As part of the recent Melbourne #Startup Week, IT consulting firm, Versent hosted a B2B pitch event at their product development lab, Level 3. Introduced by Thor Essman, the judges for the evening were Grant Thomson from York Butter Factory, Paul Naphtali of VC fund Rampersand, and Carl Rigoni, Head of Digital at Australia Post. It presented a very focussed cohort of enterprise solutions, that covered employee comms and engagement, design thinking and cybersecurity.

Pax Republic

Pax Republic is positioned as an employee engagement platform that grew out of the founders’ background in mediation. Recognizing that organisational change programs have a high failure rate, the founders explained that lack of project or employee data isn’t the problem; it’s a shortage of actionable insights and recommendations.

The solution offers text-based content and scripted dialogue combined with AI and online facilitators. Many traditional enterprise tools don’t work, either because they don’t reduce time and cost, or they can’t scale.

When asked if AI can measure sentiment or mood, the founders explained that the system makes use of emoticons to capture employee feedback plus keystroke analysis. In terms of a commercial model, the goal is to train up internal facilitators to deliver the service, rather than getting involved with specific change management projects.

The judges felt that the pitch needed to refine the problem statement and the solution proof points, as well as explain what makes this solution different. In particular, who is the buyer? It’s also important to tell the sales story, and expand on the risk transfer and pricing benefits.

Forticode

Forticode has developed an elegant and deceptively simple password protection solution, to remove the risk and costs of password resets for their corporate clients. Basically, it can support multi-factor authentication using colour coding and a randomized keypad, incorporating character sets as well as emojis.

It can provide context aware authentication, and native protection from endpoint hacking attacks, via a plug-in architecture and 3-factor authentication, using patented technology.
According to the founders, finger prints are immutable, but still do not provide 100% identity confirmation on touch screen devices.

There were questions from the judges and the audience about alternative solutions. Compared to an IPA gateway for trust and authentication or password aggregators, Forticode offers a much more robust solution and can support machine-to-machine verification.

The sales model is to target security teams within risk and compliance departments, and price on a per user per month basis. Importantly, there is no third-party software in the stack. And, there was even an offer to introduce the founders to Auspost….

Naked Ambition

With the tag line of “Always Be Creating”, Naked Ambition is a consultancy for innovation and design thinking. Their process is to focus on future needs, help clients get closer to their customers, and in doing so, help employees to leverage customer insights. The ultimate goal is to make design thinking skills ubiquitous. Naked Ambition’s aim is to embed the teaching in the organisations they work with.

The judges questioned who exactly is the customer, and what segments do they work in? There was also some discussion whether the service was more about personal branding and intrapreneurship, rather than pure solution design.

In particular, the judges wanted to know what gives Naked Ambition the “license” to offer their services? Despite hiring a leading design thinking expert from IBM, there was a sense that there is an oversupply of similar services, and that clients are not looking for yet another program. Instead, they are thinking about “buying units of innovation” for specific projects, as and when they need them.

Konnective

Last to present was Konnective, a business I have blogged about before. In short, this is an employee messaging app for frontline staff, many of whom do not have corporate e-mail addresses, let alone access to a their own desktop computer.

As part of the product development, Konnective now offers Groups, dashboards, analysis of what’s working and employee reach. Charging a basic annual fee per employee, Konnective has clients in mining, healthcare and manufacturing. The platform supports OH&S comms, promotes shift availability that can reduce agency hiring fees, and help reach hourly employees who don’t access corporate e-mail.

The judges asked about BYOD, and the risk of/resistance to having organisational data on personal mobile phones. Plus, why Konnective and not, say Yammer or Slack? These are answers that need to be made more explicit. Finally, Konnective is still working on data analytics, and there was a suggestion of opportunities among travel companies and tour guides, but that would require some multilingual capabilities.

On the night, Forticode won the judges over and took out first prize. This was the second of these events, and I look forward to attending more in future.

Next week: Startup Victoria’s #Pitch Night for #Startup Week