It’s not every day a young and innovative startup gets a chance to meet with dozens of directors and VPs from the world’s top brands’ business units, hear what they focus on and share with them what they do.
In February 2019 TrenDemon was selected to participate in “The Bridge Builders” Commercialization program. The program, sponsored by Coca-Cola, Walmart, Turner and Mercedes-Benz is aimed at closing the gap between the entrepreneurial community in Israel and the US market. We have an opportunity, for the next seven months, to engage with these amazing brands, gain a better understanding of their challenges, and explore areas we could bring them value. is.
It’s daunting just thinking about how a young tech startup can partner with a mega brand like Walmart, a Fortune 1 company with over $500B (!) in annual revenue. However, meeting after meeting, you realize that it all boils down to people working together, building relationships and trust.
As we zoom out, patterns start to emerge. In our corner of the digital world, brands are confronting today challenges of contextualizing the vast amounts of data they possess. They are also trying to balancing their need for new types of data with new restrictions around privacy.
Megabrands like those sponsoring The Bridge, and other organizations that allocate 10 percent (or more) of their budget towards marketing, want to understand what they are investing in and how they can improve their efforts in a simple and gratifying way. These companies have the technological capability to gather and store great amounts of data, but analyzing that data can be cumbersome and costly. This is where TrenDemon can help operationalize their data, and save countless analysts hours.
Gabby Czertok, general manager of The Bridge, said the program offers startups something markedly different from traditional investment programs. “Venture capitalists want to invest in companies in exchange for equity and financial growth of the startups,” he said. “What we want is to get true partnerships with innovative technologies that we can bring into the business to help us innovate and make our business faster and better. Once these companies are accepted into The Bridge, we get a seven-month head start in figuring out together what is the best fit for working together.”
TrenDemon has already hit the ground running, and we can’t wait to see where these partnerships will take us in 2019!