Swedish Startups in the Valley
Saplo's founder and CEO Mattias Tyrberg tipped us that Saplo, the Swedish semantic text processing technology firm, and a winner of Seedcamp, is going to participate in two VC events in California (previous coverage of Saplo). While in the area, Mattias and Fredrik Hörte from Saplo will also visit a few big firms like Google and Facebook, and look for other potential partners, customers, and investors.
The first event is Mini Seedcamp, which aims to give the startups a chance to meet face-to-face with the local startup and investor scene, and discuss anything from their product to investments. Seedcamp hopes to give the Valley folks better understanding of European startups, and show the participating European startups the US entrepreneurship culture in action, and help them connect with advisors and mentors.
Another event is organized by Invest in Sweden Agency North America (ISA). ISA has gathered a delegation of 20 Swedish early stage wireless, IT, electronics, and internet startups seeking risk capital, and takes them in front of some of the biggest VC firms in the US. The event takes place tomorrow November 11th in Menlo Park, CA. ISA is reporting to the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and markets Sweden, its industry clusters, funds and individual businesses to North American companies and investors.
Saplo's Feelings Before The Pitch To Investors
I chatted with Saplo's CEO, Mattias Tyrberg, this morning just before they were going to present to the investors at the Seedcamp final. Mattias told me that they were ready for the challenge. We will find out whether they made it and got the investment on Friday morning. Here's our previous coverage on Saplo. Good luck to the whole team.
Saplo's Intelligent Context Analysis in Seedcamp Test
Saplo is a new Swedish startup, which also got to the next round of Seedcamp. Tomorrow will tell if the company got to the final. The founder Mattias Tyrberg commented his plans and firm to Swedish press last week (another article).
Saplo has a software called AIAnalys, which according to Tyrberg can understand text in a similar way as humans do. It's based on intelligent context analysis, meaning the software can value information automatically. It allows to get rid of slow manual work and problems with subjective judgment, like individual bias and systematic errors, in analysing and evaluating different kinds of texts. The software also enables analyzing huge pieces of text, which may have been impractical before. According to Tyrberg this kind of a product is of interest in many different areas, like media analysis, advertising, and web site optimization to name a few obvious ones.
The main benefits are the product saves money and it enables potentially more revenues. For example, with the technology one can measure exactly how positive or negative a person or firm is covered in media, and the program can show a graph with a comparison to another person or firm. One can also optimize ads with AIAnalys. Saplo web pages state results up to 70 % higher ad revenue can be achieved through presenting the right ads to the right reader, as AIAnalys can understand the text and present suitable ads accordingly. The software can also be used to tweak the whole user experience on a website, to make the users stay longer on the site by displaying similar content, which the user is interested in.
According to Mattias Tyrberg the technology is unique, even though there are some competitors in the sector. Saplo's technology is based on several years of research, and Tyrberg's final thesis, which he doesn't want to turn in until the patent process allows for it. It seems there's potential for a financing round later on as well, since Tyrberg mentions he's especially looking forward to establishing risk financier contacts in London.
