Iterate.ai - An Innovation Platform for Enterprise

Company Overview

Located in Silicon Valley and Denver-Boulder, Iterate.ai supports Open Innovation and rapid fire experimentation in the digital space. Iterate discovers and curates emerging technologies, and implements proof-of-concept tests (a.k.a. proof-of-value tests) for a global partner base. Close partners include a few dozen large companies representing beauty, media, accessories and apparel, DIY, and footwear categories representing $600 billion in revenue.

For large companies, Iterate reduces the time, costs and risks associated with analyzing and deploying innovative startup technologies. At the same time, startups get special visibility and credibility on the iterate.ai platform.

Problem Statement

Lack of visibility of innovative solutions that can fix the real life problems of enterprise companies.

Problem Description

Innovation is an essential factor for any business to win the market. The markets today change rapidly and companies need innovative solutions to solve their problems. It’s difficult for large companies to innovate quickly and efficiently due to their size and organization structure.

Practically, it’s hard and time-consuming process as that involves:

Market research to find the suitable solutions for existing problems of an enterprise.
Curating and studying various solutions and the technology that can be used.
Rating solutions and selecting the “Best Fit” companies to work with.
Connecting with the companies and sharing the challenges/problems to be resolved.
Joining hands with best-performing companies or buying them.

With above challenges Iterate founders came to us and Digicorp helped build the market place with Agile approach.

Solution

A marketplace for large companies and startups to discover and help each other. A marketplace enabling enterprises to document their challenges and find appropriate solutions from startups.

We assigned a cross functional dedicated development team and followed the Scrum agile methodology. The team built a minimum viable product (MVP) for Iterate.ai within 90 days. The idea was to validate the market and get feedback from enterprises and startups both. It had basic features allowing enterprises and startups to build their respective profiles. Enterprise users could post their challenges/problems on a platform, which were visible to Startups. Startups could post their solutions to the problems and communicate with enterprise users.

After successfully validating the MVP in market, the next challenge was to develop a general selection process for all enterprises as each of them has a unique way of finding best fit startups and solutions. We built an extensive search tool, which solved this problem.

Iterate and Digicorp team envisioned and developed following features for Iterate.ai:

Profiles: For startups and enterprises.
Search: Layered search, advanced search & auto-search for searching suitable companies.
Collections: Data collections for statistical analysis of startups.
Auto Curation: Executed by back-end curator engine to locate startups based on data collection inputs.
Landscape Diagrams: Preparing a diagram of curated startups based on their technology or market segment.
JV Application: A widget for each enterprise profile using which startups can apply for partnership or JV.
Interplay: The microservices programs that create small server-less applications for enterprises.
Demandware Cartridge: Enterprises can add their scripting code on any third-party website with the cartridge.
3rd Party Integrations: Startup.io, LinkedIn, CrunchBase, Angel List integration.

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Results:

Due to dedicated efforts of both Iterate and Digicorp teams to develop a world-class product, Iterate.ai platform achieved following results within a year:

700+ Enterprises relied on Iterate.ai for hunting best-fit startups & market research.
33,550 Enterprise challenges/problems posted on Iterate.ai.
1,25,000 Startup registrations so far.
32,670 Solutions provided by the startup companies globally.
56,000+ Data collection & market research carried out by the enterprises.
325 Startups acquired by enterprises.
1000+ Auto curations & landscape diagrams.