Collider Alumnus LivingLens exits to Medallia

This February, Collider Class of 2014 alumnus LivingLens was acquired by Medallia. The Liverpool based company captures, analyzes and shares consumer insight video in a single platform. You can automatically extract meaningful insights, so you can tell powerful stories that inspire better decision-making with LivingLens. LivingLens was part of the Collider UK Class of 2014 and is the first startup from this cohort that exits.

LivingLens helps the world’s best brands, insight specialists and technology providers work with video feedback at scale by analyzing the data contained within speech, sentiment, emotion and objects. The LivingLens video intelligence platform automatically extracts insights and identifies key themes that navigate to meaningful content quickly, facilitating powerful stories to inspire action and drive change within organizations. LivingLens was founded in 2014 in Liverpool, and has offices in London, New York and Toronto.

Medallia is the pioneer and market leader in Experience Management. Medallia’s award-winning SaaS platform, the Medallia Experience Cloud, leads the market in the understanding and management of experience for customers, employees and citizens. Medallia captures experience signals created on daily journeys in person, digital and IoT interactions and applies proprietary AI technology to reveal personalized and predictive insights that can drive action with tremendous business results.

For the full press release about this exit, click here!

Collider Alumni startups Frenzi and Threedium merge!

This week Collider alumni Frenzi Media and Threedium started operating as one company.
It was a love-at-first-sight moment once they joined forces to collaborate on their first joint activation back in March 2018. Ever since the two teams were working together in total sync for all major breakthroughs. Here is a list of what they initially built together since 2018:

APOEL FC
Neutrogena
Elite Crackers
Sainsbury's Wine Finder
X2 BMW AD

The philosophy and culture remained conjuring throughout and as a landmark moment in both of the companies short history there is decided to merge the two entities together. The strategic approach was rather simply. Frenzi Media will bring a strong advantage on the commercial side of the company, whilst Threedium will continue pushing the boundaries on the tech side.

“Frenzi Media is excited to complete the merger with Threedium to pursue our mission of optimising online buying experiences for brands and fulfilling our common ambition of Democratising 3D Web Technologies to everyone ” Frenzi Media founders, Mike Charalambous and Kyriacos Kyprianou commented.

The main goal has always been – and remains – to bridge the gap between expectations and reality online and help create more lifelike online shopping experiences.

Frenzi Media was part of the Collider UK Class of 2017 and Threedium was part of the Collider UK Class of 2018. Threedium also spoke on the Demo Day 2018 of Collider Amsterdam.

Collider presents: Hyper Retail

Last June 18, Collider hosted their second knowledge event of the year: Hyper Retail.

Three startups and retail expert René Repko shared some amazing innovative technologies, giving new insights in how digital innovation can help traditional retail future proof their business.

Below you will find the key take outs of the afternoon. If you are interested to receive one or more of the presentations, do drop a note at ellen@collider.io

• Adapt or suffer
  According to a recent publication of McKinsey*, “….retail industry, far from being moribund, is experiencing disruption— and reinvention—at unprecedented speed. It’s not a story about the malaise of an entire sector but rather a tale of two worlds. A confluence of trends has changed the playing field, forcing retailers either to adapt and innovate or to suffer painful losses or imminent demise.”

• Key questions to ask
  The same publication* suggests that, in order to adapt, some of the key questions traditional retailers should ask themselves:
  - Are you meeting consumers where they are, both physically and digitally?
  - Are technology and analytics working for you?
  At-scale technology could help automate more than 55 percent of tasks in a classic grocery store. Retailers that are technology leaders can generate two to five percentage points greater EBIT than technology laggards.

• Dynamic pricing reduces waste and increases margins
  Kiran Gange talked about how RapidPricers’ dynamic pricing software gives the retailer the knowledge and power to optimise - with one mouse click - prices at any given moment, on any article in any store. Avoiding unnecessary waste, saving labour costs and generating sales at the right price. Those retailers who are the fastest to implement electronic shelf labels, will be the first to reap the benefits.

• Cloud capacity is a huge barrier to leverage data – but there is a solution…
  AI and computer vision can unlock the potential for innovation in many areas of physical retail. Think autonomous stores, fraud prevention, smart check out. However, challenges of infrastructure, high costs and AI accuracy are holding us back. Edgify’s unique technology deals with these challenges by avoiding the cloud, and thus avoiding high cost and time (years!) needed to get huge amounts of data into the cloud, train them there and deploy them. Ofri Ben Porat explained how Edgify can train data on the edge, i.e. inside the devices used in store, and subsequently share the models between devices. A technology that secures privacy by design, is scaleable by definition, is less time consuming, less costly and consumes less energy than cloud platforms.

• Increasing CX and sales by connecting on- and off line in store
  It seems that e-commerce is overtaking retail, but, even according to Jeff Bezos, nearly 90% of retail remains in brick and mortar stores. Some of the reasons are the very high costs related to customer acquisition and return deliveries on-line. And shoppers are looking for experience. Combining best of both worlds seems a daunting task to many retailers, who believe that transformation to modern digital stores is complex and expensive. Richard Mason, Scoop Retail’s CTO, showed us that their platform packages in-store digital technologies, making them accessible to all retailers. That’s why UNIQLO is now rolling this out across Europe and the US.

• Next time, go East
  René Repko gave us a visual illustration of why we shouldn’t go to Silicon Valley to find new retail technologies and innovation, but to China. Characteristics:
  1. It’s a different economy, it’s governed by a different system
  2. Capital and growth in abundance
  3. Protected eco-systems
  4. Leading eco-systems drive innovation
  5. No walls, less silos: customer centric at its best
  6. More experiments, less fear: delivery, unmanned, new retail

We’ll be back after summer with the launch event of our new cohort of startups, the Class of 2019!

* McKinsey & Company, Perspectives on retail and consumer goods, January 2019

Collider co-founder Ellen Bark speaks on the myths about starting your own business

Ellen Bark recently co-hosted HelloMaas’ new weekly podcast HelloMasters, alongside Rado Raykov, CEO of Holler.live (Collider Class of 2017).

“If you keep joining accelerator after accelerator, you are like one of those guys that stays in college for the lifestyle” – Rado Raykov

Four people around their forties with solid careers took the decision to become startup founders. You may wonder why after listening to this podcast. From fundraising and hiring for diversity to working insane hours, we demystify and challenge persistent myths about startups in this fast-paced episode of HelloMasters.

Clockwise: Sander Nagtegaal, Willemijn Schneyder, Rado Raykov & Ellen Bark-Lindhout

Listen as Rado Raykov of Holler.Live, Willemijn Schneyder of SwipeGuide, Sander Nagtegaal of Unless, Louise Doorn of HelloMaaS, as the founders of Dutch marketing startups, together with co-host Ellen Bark-Lindhout of Collider.io , challenge the following most persistent start-up myths:

• Just build a great product

• You need a co-founder to built a successful startup

• You need to work 80 hours a week

• You need to be a college drop-out

• Startup founders are best when they are young.

• Startups don’t need diversity

• Raising a lot of money is a sign of success.

• Pitch competitions, accelerator and corporate challenges are important

• Building a team needs to happen in person. So where does that leave remote teams?

• As CEO/Founder you’re only happy when you have sold or IPO’ed your company

Topics

[00:00:00] Introduction Ellen, Rado, Willemijn and Sander

[00:03:55] Myth #1: Just build a great product

“VC’s told me I was building Rolls Royces, rather than the Beetles that you actually need” – Sander

“A great team cannot do without a great product” – Willemijn

[00:05:29] Myth #2:  You need a co-founder to build a successful startup.

“If you have  a solid base, you can build a good house. It depends on the definition of what a co-founder is.” – Rado

[00:07:55] Myth #3: You need to work 80 hours a week or more

“It’s like interval training, sometimes you do sprints and other times we take it slow.” – Willemijn

[00:10:17] Myth #4 & #5: College dropout & Startup founders are best when they are young.

“Hard data: the average age of a startup founder is 42 years old.” – Louise

“I’m 44 and I just don’t get impressed by bad stuff. If I were 21 and got hit in the face, I would cry and run. Now I would still cry but not run.” – Sander

[00:13:43] Myth #6: Startups don’t need diversity

[00:16:59] Myth #7 Raising a lot of money is a sign of success.

“At least step one, you’re pretty good at” – Sander

[00:21:43] Myth #8: Pitch competitions, accelerator and corporate challenges are important

[00:26:52] Myth #9: Building a team needs to happen in person. So where does that leave remote teams?

[00:33:38] Myth #10 As CEO/Founder you’re only happy when you have sold or IPO’ed your company

“ I wonder if the love of the journey is a high indicator for a potential successful exit.” – Ellen

Want to listen to the episode? Hit this link!

Collider presents: Purpose Meets Performance

We look back at an afternoon with a truly “good” vibe in the audience and a great set of speakers who gave us insights, based on first hand experience, about how companies and brands can embrace purpose.

There were some keypoints given by the speakers and we’re very proud that they were able to enlighten us with their interpretatation of purpose within their business. Below please find some keypoint that were discussed during the Purpose Meets Performance event.

• Purpose is becoming increasingly important to brands, with many of the speakers talking about it as a competitive advantage increasing not just revenues but also customer and employee engagement.

• It’s not authentic and just not enough to “do purpose” on top of the business. As Coen de Ruiter from Independer put it: Purpose is Business and Business is Purpose. Or as Dylan from The Student Hotel argued: Purpose Position is your Brand position. Only then it will drive everything you do, both internally and externally.

• Niki Kauffmann illustrated how that works in Rituals. Their purpose, “making you feel good”, was always there and lived by the founder. But clearly defining and expressing it, helped to engrain it further in every aspect of the business. Her advice: keep it simple – and then full focus. 

• Harm Jans from bol.com shared with us how a new way of holacracy based working, with cross functional teams defining their own roles and goals, following their “sparks”, allows employees to be truly engaged with their own purpose and that of the organisation.

• Dylan Ingham inspired us to work out how people can do good through your brand. To increase the chance to deliver meaningful impact: align your effort to global SDG’s, employ more women, employ more activists, get their purpose and give them 10% of their time to work on it > purpose must be real, lived, time owned. If you get it wrong, audiences will leave. If you get it right, you have more than a product - you have an innovation channel.

• Amy Williams from Good-Loop showcased how startup-corporate collaboration can be successful. Delivering great performance as well as positive impact by moving a little bit from massive ad spendings to charity. Our other Tech-for-Good startups, Clickshelp and Greengame talked about their innovative ways to help brands doing good. Because Good is the new Cool - Consumers are voting with their wallets by buying products and services from brands who have a higher mission and positive social impact.

We look back at a wonderful afternoon with good conversations, presentations, network drinks and insights. Also, our our next event is coming! It will be called Hyper Retail and will be held on June 18th 2019. You will hear more from us in the future!