I while ago I wrote about the selection of Top 30 companies for Nordic Angel Program at Slush and what caught my attention in those companies. Now we have entered into Top 4, so it is time to make a deeper dive into these startups: What was so special about CHAOS architects, FeelingStream, Videoly, and VIMMA that they made it to the due diligence phase?
CHAOS architects
What Do They do?
CHAOS architects responds to the Smart City challenge via AI solution that combines crowd insights and big data.
Why It Is Great?
As urbanization accelerates, the significance of city data becomes more relevant. The creation of forecasts through big data and crowd insights is crucial to solving problems such as housing, climate change, and transportation.
The solution tackles the problem and is riding with the growing smart city agenda. The solution can be applied to several segments, such as governmental & commercial decision makers, builder, and real estate consultants and architects.
The company has a broad team that is extremely passionate and driven to push their startup forward. And they have some nice client cases to back their case.
FeelingStream
What Do They do?
FeelingStream is a company offering actionable intelligence for customer service. They have built an AI-based real-time customer conversational analytics platform to discover sales potential and detect lost opportunities.
Why It Is Great?
The problem the company is targeting is clear: Quite often the customer experience from call centers leave room for improvement. Also, there are currently very little tools to analyze the contents of the call. Thus, this is an important problem to solve and the solution is unique.
The solution can be fitted to any call center, so the solution is scalable. However, as the company is targeting Nordic languages first, the scalability and market opportunity are somewhat limited; on the other hand, this also gives the company a lesser competed niche to operate in.
The team has been able to show solid traction with reasonable revenues and good customers.
Videoly
What Do They do?
Videoly streamlines video content for retailers without creating a single video. The company finds product videos from Youtube, curate the content and embed the right product videos to the right product pages in online stores.
Why It Is Great?
The demand for video content is huge and growing. At the same time, content creation is a challenge for retailers. Videoly solves this problem connecting existing material and online retailers in an effortless manner.
The solution is global and can be used by basically any e-commerce benefitting from product video content; thus, both the scalability and the market opportunity are great.
This is a quite mature startup with significant recurring revenues and significant good quality customer base. Also, the company has proven it can grow outside of Finland with over half of the revenues coming abroad.
VIMMA
What Do They do?
VIMMA turns vast amounts of existing social media content into actionable ad placements for marketers. Their AI-based software analyses existing social media content and connect it to brands, turning every single post into a commercial opportunity.
Why It Is Great?
Influencer marketing is growing rapidly. At the same time, connecting brands with influencers takes time and effort. VIMMA solves this problem by programmatically connecting brands with potential influencers.
This is an interesting industry with huge market potential in the future. The team has a previous track record to show that they can build world-class startups. The company is in a very early stage, but yet they have been able to secure paying pilot customers.
Conclusion
Four different startups, in different industries and phases. Thus, comparing these between each other would make very little sense. However, from all the four we can see a great product, significant market potential and demonstrated traction.
Also, as a little surprise in the startup world with mostly male founders: All are headed by a female CEO. Hope this is a signal of more female-founded startups showing up in the future as well.
These companies will enter the due diligence phase and the final negotiations with the lead investors. After those steps, we shall know which company will get the investment from the Nordic Angel Program syndicate at Slush.
Read more about the Top-4 and the Nordic Angel Program by FiBAN on FiBAN's website.