Collision 2022 is being held in person this year at the Enercare Centre in Toronto, Canada, after two years of virtual events. With the show floor packed with exhibitors, we took a breather in between sessions to check out some of the coolest startups. Here are five we connected with.
Skribe.ai
Skribe.ai is looking to cut down time and cost of one of the most expensive aspects of an attorney’s daily functions: court reporters. Court reporters cost $500 to $600 an hour, and the cost continues to rise. Skribe transcribes court testimonies, time-syncs them to videos and exhibits, and provides a secure way to embed them into emails and share them as password-protected documents.
“What we’re looking to do with this is take the need away for a court reporting agency and empower the attorneys to do all of that on the road,” said Jacob Wuest of Skribe.ai. “It comes with this cost saving, it also comes with an efficiency factor. Right now you have to wait three to six weeks to get a transcript back. And so that’s slowing down the wheels of justice every time we have to wait that long to get a transcript. In this case, they get it instantly and so they can collaborate with their other attorneys on the case.”
Isaiah McPeak, chief operating officer of Skribe, said that Skribe saves about two-thirds of the cost of a court reporter.
Handshakr
Handshakr, a U.K-based company looking to build what it calls “sales orchestration,” wants to cut through the tedium in the B2B sales process.
“It’s really hard to sell to big enterprises, but actually the problem is more on the buyer’s side,” said Leon Hardwick, founder of Handshakr. “ Big companies find it really hard to bring innovative companies into their organization. And it’s because they’ve got lots of processes and stakeholders, essentially bureaucracy that they’ve got to go through, to bring a new company into their organization.”
To address this problem, sellers and buyers signed up on the platform both could benefit from more precise solution recommendations. Handshakr consults with large organizations to identify their specific needs and recommend products from smaller companies. It then guides both sides through the rigorous due process to close the deal as soon as possible.
“There’s that age-old adage, nobody got fired for hiring IBM. But actually, that’s not the way to do things anymore. You’ve got to find ways that will give you a really great competitive advantage. And that lies in engaging small companies,” said Hardwick.
Handshakr has gained the interest of a few major telcos, including Verizon, Telefonica, and Rogers in Canada.
Gamify
The gamification trend is pervasive in a slew of industries from education to productivity. One company is looking to leverage the trend to inject a bit of fun into sales for larger enterprises.
The Gamify app connects to the salespeoples’ CRM and uses the data to create leaderboards, spiffs, trophies and more. Those who hit or exceed targets can earn trophies and company currency.
“A lot of companies we talk to [say] they’re already running incentives, they just don’t have an easy way to track it,” said Emily Applegarth, cofounder of Gamify. “Some of the companies we’re talking to have Google Sheets…and then they use GroupMe, or Facebook Messenger for their teams, and their teams will all talk about what’s happening throughout the day with sales on there, and they’ll talk about competitions on there, and it’s just scattered. It’s just everywhere. But if gamification is done correctly, you can see an increase of about 45 per cent in revenue, so that’s what we specialize in.”
Gamify works with the most popular CRMs, including Salesforce. For other CRMs, Gamify performs a consultation to identify what’s needed for a custom integration.
Applegarth said the company generated $1 million in revenue in the six months since its founding.
Qlinks
If your job involves a laptop in any capacity, then it’s likely that you have tons of bookmarks. Organizing and memorizing them can be a massive pain, especially if you need to share a particular group of them. Copying and pasting 10 links into an email is no fun.
That’s the reason Praguthaa Rabichandran created Qlinks, an enterprise link management system. With it, organizations can abbreviate, rename, group and share important links by typing in their relevant name. Moreover, Qlinks allows the organization to create a centralized link repository to be shared across the organization. No more forgetting long strings of random characters for important pages.
Cozii
For landlords, addressing tenant issues swiftly is a big deal. But dealing with tickets through emails and texts can be overwhelming, and it’s easy to lose information in the process. To keep track of all the items and minimize wait times, Cozii offers a solution.
Cozii provides a central hub to streamline the communication between tenants and landlords, bridging the communication gap that often leads to misunderstandings. It also provides a handy list of technicians to resolve issues related to the residence.
“The whole issue is the fact that there’s a lack of communication between tenants, landlords and handy people,” said Aswin Venkat, UX designer at Cozii.
Venkat explained that with so many contact points, it’s difficult to define who to touch base with first. Cozii streamlines that process to make it much easier to find people.
Additionally, Cozii can securely handle rent and utility payments and share new listings through the mobile app.