Companies to Watch
It’s been a stellar year for investments in tech startups. Emerging tech is definitely high on the radar for venture capitalists looking to find the next unicorn. But it’s not just about being tech-first but tech-forward. Martechvibe takes a look at startups that are solving real-world challenges of marketers. Incode Founded: 2015 Founder: Ricardo Amper […]
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It’s been a stellar year for investments in tech startups. Emerging tech is definitely high on the radar for venture capitalists looking to find the next unicorn. But it’s not just about being tech-first but tech-forward.
Martechvibe takes a look at startups that are solving real-world challenges of marketers.
Incode
Founded: 2015
Founder: Ricardo Amper
Segment: Identity Verification
Incode Technologies is an identity verification company that specialises in omnichannel biometric identity. Interestingly, when the company launched, it called itself a consumer app that automatically recognised and shared photos with everyone in them. The launch drew attention from large financial institutions and governments who wanted to use the technology to identify customers when they opted into a service.
In time, the photo tagging exercise in the consumer app contributed to a large dataset of tagged people which the company intelligently repurposed to train their AI models. The company used its data to give birth to a new product suite called Omni. This new product line includes software development kits and APIs compatible with cloud-based and on-premises environments, web browsers and operating systems. The kits offer liveness check technology that leverages machine learning, light modelling and computer vision in addition to fraud and tamper checks designed to detect potential threats. The use cases include onboarding users from the web or mobile, or verifying purchases using facial recognition from kiosks that cross-reference government-issued IDs.
Marketers who may be toying with the idea of biometric-targeted ads will surely be intrigued.
Fable
Founded: 2018
Founder: Chris Boardman
Category: Motion Design
Investors are calling it the new frontier of cloud-based creative software. Content that is interactive scores higher in eyeballs. Yet, motion design has been restricted to a few big players like Adobe’s After Effects and needs skilled designers to navigate. Fable wants to democratise the underserved designer market and encourage visual storytelling.
The company offers a web-based platform that promises to be equal parts collaborative, pro-grade and easy to use.
In December, Fable’s leadership announced its $15 million Series A funding round led by Redpoint Ventures, taking it to a total funding of $22.4M.
Dragonboat
Founded: 2018
Founder: Becky Flint, Lee Bailey
Category: Product Portfolio Management
The team at Dragonboat wants to reduce product failures using data. This is a rather obvious progression for the way companies should use data to minimise risk and find evidence for product-market fit. But how many companies manage to do it effectively? Dragonboat automates and optimises planning and delivery using learnings of delivery velocity and customer feedback. The solution measures outcomes to influence the next iteration of product strategy. It also automates custom reports for stakeholders and reallocates resources based on the results. The solution can help companies evaluate the market, customers and business to ensure that the right product is released at the right time and for the right customer.
Product management knowledge enables companies to understand customer needs and build products to fill the gap. Meanwhile, portfolio management techniques enable companies to juggle competing needs with limited time and resources. Together, product portfolio management is what sets best-in-class companies apart, according to the founders.
Placer Labs
Founded: 2016
Founders: Noam Ben-Zvi, Oded Fossfeld, Ofir Lemel, Zohar Bar-Yehuda
Category: Location Analytics
Placer.ai is an advanced foot traffic analytics platform that helps stakeholders connect analytics from the physical world to generate insights to drive business success. It works across industries such as retail, commercial real estate, hospitality, economic development, etc to maximise offline activities.
Digital native companies too see the value in a physical store though it plays the role of an experience zone now. Large companies face the challenge of disparate process systems for their brick-and-mortar stores and online eCommerce presence.
Placer can capture and analyse venue information, visit metrics, plot visit trends, trade area reports which are a list of polygons that represent the entity’s true trade area, trade area demographics, cross-shopping patterns of customers, etc.
Kasada
Founded: 2015
Founder: Sam Crowther
Category: Enterprise cybersecurity
Since its Series B funding in mid-2020, Australia-based Kasada has grown its revenue by 230 per cent. The pandemic-induced lockdowns and increased remote working habits lead to an onslaught of cyber attacks in the last 18 months. This has been an opportunity for cybersecurity firms to innovate. Unfortunately, cyber-criminals are innovating too. Cybercriminals increasingly use bots to launch automated threats such as credential stuffing, web scraping, carding and inventory hoarding against online businesses.
To counter this, Kasada has taken a fundamentally different approach to bot mitigation. Their modern anti-bot solution frustrates the attacker by striking back. According to their retention numbers, it works. Kasada stops automated attacks in real-time before they are allowed to enter an organisation’s systems. This technique is bolstered with data analysis and machine learning from billions of bot interactions.
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