Recap: What Did Our Second Cycle Bring to the Table?
Combient Foundry’s second Venture Client Cycle of 2020 was our first fully online cycle. The traditional milestone, Foundry LIVE, will have 16 startups presenting their Final Demos on October 1st.
The previous cycle was exciting for the Foundry team for many reasons: Epiroc joined Foundry as an annual member, we fielded an opportunity directly related to making public places safer in times of a pandemic, and customer co-creation took a major leap forward. All of this is leading to our most exciting Foundry LIVE show to date. But first, what were the major achievements of the past cycle?
This Cycle’s Veterans
Epiroc joined their first Foundry cycle of the year, after having been part of the Venture Client Cycle in Fall 2018 and the Slush 2018 event. This time, we had two new opportunities seeking tech solutions to benefit mine site support and infrastructure-free data gathering. For Epiroc, collaboration is a core value, making them a great partner for startups looking to work with large corporations.
In turn, KONE addressed a business need of great importance. The company’s new Health & Well-Being solutions meant that safety and hygiene could also be a key focus area for startup collaboration. Consequently, there were widespread possibilities for applications from robotics, to surface materials, and even gesture recognition.
Welcoming New Friends
Customer co-creation took a step forward for us, when KONE invited a consortium of Finnish companies to create their own joint business opportunity for the Venture Client Cycle. KEKO brings together major players, including KONE and SMEs to build a dynamic ecosystem around a smart building platform.
The new opportunity focussed on an area where the Foundry Team has worked a lot on in previous cycles: digitalizing the building industry and smart built environments. Each KEKO company brings an area of construction industry expertise to the table (for example, KONE and People Flow). KEKO’s goal is to create the world’s first smart building standard and a data sharing platform for the industry.
The Major Cycle Milestone: Foundry LIVE
The four business needs attracted 252 submissions from startups, representing +40 countries. Thanks to the fine-tuned Venture Client Approach, this group was quickly narrowed down to the 16 teams that showed the best potential for long-term partnerships and most relevant for co-creating new tech solutions.
Each of these startups will be presenting their Final Demos, outlining their proposal for continued co-development, to the teams of the Foundry companies on October 1st. All employees of Combient Network companies are welcome to see the show. Please check out our Foundry LIVE webpage for more information and register for the webinar.
We also have our new Venture Client Cycle running right now. This week we launched new opportunities with Stora Enso and KEKO. Check them out here!