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Where do New Impulses For The Hospitality Industry Come From?

Business intelligence software and HR tools, virtual assistants, AI-based solutions and chatbots - 10 start-ups from 8 countries are working on these Gastro-Tech topics. It will be exciting in mid-February 2019. Then the founding teams will present their solutions to potential investors in Berlin. We present their ideas.

Group Foto Accelerator 2018

Since November 2018, the participants of the new round of the METRO Accelerator for Hospitality powered by Techstars have been working on their ideas. 10 start-ups from 8 countries made the preselection - from 400 applicants worldwide.

And now the Countdwon is running. In mid-February 2019, the founders will present their results to investors. During the 3 months, they will be accompanied by selected experts from a pool of almost 200 mentors and supported by a funding of up to 120,000 euros each as well as by METRO's infrastructure, network and know-how.

barratio - complete all daily back-office duties within 5 minutes with the help of a single software solution.

Barratio

Complete all daily back-office duties within 5 minutes with the help of a single software solution.

Sarah Hiryczuk managed a bar before she developed her solution. To keep track of the weekly key figures, she created extensive Excel tables. She was looking for a helpful tool, but found nothing to meet her needs as a bar manager. That's how Barratio was born.

Facts

Founder: Sarah Hiryczuk, Cécile Martelle, Ibukun Bello
Founded:
2016
Location:
Paris, Frankreich
Link
: www.barratio.fr

What is the solution?

Barratio has been developed as a unique and easy-to-scale solution: It caters to both new establishment owners that need support in their day-to-day administrative tasks, and multi-establishment owners who have a need for transversal, a consolidated vision of one or all of their properties’ performances. The software is a SaaS-based (Software as a Service) cloud service, meaning that the software is licensed to a user and accessed via the internet and a web browser. It also uses Artificial Intelligence (AI), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and e-learning to support on back-office duties.

What is the solution?

Barratio has been developed as a unique and easy-to-scale solution: It caters to both new establishment owners that need support in their day-to-day administrative tasks, and multi-establishment owners who have a need for transversal, a consolidated vision of one or all of their properties’ performances. The software is a SaaS-based (Software as a Service) cloud service, meaning that the software is licensed to a user and accessed via the internet and a web browser. It also uses Artificial Intelligence (AI), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and e-learning to support on back-office duties.

easyway - EasyWay‘s Eve (EasyWay’s virtual assistant) is  a virtual concierge and assistant for travelers.

EasyWay

EasyWay‘s Eve (EasyWay’s virtual assistant) is a virtual concierge and assistant for travelers.

Roy Friedman is a passionate traveller and has always believed that his travels would have been even more intense with a native at his side who would show him authentic places.

Facts

Founders: Roy Friedman, Asaf Ofer, Yaniv Holzer
Founded: 2017

Location: Tel Aviv, Israel

Link: www.easyway.ai


What is the idea?

Till now most hotels are able to fully optimise potential revenue from rooms (their core product) begging the question, how else they can better optimise their offer to customers’ needs. On the flipside, travellers visiting a place, are lost when it comes to finding the best experiences that fit their interests and preferences.

What is the solution?

Eve automates customer interaction with the hotel via apps like messenger or whatsapp and provides guests with customised recommendations based on AI learning to enhance their travel experience. While increasing customer satisfaction, this virtual concierge also helps hotels increase revenue from other sources like partnerships. Guests can send Eve a text in any language and the system understands it automatically. The solution offers answers to all frequently asked questions regarding the hotel (e.g. what's the WiFi password?), recommendations for activities customised to the guest as well as events around the city. In this way, Eve boosts in-house sales, optimises and personalises the customer experience. No integration is needed - Eve can be part of the hotel within minutes.

FRESCO is the only existing appliance that allows users to produce their condiment with one click.

Fresco

FRESCO is the only existing appliance that allows users to produce their condiment with one click.

Antonio Pagliaro comes from a family of olive growers. This inspired him to study the chemical and technical processes associated with olive oil - he wanted to produce the best condiment of all time.

Facts

Founder: Antonio Pagliaro, Alessandro Gallo, Francesco Spadafora
Founded: 2014
Location: Milan, Italy
Link: www.oliofresco.it


What is the idea?

Consumers increasingly look for natural, fresh, customised and safe ingredients when it comes to eating out. According to Technomic which provides foodservice clients with research, insights and strategic consulting, almost 50% of consumers say they’d pay more for Food and Beverage (F&B) items that are fresh and almost 40% would do the same for premium F&B items, as an all natural condiment. Olive oil falls under these statistics. Also, a growing competition in the restaurant industry means restaurateurs look for new ways to differentiate their business, and the experience they offer from others.

What is the solution?

Fresco’s technology allows any restaurant anywhere, during anytime of year produce fresh olive oil, 100% natural and customised to taste. EVA is a small appliance that contains the latest technologies typical to industrial plants. EVA gives its users fresh oil, rich in organoleptic and nutritional values which a standard oil typically loses over time. The machine also produces a bi-product, olive cream, a superfood that can be incorporated in the restaurant menu. Fresco changes the way restaurants produce oil, their appliance EVA creates a unique experience with a certifiably fresh healthier product.

Gofer is a human-centric mobile app, which simplifies the hiring of short-term employees.

Gofer

Gofer is a human-centric mobile app, which simplifies the hiring of short-term employees.

The first 2 founders have been friends for 17 years. They both worked in the US and noticed how flexible the job market there can be, and how safe it is in Europe. They set out to build a tool that combines the two. Since then the founding team has grown to 4 people.

Facts

Founder: Marc Tessier, Nicolas Delahaye, Isabel Yus, Aymeric Bouzy
Founded: 2017

Location: Paris, France
Link:
www.gofer.fr


What is the idea?

Hotels, bars and restaurants spend a lot of time sourcing, selecting and managing paperwork when it comes to hiring on-demand staff. Gofer’s current customers have estimated the time spent sourcing and dealing with paperwork for a simple 5-hour contract adds up to a minimum of 1h25m. And finding the right staff to fit a specific establishment is also extremely time consuming.

What is the solution?

Gofer streamlines sourcing and paperwork processes. During sourcing, its in-app social network refers and recommends staff. During selection and onboarding the solution uses surveys and digital tests to determine the staff’s hard and soft skills. The results of these tests go through Gofer’s algorithms to establish a match between staff and establishment. The benefit ultimately is that the tool decreases time spent on temporary staff significantly and adds time for restaurant and hotel managers to deal with their daily team management to improve customer satisfaction.

HeyMojo builds innovative digital solutions for the hospitality industry combining marketing automation, AI and Machine Learning to increase direct ordering, guest engagement and customer life time value.

HeyMojo

HeyMojo builds innovative digital solutions for the hospitality industry combining marketing automation, AI and Machine Learning to increase direct ordering, guest engagement and customer life time value.

The founding team comes from technology and product backgrounds, have built products and worked for enterprises that have been acquired by companies like Yahoo, Expedia, and Oracle. HeyMojo’s founding team has a combined experience of over 30 years in technology.

Facts

Founder: Jagdish Repaswal, Pallav Kumar, Rahul Chandra
Founded: 2017

Location: New Delhi, India

What is the idea?

Challenges small businesses face today, include lack of digital presence, access to data, insights on marketing, loss of revenue due to poor conversion rates and having to deal with multiple vendors when it comes to their digital needs. HeyMojo sets out to give hotels, restaurants and retailers a stronger digital presence, and grow their revenue by building customer relationships at each stage of the purchasing process; from discovery, to ordering up to maintaining loyalty.

What is the solution?

HeyMojo builds chat and voice bots customised to marketing campaign automation and website widgets for direct bookings, ordering and guest experience management. The solution creates a seamless experience by using machine learning, AI, customer profiling and marketing tools on different messaging and voice platforms. HeyMojo enables businesses to connect with their customers directly, increase engagement, generate personalised offers and build loyalty for their brand. The unique benefit about HeyMojo’s solution is the conversion efficiency and retargeting automation that enables the brand to drive revenue growth and generate new business at a much lower cost.

Hotelhero is the only hotel technology research platform specialised for the independent hotel market.

Hotelhero

Hotelhero is the only hotel technology research platform specialised for the independent hotel market.

During an internship in a hotel, one of the founders recognized the weaknesses of the complex and time-consuming IT selection process, which usually leads to a bad result.

Facts

Founders: Florian Montag, Julien Schmit, Thibault Gence
Founded: 2017

Location: Berlin, Germany

Link: hotelhero.tech

What is the idea?

Hotelhero’s customers, independent hotels, search for the right solutions to help them build efficiencies and meet constantly changing demands of guests and staff, they do this to stay competitive, in the face of larger hotel groups and other hotels in their market who are already doing so. The shift from legacy systems to cloud-based solutions has led to a significant change in the industry. The hotel tech market is increasingly more complex and fast paced. The extensive offers available and the varying unique characteristics dependent on hotel types, makes distinguishing the most fitting solution even more of a task. Hoteliers do not have the time nor the resources to allow them to track every solution, so risk missing out on tools that could truly help their business.

What is the solution?

Hotelhero is a hotel tech marketplace that guides independent hotels and small chains to find the right SaaS tools and systems that fit their business needs. The marketplace is set out to help hoteliers master the challenge of digitalisation and make sense of the complex technology space. The platform helps to identify, compare and select the right innovative hotel software for the user. By collecting the hotel’s data, the solution personalises the search based on individual hotel needs.

Roborus sets out to enhance the customer experience and lifts the burden off of overworked staff.

Roborus

Roborus sets out to enhance the customer experience and lifts the burden off of overworked staff.

DH Kim (co-founder and CEO) had worked for several global IT companies such as Pentech, Nokia and Foxconn. Co-founder, Jeong Kim had worked for multiple research institutions in the US, South Korea and Finland. The two met 5 years ago and have built a strong partnership since then. The mission together became developing AI robots to enhance human relationships.

Facts

Founder: DH Kim and Jeong Kim
Founded: 2016

Location: Seoul, South Korea

What is the idea?

Franchise restaurants experience ahigh turnover rates for staff, yielding significant costs that eat into their already slim profit margins. Also, current POS (Point of Sale) systems have a limited ability to take advantage of the data that is collected in everyday transactions. They are not equipped to complete certain tasks, so take a long time and require repetitive actions by cashiers which can lead to unmotivated staff.

What is the solution?

Roborus’ solution, remembers data, therefore is able to enhance the customer experience and diminishes the need for repetitive tasks. Their AI-based kiosks employs facial recognition and automatically identifies customers. Their machine learning system provides guests with personalized services and is able to recommend specific menu items based on custoemr profile. The platform improves the franchises’ understanding of their customers by gathering and analyzing key data such as; number of visits, consumption patterns, and average spending. Businesses can use this data for actionable insights on how to enhance their marketing activities and increase sales.

Sentiment Search tracks and analyses social media activity for every restaurant and hotel in any given city.

Sentiment Search

Sentiment Search tracks and analyses social media activity for every restaurant and hotel in any given city.

The idea was born in 2011 when buying a mobile phone in an online shop. There were hundreds of reviews for every phone and it was extremely hard to go through everything. This led to the development of a tool that analyzes all the reviews. Prithvi was curious, so he adapted the tool for restaurants and hotels because it could be useful for these companies as well.

Facts

Founder: Prithvi Dhanda
Founded: 2015

Location: London, UK
Link:
www.sentimentsearch.com

What is the idea?

Millions of reviews, tweets and blogposts are posted daily. This wealth of information sits on the web and would help generate deep insights about any given hotel or restaurant, their competitors and the industry as a whole. Existing analytic solutions however, are unable to harness this information, on two counts: 1) No solution is specialised for hospitality, making detail and quality of insights primitive; 2) No solution tracks every restaurant and hotel in any city and therefore cannot deliver a holistic view of the industry. All this results in restaurants and hotels that are unable to make in-depth comparisons with competitors, identify new ones, and detect developing trends across their own industry. Most importantly, they are unable to pinpoint exactly which areas of their business that require attention. The volume of information on the internet is fragmented and overwhelming which makes it impossible to analyse manually.

What is the solution?

Using AI algorithms Sentiment Search puts forward a solution that solves exactly this challenge: it aggregates and analyses reviews for individual restaurants and hotels in any city providing them with a comprehensive picture of consumer sentiment. The algorithms have been developed in-house by Sentiment Search to cater specifically to the hospitality industry, just like everything about the tool.

Actionable businesse intelligence (BI) for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in the hospitality industry.

Trakbar

Actionable businesse intelligence (BI) for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in the hospitality industry.

It all started with the bet that Igor could manage a bar and make better business decisions using BI software. However, he couldn't find one he could afford, so he decided to develop one himself.

Facts

Founder: Igor Svehla, Gabriela Lovric
Founded: 2016

Location: Zagreb, Croatia
Link:
www.trakbar.com


What is the idea?

Small bars and restaurants often approach strategic decision-making by resorting to a pen and paper, giant excel sheets or don’t do it all. Most other industries already have strong BI insight tools provided to them – this has not yet reached the SMEs in the hospitality industry. Independent business owners cannot afford the BI tools available for them on the market, leaving them with their own intuition and non-specific tools. BI intelligence has proven that human behaviour and intuition are rarely benchmarks to be successful in business. All this in face of bigger competitors who can afford dedicated teams whose sole purpose is to optimise the business based on data.

What is the solution?

Trakbar provides an accurate sales forecast, analytics in real-time and smart order suggestions backed by AI technology. The solution sets out to help business owners optimise their enterprise, identify trends, uncover threats and find answers to business questions putting them on the same competitive level as big groups but on a SME budget.

Waffle is a chatbot that generates demand for restaurants in real-time.

Waffle

Waffle is a chatbot thatgeneratesdemand for restaurants in real-time.

Waffle was created because the founders felt that they were spending too much money on restaurant visits. They didn't understand why restaurants are mostly unvisited during the day. They realized the great potential and eventually developed the concept for Waffle.

Facts

Founder:Julian Bourne, Matt Pritchard,James Powell-Tuck

Founded: 2017

Location:London, UK

Link: https://joinwaffle.com

What is the idea?

Waffle connects restaurants with diners solving a problem for both sides: 1. Restaurants: In an industry with high overheads, most restaurants strive to have an endless number of guests. However, in reality this is not the case, in fact most restaurants are quiet throughout the majority of the day. Restaurants know that a good deal can get the right customers, but how do they reach those customers? 2. Diners: On the other hand the number 1 reason why people don’t eat out often is because they want to save money. Customers are overloaded with page after page of irrelevant deals; facing “analysis paralysis”.

What is the solution?

Waffle uses AI through a conversational interface to bridge the gap between supply and demand. The team is building the market place that connects restaurants with spare capacity to potential nearby customers. As a result, restaurants get more customers. Waffle built a chatbot that enables people to find the food they want, at a price they want, without having to download another app.

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