data, including certified details about raw materials, textile manufacturers, fabric dyers, designers, craft people, factories, and sewers. As retraced gathers information, two things happen: brands can collect and analyze supply chain data, and a QR code is automatically generated, which consumers can scan to discover information about ethical sourcing and sustainability. 

Cleaning up

Startups are playing a vital part of cleaning our planet. Oceanworks is one of them. The startup is intent on banishing plastic from the ocean and is doing its bit by creating an online marketplace for recycled plastic materials and products. It has more than 100 customers and a supply capacity of more than 190,000 tons of ocean plastic a year from collection sites across six continents.

Based in Los Angeles, the cloud startup runs a track-and-trace application to certify that the plastic that manufacturers source really is recycled ocean plastic so their customer base (which includes Fortune 500 companies) can prove their eco credentials. 

Calling climate crusaders

If your startup business is on a mission to save the world, Oracle for Startups can help. We offer the technical tools and one-on-one mentoring startups need to make the world a better place. From free cloud credits and access to Oracle Blockchain to introductions to customers, Oracle for Startups offers the support your startup needs to make a real difference. 

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The startups bringing sustainability to energy and utilities

This article first appeared and was originally published at https://blogs.oracle.com/startup/post/startups-sustainable-utilities.

Analyst Jeremy Cox was watching the United Nations Climate Change Conference news while researching his recent report on startups offering sustainability solutions for the energy and utility sector. The timing was especially fortuitous for another reason: Cox was about to welcome a grandchild.

Sustainability is top of mind when you start thinking about future generations. Cox took notes and quoted environmentalist Sir David Attenborough to lead off the report, “If working apart we are forces powerful enough to destabilize our planet, surely working together we are powerful enough to save it.”

What is more powerful than startups harnessing the cloud and enterprise expertise to bring their novel sustainability ideas to the market?

Here’s a look at the startups featured in the report from CX Create: 4 startups show the way to sustainability. 

How an empty garbage truck sparked a company

The idea for Evreka came after the founders noticed empty garbage trucks driving back to the depot. The drivers drove scheduled routes regardless of whether there was garbage to collect, wasting gasoline and staffing. Evreka’s first product was a sensor that attaches to garbage collection carts to show the cart’s position – ready to be emptied or not at the curb. The information helps waste collectors orchestrate efficient pickup schedules.

The founders have since expanded their vision to include tackling inefficiencies in the entire waste management lifecycle, looking to extract materials (other than the obvious recyclables) that could be sold to manufacturers and reused as raw ingredients for different industries. They offer the data as a SaaS solution. The platform runs on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), a choice the company made because of “(Oracle’s) global reach, second-generation OCI technology, and expansion of highly secure data centers.”

The All-in-One Waste Management Platform from Evreka

Why predictive analytics is vital to powering sustainability

Complete Intelligence joined Oracle for Startups because founder Tony Nash looked to the Oracle cloud to help power his machine learning platform designed for smarter revenue, expense, cost, and investment planning decisions.

Being super agile is critical in today’s global business world, including as it relates to understanding, measuring, forecasting for sustainability. “What I discovered from talking with Tony was that strong predictive analytics helps waste less – whether that’s materials, time or money,” Cox says. “It might not be as intuitive a sustainability play as, say, building solar panels, but it is important nonetheless.”

An AI-powered global intelligence platform for strategic and tactical procurement and investment decisions

Watch our interview with founder Tony Nash and check out Cox’s deep dive on Complete Intelligence: 

An AI-Powered Global Intelligence Platform for Strategic and Tactical Procurement and Investment Decisions

Making the cloud greener

Cloud storage opens many opportunities for enterprises and startups to run more efficiently but sending all that data to the cloud and instantly making it available is an energy hog. Danish startup GroenSky is meeting that challenge with an approach that makes less energy-intensive archived storage just as appealing and easy to access as live storage.

Writes Cox, “GroenSky allows customers to choose how they store their files. Those that are only rarely accessed, typically around 80% or more, can be placed in archived storage that doesn’t consume power except when accessed or moved to regular, live storage. A real-time calculator allows customers to see how much CO2 they can save.”

GroenSky founder Pierre Bennorth Cox he chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because of its security features, global data centers, and commitment to power its cloud with 100% renewable energy by 2025.  

A Green Cloud to Massively Reduce the Carbon Footprint

Combing millions of data points to find the energy wasters

The founders of Faradai (also known as Reengen) have turned rooting out energy waste in stores, offices, and other commercial properties into a global business. Their hardware-agnostic IoT platform analyzes sensor data to uncover energy and operational insights.

One of our favorite success stories involves the company’s work with a bank that found that ATMs with high energy usage often had outdated exterior lighting. A simple change in lighting reduced the site’s energy consumption by 59%.

The company joined Oracle for Startups and told Cox how they’ve reaped the benefits. “Apart from the performance and security advantages of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure,” Cox writes. “Oracle has been instrumental in opening doors to its large enterprise customers throughout the world. Faradai has also benefitted from further exposure by speaking at Oracle conferences in the Middle East. As (the founder) said, ‘we get great leverage in industrial B2B sales and have had a very positive reception from the Oracle sales teams and now work even closer with them.”

AI-powered Energy and Sustainability Intelligence Platform

How startups can build a greener future

We ask Cox to interview startups because he often finds insights that we haven’t discovered. This project was no different. “Each of the startups highlighted in this report is making a significant difference that benefits customers and society, providing real hope that we can all make a difference collectively.”

Are you building the next great sustainability solution? Join us to save 70% on cloud and scale your business with global connections. 

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Oracle for Startups Featuring Complete Intelligence

Complete Intelligence is in partnership with Oracle for Startups, and here’s a Youtube interview featuring our CEO and founder, Tony Nash, where he explained what the company does and for whom. Get to know the technology behind the superforecasting for manufacturing firms and learn how CI helps them be more profitable specially in a highly volatile market like in the Covid pandemic. There’s also a section on how CI uses the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to better serve its clients around the world.

 

The video above is published by Oracle.

 

❗️ Besides Oracle, Complete Intelligence is also in partnership with Bloomberg, Refinitiv, and Microsoft. Learn more about our Partnership program here.

❗️ Discover how CI can help your company in future cost projections, revenue forecasting, budgeting, and more. Book a demo here for your agile budgeting and forecasting.

 

Show Notes

 

WD: Can you tell me a little bit about what Complete Intelligence does and for who?

 

TN: We work with global manufacturers and we help them better understand their cost and revenue environment. We’ll work directly with their ERP data. Work with IT in the cloud and help them understand the forecast for their costs and for their revenues. So, they’re using their exact data in their exact environment to make great decisions for their clients.

 

WD: I’ve heard what you do referred to as super forecasting, which sounds so cool. Which industries
are best served by the super forecasting that Complete Intelligence offers?

 

TN: It’s mostly manufacturers. We work with chemicals firms, mining firms, electronics manufacturers, industrial manufacturers. So people who make stuff or people who work with firms who make stuff have to know how much that stuff’s gonna sell for, how much it’s gonna cost. Anybody who has risk associated with the future cost or future price, would need what we do to really help them de-risk their future decisions and their proactive planning processes.

 

WD: How are the forecasts that you provide impacted by volatility caused by unprecedented global events, say a pandemic?

 

TN: When Covid came around, when markets were hit dramatically in February, March and into April, we increased the frequency with which we update our forecast to our clients. But we also folded in a lot more volatility-specific algorithms, so that clients would understand what the path back would be like. In a normal year, let’s say the cost forecasts for a major manufacturing firm can be off by up to 30 percent. In some cases even more. So, if you’re planning those expenses and those budgets. You have a huge variance that you’ve got to pad in your budgets.

 

On average, we’re looking at a four to seven percent error rate. We’re helping people in a dramatic way to really de-risk their future outlook on the cost side. What we’re doing is a fully automated process. That guesswork of people sitting around the table saying, “let’s push this number up, let’s take this number down,” that’s a long budgeting process for people. And we really put that in the cloud. We have the machines learn and work through the data and calibrate and reduce that error for clients.

 

WD: Working with global markets and currencies, you must have massive data sets. Increasing the frequency of running those data sets probably requires quite a bit of computational power. How does Complete Intelligence manage that?

 

TN: Wee do that with cloud solutions. We work with OCI and the current generation of OCI to expand our computing capability. Many companies work across clouds. They work across on-perm and cloud and so we’re flexible with all of that. The frequency of those updates, the frequency with which clients want an updated view of the future for different companies changes. You have really fast moving companies who want that on a really high frequency basis. You have slower moving companies who are looking at it maybe monthly. That’s fine. We adjust to all of them.

 

WD: So, flexibility and multi-cloud are two really interesting considerations for dealing with enterprise customers like you do. What are some of the other unique challenges that face startups, like yours right now?

 

TN: With the pandemic, we’ve seen clients be very, very risk-averse. The the risk of taking on a new small company as a vendor is a problem for major companies. They’re trying to figure out how to adjust their business to an uncertain environment. For us, partnering with Oracle has helped to de-risk that decision for major companies. Oracle says Complete Intelligence has a viable solution, let’s talk about how we can help you. And the credibility that Oracle has when we go into a client is really really important for that situation.

 

WD: Aligning with a credible brand that’s been around for 40 years like Oracle is absolutely something that a startup can use to hack their growth. I’m curious about your use of Oracle Cloud and solutions that are open source Cloud native like Kubernetes. Can you talk a little bit about how you work with those Cloud Native Solutions?

 

TN: Kubernetes is a great one where our solution is containerized. We throw it onto Oracle Cloud and we can use it with clients. So, whether it’s the database we use, whether it’s the scheduling languages we use, whether it’s containerization, all of that is flexible on Oracle Cloud. And we can use the open source infrastructure that we have within our specific configuration on Oracle Cloud.

 

Over the last year, OCI has changed a lot in terms of enabling some of the very specific solutions that we’ve had. And very kind of high performance computing solutions that we’ve needed. Accommodation has really given us a lot of confidence with OCI.

 

WD: Your startup has had a pretty unique trajectory. You started the company in Asia and now you’re based in Houston, Texas. What inspired such a significant change?

 

TN: I guess the biggest thought behind there, is this is where the customers are. And to be honest this is where the talent is. The people who are doing the leading edge work in what we’re focused on are here. And the context around manufacturing and the need to automate some of the decisions around manufacturing really are happening in the U.S. and Europe, in a big way.

 

Of course that’s happening in Asia but it’s different in Asia. I spent 15 years in Asia. We conceived of and started Complete Intelligence there but we really utilized as much as we could there. And I came to a point where we just had to move the company to the U.S. to find the resources we need to build the company.

 

It’s been great moving to Texas, has been great. It’s a fantastic business environment. The manufacturing clients here are fantastic. Oil and gas is seeing a lot of headwinds right now which is a real opportunity for us.

 

WD: So the forecast is looking bright for Complete Intelligence?

 

TN: Oh absolutely. Again, with the right partners, we can move into the right clients and any startup trying to go it alone today is going to have a really hard time. It’s possible and it’s probable with the right amount of work put in, but building the right partnerships like our partnership with Oracle has been huge in helping us to accelerate our commercialization and our presence in the market.

 

WD: Absolutely and I know that if startups want to learn more about working with Oracle they can go to oracle.com/startup. If they want to learn more about the exciting work that Complete Intelligence is doing, where should they go?

 

TN: They can go to completeintel.com. We’ve got all of the resources there. We have a weekly newsletter. We have regular video interviews with industry experts, similar to what you’re doing. There are a lot of resources. Our twitter feed is complete_intel as well, there’s a lot there.

 

WD: Great, any secret market intelligence you want to share with our viewers?

 

TN: The changes we’ve seen over 2020 and the risk and volatility we’ve seen over 2020, unfortunately we don’t see a return to normal soon. The challenges that we’ve faced as startups and the challenges that our customers have faced in 2020 aren’t necessarily going away. This type of up and down environments and the persistence that we’ve had to have as startups, 2021 is not going to bring a normal back. We’ll see a little bit more, but as startups we’re going to have to continue to push very, very hard to get the mindshare within those endpoints.

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Oracle Startup Idol – Complete Intelligence Winning Pitch

 

 

This is the recording of the Oracle Startup Idol, which is originally published at https://videohub.oracle.com/media/0_4e9ncjzn. Complete Intelligence won the Best Overall Pitch during the event. Thank you to every startup that participated in this fun event!

 

Pitch Transcript

Complete Intelligence is a cloud containerized platform for forecasting costs and revenues for better decisions. The real problem that we’re helping people with is the overwhelming amount of data they have. There are two key issues that we’re solving. One is forecast accuracy. Error is a real issue with forecasting of costs and revenues. The other is context. It’s very difficult for people to get the right context for their forecast. Can they forecast that specific component for that specific product line that they need? And can they do it in an accurate way?

 

We’ve spent 2 and a half years focusing on costs. And what you see here is CI forecasts compared to consensus forecasts for all of 2019. This is looking at energy forecasts. You can see that the consensus errors in the far right are double-digit error rates. CI’s errors are in the far right, and we beat consensus forecast 88% of the time. In many cases, we’re significantly better than consensus forecasts.

 

Once we solve the forecasting problem, the other is the context problem. We have a product called CostFlow and RevenueFlow, where we take in data from ERP systems and e-procurement systems and process on our platform for high-context, highly accurate forecasts. What you’re seeing is the bill of material for electronic control valved. We have a hierarchical visualization from the business unit, down to the product category, down to the element/component level, where a CFO, etc. can manage the pipeline for procurement. This solves CFO pain points.

 

The results that we see, this is a client of ours who has a 2 billion dollars in revenue, helping them save 32 million dollars on their cost line, which ultimately adds up to 22 million dollars of free cash flow and 441 million to their valuation.

 

This may seem like very specific forecasting problem, but ultimately it leads to a better valuation for these manufacturing firms.