A Silicon Valley startup takes over the KPN Challenge

Pitches at 4 AM & virtual battles: Everything was possible at KPN’s Amsterdam office on Feb 15th. 6 startups from across the world pitched their solutions in the sphere of Artificial Intelligence. They stood up in front of experts from the company. And they proved that their AI technique can analyze KPN’s data so as to improve their decision making!

The possibilities with artificial intelligence are endless. KPN, the biggest telco in the Netherlands, knows perfectly that data analytics can give powerful insights into the way they interact with their customers. That’s why we teamed up with KPN to find the best startups worldwide to turn Artificial Intelligence into Business Intelligence! In the end, 6 startups from 6 different countries were selected to pitch their solution in person.

These startups were not only competing for a pilot contract. They were also creating opportunities by talking with the right people – the experts from KPN with decades of experience. For example, the startup liaison manager and EVP Data & Analytics. Although not the winner, Anodot highly valued this part:

“I’ve joined a lot of pitching events. But to be able to socialize with all the relevant people for a day, I’ve never had that before. And then ending with that pitch in the ring – that was really out of my comfort zone, but truly amazing. Of course, I wanted to win – I hate losing – but all in all this was a truly valuable day.”

PITCHES TRAVEL TIME AND SPACE
This time, we brought pitching to a whole new level: Startups presented their solutions from 2 continents in 3 different time zones! Ever seen two TV-screens pitch against each other in a boxing ring? Everything is possible at a Telco! Early rise for our finalists from California; at 4 am, their first pitch began. Even with more than 10 hours time difference and from a screen, Falkonry managed to give the knockout pitch through which they won both a pilot contract and an introductory meeting with KPN Ventures.

Curious about all the finalists?
Falkonry created an artificial intelligence technology for the discovery and recognition of operating conditions from operational time series data. Falkonry Service is integrated with operations management solutions to improve the efficiency, quality, and reliability of industrial operations.
Anodot provides a real-time analytics and automated anomaly detection system that discovers outliers in vast amounts of data and turns them into valuable business insights.
Dendri Systems has a unique solution for finding patterns in big data and bringing an AI based search and match algorithm that can handle the business case in Telco but also in fintech and other industries.
doolytic enables Citizen Data Scientists by simplifying self-service big data exploration through advanced analytics and search functionality on Hadoop data lakes. 
Logyc has designed a new framework and methodology to capture expressed and implied context that is nearly impossible to capture with a statistical approach.
Opera Solutions provides of advanced analytics software solutions that address the persistent problem of scaling Big Data analytics.

Are you interested in working together with large companies to prove your solution and scale up in a case of success? Check out our other Challenges.