10 Scaleups to Watch: Sharing Economy & Customer Engagement

Imagine a world in which people are willing to share experience, create a culture of cooperation and look for areas in which they can enable a radical increase in the efficiency of used resources. It does not have to be in the realm of dreams. Meet the startups which bring us closer to sharing economy and customer engagement.

1. Excell-in

Excell-in is a provider of home-like apartments in Poland, carefully designed with accordance to the exclusive taste of guests. All of the apartments are business ready. Excell-in has experience in working with corporates clients and claims to know the need of business travelers. The startup provides full integration of services corporate’s administrative procedures.

Excell-in manages 4 and 5-star apartments in central locations of three Polish cities: Wrocław, Kraków and Warsaw. Excell-in guarantees a comfortable and hussle-free accommodation service especailly for employees on business trips. The company offers anything from a modern room for junior in a delegation to exclusive apartments with concierge services to management board members.

For more visit: excell-in.com

2. Kundi

Kundi is changing how insurance works and makes it cheaper for customers to buy. With Kundi you can insure your car, motorbike, apartment or even your everyday items like laptop, phone, bicycle, glasses etc.

Kundi is based on custom insurance provided by top insurance companies extended with an additional value — a social network (peer-to-peer layer) which makes insurance cheaper. Users get insured in groups with their friends and they get some money back at the end of insurance period. How much money they get back depends on the number of claims in the group. Less claims in the group, the bigger cashback for group members. Kundi motivates users to generate less claims and less frauds. As a result users can save up to 50% on insurance price with Kundi’s claim-based cash back bonus.

For more visit: kundi.pl

3. PayKey

PayKey is a secure peer–to–peer mobile transactions on any social and messaging app. PayKey enables banks to provide their users with P2P payment options just when they are needed most –while they are engaged in social interactions.

Initiating a payment transaction right from the social app keeps the payment experience intuitive, contextual and simple without needing to share the details of the recipient’s bank account. Users enjoy instantaneous money transfer capabilities while chatting with friends and family members on any social messaging platform such as Facebook’s Messenger, WhatsApp and Twitter.

Today, in order to make a P2P transfer to a friend or a family member they need to leave the social conversation and use their bank application or a dedicated electronic wallet solution. Banks, which are being disrupted by new financial technologies, are constantly searching for innovative solutions that will appeal to the lifestyle and needs of Millennials.

At the core of PayKey’s Social Payments solution is the patent pending MobilePayment Keyboard™. This unique keyboard seamlessly integrates with the mobile banking application, enabling users to initiate and complete the transaction without having to leave the social interaction and switch to a different app. PayKey’s white label solution easily integrates on the API level and retains the bank authentication method without compromising the security level.

For more visit: paykey.me

4. PickPack

PickPack is a community driven marketplace that connects drivers with empty space in a vehicle with senders looking for a courier / runner / concierge. The user can simply send the parcel within a local distract using a rented courier for hours or parcels to be delivered. In other words — PickPack does’t create a next specialized courier company, it creates a tool that enables everyone to create a courier company by themselves.

With PickPack the customer can send packages in a cheap and time-saving way, while benefitting from safety of payments and transport. PickPack believes that their project can fulfil logistics needs that are not sufficiently addressed by regular courier companies — an individual or a company can just simply rent a courier instead of hiring one, to collect or deliver parcels and help with everyday-logistics whenever and for whatever it wants.

On one hand, our solution is dedicated for e-commerce, SMEs, PR agencies, boutique and non-automatized stores, which send its products locally and want to provide same-day delivery. We offer the best prices on the market for last mile delivery mixed with same-day. On the other hand, we propose hourly courier rental for corporations, institutions, SMEs to provide everyday-logistics and non-standard services such as: “go to the train station and send the conductor parcel”, “collect and deliver the documents”, “parcel delivery to InPost”, “stock replenishment”.

For more visit: pickpack.pl

5. Taxify

Taxify is the fastest growing transport technology company in the Baltics and Eastern Europe. The startup provides a smartphone app that connects riders with local taxis and private drivers. Taxify mobile app is available for Android and iOS. Users can choose their car based on arrival time, prices and service level. After requesting users can see their car arriving on the map in real-time and pay for the ride via Taxify app.

Taxify was established in 2013 in Estonia and is currently operating in 10 countries — Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, The Netherlands and Mexico with plans to open several new countries in Europe. The company has received 1.5M funding from international investors from Skype, Pipedrive, Adcash, Rubylight, TMT Investments and others.

For more visit: taxify.eu

Now let’s have a go at five ready-to-scale startups that are focused on enhancing customer engagement:

6. Abyss Glass

Abyss Glass is a company which delivers interactive mirrors — an innovative space where you’ll see much more than just your reflection. Mirror naturally draw attention and displayed content will be remembered for a long time. Competition is getting more and more creative and clients more and more demanding, no matter what branch we are talking about. Abyss Glass created interactive mirrors with high-flying firms in mind.

The displayed content can be specially adjusted on the mirror, except for the traditional reflection. An interactive mirror is an innovative way to communicate with clients and it enables you to convey the message in an easy yet creative way. It is really difficult to step out in an era of pervasive advertising. An interactive mirror is very effective alternative which is something completely new for most of us. Stand out by using the element of surprise and make your business unforgettable.

For more visit: abyssglass.pl

7. Hotailor

Hotailor is a tool for travel agency booking automation. The biggest hotel suppliers are integrated into one inventory pool. With API connection to wholesalers, GDS systems and direct hotels, we created a multisource platform to search them all in the same time. In practice that means one agent can process an accommodation request to conformation voucher within 5 minutes with maximum profit possible. Demo can be viewed here and and the presenation here.

For more visit: hotailor.com

8. Nine Connections

Nine Connections’ mobile application and artificial intelligence empower employees at our clients to become powerful employee advocates. The traditional marketing methods for customer engagement are losing their impact: 84% of online conversations do not happen on the social media channels companies can access, but on channels companies cannot access like Whatsapp or email (so-called: Dark Social).

The organic reach of brands on social media is rapidly declining due to social media algorithms favouring messages from people over messages from companies. When companies share a message through their people, it will get more reach (561% more than a company’s message), 8 times more engagement and will be trusted by 83% of the people. However, only 2% of employees shares content of the company because of insecurity, unwillingness to spam their network and lack of time.

Nine Connections AI & app removes all hurdles by finding the best industry content and making it very simple to share. That way, employees will build their thought leadership and grow their professional network. As a result, they are more willing to share company content as they go along. Moreover, this approach has two other major benefits: (1) employees get the chance to show their expertise first, the messages they share about the company will make more impact, and (2) the more employees appear as thought leaders, the more the company will appear as a thought leader.

For more visit: nineconnections.com

9. Smart Signage Poland

Smart Signage is a startup focused on usage of new technologies in client, patient or petitioner flow and experience. The company combines world leaders hardware and software, originally dedicated for different markets and usage, into smart solutions. Smart Signage helps its customers to optimize and improve processes on various business areas like: efficient customer flow management at the customer service point, detailed traffic measuring and interest at the point of sales including sales shelfs; digital communication in accordance to occupancy of specified areas or zone.

Solutions offered by Smart Signage are dedicated to companies that: (1)want to know efficiency in details of the customer service point in accordance to each employee and service; (2)want to know how many customers are leaving your branch due to queues; (3) need detailed information about offline customer flow without need of installing any application on customer smartphone e.g. for reliable conversion rate; (4)want to know where are the most valuable places in the shop; (5) need real and accurate data to calculate the ROI of new products or digital posters inside point of sales; And finally (6) need to know how decrease power consumption and increase savings on air condition.

For more visit: smartsignage.pl

10. ScreenNetwork

ScreenNetwork is the biggest Polish DOOH network, offering more than 19.000 hi-res screens located in outstanding Polish placements. MediaMarkt, Saturn, PKP stations, EMPIK stores, Airports, press lounges, as well as prestigious large LED boards located in Polish city centers are places where Screen Network displays can be found. Since December 2016 this inventory can be simply bought and managed through programmatic platform.

ScreenNetwork develops technology offering technology advanced campaign triggering (e.g. based on current weather in particular screen location, sports events or local street traffic) and dynamic video creation based on “at will” data feed.

For more visit: screennetwork.pl

All the scaleups presented their solutions during The Heart Demo Day: Sharing Economy and Customer Engagement  — an exclusive event designed to connect best late stage startups with corporations, members of The Heart Corporate Club.