These 3 arguments speak for a corporate to engage with the start-up world according to Siemens Energy:
This is the opinion of Siemens Energy,, who announced a challenge at the last Corporate Challenge Pitch (ruhrSUMMIT 2020), which was solved by the start-up ambeRoad. One thing is certain: Siemens Energy is satisfied with the result that followed from the cooperation with ambeRoad!
"By acting as a challenge owner, we had the opportunity to choose the best provider with the appropriate solution for our individual challenge. This made it possible to achieve a solution that is outside the common standard offerings on the market." (Siemens Energy).
Therefore, Siemens Energy, is again inviting challenges for the Corporate Challenge Pitch at ruhrSUMMIT 2021 this year!
We made no major adaptations. We did, however, work on several adjustments and fine-tuning, but these were rather small things, such as the length of a proof of concept, which were adjusted. All in all, as a start-up, we have already had a pivot.
Yes - our subsequent proof of concept was very successful. By implementing not only an intelligent search in unstructured data and documents, but also by implementing an image search and other features such as question answering, we were able to exceed Siemens Energy's expectations.
Therefore, we are currently planning further cooperation with Siemens Energy in the future. We are very satisfied with the way the cooperation has gone so far, as the Digital Info Management Challenge not only enabled us to skip the classic sales funnel, but also to directly win over the Siemens Energy team with the necessary motivation for the project.
A big topic for us now is the expansion of the team. We are currently in a financing round and have been able to convince more customers of our solution. Consequently, our developers currently have more than enough to do, and we would like to support them with additional capacities.
Participation was worthwhile for us, as we were able onboard our second major client. Not only did this lead to valuable learnings, but it also facilitated further steps, such as the acquisition of new clients.
We found that most companies try to avoid being early adopters and prefer to work directly with more experienced start-ups and success stories in the bag. The CCP is therefore a great entry point for young start-ups. In our case, the cooperation with corporates such as Siemens Energy strengthened us enormously in order to build up the necessary trust and traction to convince further customers and investors of the solution.
We would therefore highly recommend participating in the CCP!
We are currently in talks to clarify what a roll-out could look like. However, there is nothing definite yet, so we do not want to go into too much detail here. However, we can say that both sides are very satisfied with the cooperation and the outcome of the project. In the last few months, we were able to acquire 4 more customers with whom we are now also carrying out further proof of concepts.
There have been no changes in the founding team since winning the challenge. However, we were able to hire our first full-time employee and another working student, who are helping us significantly with the development of our software.
Currently, we are just entering the growth phase. We have already learned so much, be it sales, large scale deployment or building a small team. These are all things that we did not have to deal with in our previous roles and have learned over the last few months.
No. Sure, there were some night shifts and frustration - for example, when you lose a client you thought already planned with further. But it is still a great feeling to see what we have developed and built up ourselves so far. That's why each of us founders would found a company again.