START UP SHORTLISTS

The worldwide competition aims to shine a light on the most innovative starts-ups in luxury and retail tech.

Pre-selections were held at the end of March 2018, in conjunction with London-based Founders Factoryand Paris-based Lafayette Plug&Play accelerators.

We have selected 22 finalists who will be invited to attend a two-day bootcamp, organized in cooperation with the INSEAD Middle East Campus in Abu Dhabi, on May 6 and 7.

The finalists will then be able to present their pitches in front of more than 600 international industry experts and investors at the ARAB LUXURY WORLD conference on May 8 and 9.

 

FINALISTS – PARIS

Stockly – Reduce stock-outs, increase sales and retention
Anytime we detect a stock-out on your e-shop, we switch it to marketplace mode: you sell, it is shipped by a partner. The concept is based on the principle that e-tailers are concerned about profit dollars rather than profit margins, and they are neutral if an item is sold by them or another retailer. The solution allows to seamlessly find the right products across the network of distributors.
Kronos Care  – Delivery Tracking
Kronos Care offers to your customers a seamless post purchase experience through a branded tracking interface and proactive notifications by analyzing your packages in real-time.
Alcméon  
Customers want to interact with brands the way they communicate with their friends. Our hybrid technology, developped in parallel by customer care and AI experts, combines very efficiently and smoothly automation and human intervention. Wtih Alcméon, leading brands and retailers can transform their Twitter, Facebook or Messenger accounts into a 24/7 premium customer service channel, able to absorb easily traffic peaks, crisis, and much more…
Gowento – Mobile customer engagement
Gowento enables brands to effectively leverage mobile to create a new channel of communication with customers, with no app to install.

Blippar – Pioneering Augmented Reality

We specialise in Augmented Reality (AR) and Computer Vision, the field within AI that understands sight. Harnessing these technologies allows us to bridge the physical and the digital, pushing the boundaries of visual search and user experience. All our products are built around two core technologies: (AR) – Adding digital content onto the real world; and Computer Vision (AI) – Let’s cameras see the world like we do.

INDUO – textile tech
INDUO is creating the first non-iron, stain resistant, and sweat resistant cotton dress shirt fabric in the world. Its fabric, manufactured with a patented technology, is made of cotton. Its special properties are characterized by two qualities: repellency and breathability.
Returnado – increasing online merchants profitability by improving the returns process for both consumer and merchant
The returns problem is prevalent, and affects all parts of the business. Improving the returns process will affect customer acquisition, customer loyalty, quality, growth and of course profitability.
Our service 1) recoups loss of revenue through re-conversion (getting customers to do exchanges or buy new products with their return value) 2) minimizes administration costs by automating internal flows 3) minimizes customer service time by offering customers a clearer return process 4) eliminates erroneous returns/exchanges by implementing automated controls in service.
BLUMENLAB – Engaging Clients through XR Tech Augmented & Virtual Reality on-line & In-store
Blumenlab is a WEB / VR / AR agency. We support brands, institutions, media in their innovative digital projects.
Our skills: Website development in webVR and VR / AR applications, interactive design, 360 VR production, digital strategy consulting.
Capsule 3D – cloud-based product collaborative workflow 
Changing the way of product imaging. Our team is dedicated to virtualizing your products line. We are a platform that allows all members of the marketing process to manage 3D product data and 3D shooting seamlessly by replacing product photography. 3D photo shoot will replace the physical camera and all physical goods will be digitized. Capsule is transforming the way companies will produce the product imagery for the coming year.
EuroPass – Creating Chinese friendly ecosystems by combining the power of Marketing and payment solutions  
EuroPass is a digital solution, developed inside the WeChat environment (1st Social Network in China with 890M users), and committed to encouraging Chinese individual travelers (FIT) to experience the charm of European cultures by providing online tickets booking, original local experiences and exclusive VIP services.

FINALISTS – HONG KONG

Goxip – A photo-recognition online research & shopping platform
Goxip is set to be The Fashion Google and The Shoppable Instagram in Asia. Our online platform services empower consumers to make online purchase with highest satisfaction levels compared to traditional offline sales channels and also improving e-commerce sales conversion for merchants. We are uniquely equipped with our powerful image recognition technology to bring a whole new different shopping experience to the tech savvy online shoppers.
COVE Drive – Luxury Car Sharing  
COVE provides luxury rental vehicles at your residence or workplace for easy access and convenience. The technology provides community, residential and public car-sharing services. It is composed of a booking software and fleet management platform, brand agnostic security hardware, as well as driving behavior data analytics.

FINALISTS – LONDON

Talkin Things  – Let’s Make Your Product Talk
Talkin Things is a smart IoT packaging platform for connected products. The system provides an innovative product communication platform and an effective protection against threats related to a brand. Advantages of smart packaging: Real-time promotions management; Loyalty to brand and product; Digitally extended label; Expiration date control; Extended data management possibilities; Personalisation for every single product; Direct communication with end-customer
Riviter 
Riviter provides visual social listening for the world’s biggest consumer brands. Its patented visual search identifies insights from consumers’ relationships to brands, products, and trends in social media at 5X the rate of text-based social listening to help brands discover opportunities at a much larger scale and in a fraction of the time of traditional market research.
Riviter trains a computer to automatically detect and identify objects in images and attribute them to specific products, trends, and people. Riviter’s unmatched accuracy and speed make it possible to connect millions of photos to their significance within and between consumer narratives.
Mercaux – Mobile retail platform enabling the digital in-store experience
Mercaux’s mobile platform brings the benefits of digital into physical stores, improving retailers’ sales and effectiveness, ensuring customers have a seamless shopping journey across both offline and online channels. On the store level, Mercaux provides Apps for Sales People and Customers that empowers them with all the information they need at their fingertips, such as realtime store and online inventory, product catalogue, recommendations and alternatives, looks and marketing content.
Metix – Beauty Platform   
Metix is pioneering a new age of transparent celebrity beauty. From the red carpet to fashion week, Metix is the only platform that allows users to access exclusive celebrity beauty highly sought-after but currently unavailable. Metix brings together previously hidden celebrity insights with beauty education directly from industry giants, in one shoppable platform. Metix is the go-to millennial celebrity beauty authority.
Sampler – Product Sampling Solution  
Sampler’s technology will analyze the data provided in the consumer’s profile in order to recommend them the product that fits best their need according to the rules you set for each product. Sampler’s re-marketing cadences are a great way to stay in-touch with consumers seamlessly after their initial trial.
VEED Studio – Automated Product Video Editing 
VEED is an intelligent video editing service, designed to deliver perfect product videos for online fashion brands. We automate the editing process by using our innovative AI technology and pose tracking. This way the computer can see the scene and know when to crop and edit you video.
Currently, e-commerce sites like ASOS create up to 24,000 product videos per month. Videos are great at boosting sales – but they also cost time and money to produce. VEED Studio solves that challenge by creating low-cost, beautiful video in seconds.
Actiff – Activity Marketplace driven by Activity Rewards 
Actiff encourages and rewards people to lead their active lifestyle. The app finds and recommends activity zones, where customers earn points by doing sport. These points are transformed into discounts for sportswear and luxury brands.

FINALISTS – NEW YORK

RADAR – Reimagining RFID Technology
Today, managing inventory effectively is one of the industry’s biggest problems. RADAR is a fully-integrated hardware and software solution that is powered by RFID and enhanced by computer vision. Our improved location accuracy means that you can find inventory more easily than ever before. Our heightened speed ensures immediate and accurate performance, even in the busiest of retail environments.
Style Lend – Fashion Rental Marketplace
Style Lend provides a peer to peer marketplace where women in need of a dress have the opportunity to rent it one tenth of the retail price. Instead of paying $500 to buy a new dress, women can now use Style Lend to rent for one week for $50 and then return it when they are done. The owner of the dress makes money and the person renting it gets access to amazing fashion at a fraction of the price. This is the sharing economy for high prices fashion items.
Dropel – Waterproof Fiber
Dropel is at the cutting edge of fabric innovation, creating highly technical natural fabrics to redefine customer experiences and push boundaries of sustainable innovation. Our mission is to leverage material science and textile technology to create new materials that bring the performance qualities of synthetics to natural fabrics.