Challenge #1 Winners: Group 1

Cognaize

Year founded: 2018

Funding: $5M

Market sector: Data analysis automation for financial and insurance firms

What they do: Provide intelligent document processing (IDP), powered by human-in-the-loop AI, for financial and insurance firms

How macro-economic turmoil is impacting their sector: “The banking space continues to consolidate, which raises the bar for all banks to be competitive. Two critical competitive dimensions are: 1) increasing efficiency to cut non-interest expenses, and 2) gaining greater insight for assessing risk and market opportunity. Outperforming on these two dimensions are banks’ best opportunities for standing out in the stock market.” – Vahe Andonians, Founder and Chief Technology and Product Officer, Cognaize

How they will navigate macro-economic pressures: “All banks process unstructured data that could help them be more competitive, although today they rely on largely manual processes. Cognaize applies deep learning models to this problem. We have architected a system specifically designed for applications where training data is difficult, and the data itself is costly to obtain, which is true for many use cases in the financial services industry. Cognaize enables banks to automate these processes, improving efficiency while expanding opportunities to harvest new data sources to create opportunities for outperformance.” – Vahe Andonians

FeatureByte

Year founded: 2022

Funding: $5.7M

Market sector: AI development tools

What they do: Provide a feature engineering and management platform designed to enable enterprises to accelerate and scale AI

How macro-economic turmoil is impacting their sector: “The current economic environment is leading to enterprises scaling back on hiring, while simultaneously increasing their AI efforts. As a result, they are seeking greater efficiencies in their operations, which directly impacts AI-data management. Traditionally, this has been a manual process that requires data engineering expertise. However, with the need for automation and self-service for data scientists, our market sector benefits from providing the ability to do significantly more with fewer supporting data engineering staff.” – Razi Raziuddin, CEO at FeatureByte

How they will navigate macro-economic pressures:“Startups like FeatureByte that focus on delivering hard value for clients will outperform in the current economic market. Businesses will seek tools that can enable them to operate more efficiently and effectively. We deliver on two important fronts: 1) speed, with pipeline deployment in minutes instead of weeks and months, and 2) cost, with 10x efficient compute with 1/5th of the resources).” – Razi Raziuddin

HYCU  

Year founded: 2018

Funding: $140M

Market sector: Cloud data protection

What they do: Provide multi-cloud and SaaS data protection for mid-sized enterprises

How macro-economic turmoil is impacting their sector: “The data protection market is unique in that its purpose is to help customers in times of market turmoil. Whether geopolitical, financial, or sector risk is at play, organizations ultimately suffer from the ensuing rise of cyber-criminality and higher levels of data loss. To give a real-world example, think about ransomware. When you look back at the rise of COVID, everybody started to migrate to cloud. Remote work and work from home became the norm. At the same time, the number of ransomware attacks increased exponentially, with an attack happening every 6 seconds at last count. It’s for this reason that data protection solutions like HYCU that address both the ability to protect and recover quickly are providing increasing value to companies globally.” – Simon Taylor, Founder and CEO, HYCU

How they will navigate macro-economic pressures:“The other important item to note is you need your critical data protection provider to be financially stable and there for you in the long-term. As an emerging and growing company, HYCU has raised $140M over the past two years through two rounds of funding. This has put the company in a very strong position as a business and allowed us to grow fast, attracting more than 3,600 customers in more than 78 countries.” – Simon Taylor

Onehouse

Year founded: 2021

Funding: $33M

Market sector: Cloud data infrastructure

What they do: Provide managed services for cloud data warehouses

How macro-economic turmoil is impacting their sector: “Cloud Data Infrastructure SaaS (Cloud Warehousing, Data Lake engines, ML startups, Streaming Data) has seen a meteoric rise in the past 5 years. Adopters of these products have thus far been less cost-conscious. However, as the market/economy sentiments have considerably moved downwards in the last few quarters, we are seeing users emphasize cost when budgeting for new projects.” – Vinoth Chandar, Founder and CEO of Onehouse

How they will navigate macro-economic pressures: “As the foundational technology powering some of the largest data lakes on the planet, including Uber, Amazon, Walmart, GE and more, Onehouse’s technology was designed from the ground up to provide orders of magnitude better cost efficiency versus current offerings. A more cost-conscious market condition should help us more easily present the value proposition for building these new projects on Onehouse, at significantly reduced time-to-value and with lower operational costs.” – Vinoth Chandar

SimplicityDX

Year founded: 2021

Funding: $3M

Market sector: Retail and E-Commerce

What they do: Deliver an edge e-commerce platform designed to reduce Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and boost Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS)

How macro-economic turmoil is impacting their sector: “As inflation and the cost-of-living rise, consumers are spending more cautiously. The slowdown puts greater pressure on brands to outperform competitors and meet revenue targets, resulting in a greater need to deliver a strong return on advertising spend (ROAS). However, recent changes in cookie policy and the demand for greater efficiency and transparency on marketing spend are putting pressures on performance and making it harder for marketers to gain sales.” – Ruth Peters, CMO at SimplicityDX

How they will navigate macro-economic pressures: “This creates an opportunity for SimplicityDX, as we bridge the gap between social commerce and e-commerce and help to improve CAC and ROAS. The advances in AI and machine learning are also improving the speed of setup and the performance we can deliver to our customers. Plus, the learning nature of AI helps us to keep pushing boundaries for the benefit of our customers in new ways. The problem we are solving is also one that EVERY brand we talk to is looking to solve, and there is a genuine gap in the market and thirst for a solution.” – Ruth Peters