Meet Novable – An AI-Powered Innovation Scouting Technology For Companies

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Below is our recent interview with Laurent Kinet, Co-founder and CEO of Novable:

Q: This is the first time we have spoken. Can you provide a brief overview of Novable?

A: Novable is an AI-powered innovation scouting technology for companies.

Their future lies in their capacity to innovate fast and efficiently, and one way to do that is to turn to startups – startups are crystal balls to the future, right? It is corporate venturing, that’s not new, but it’s booming right now. 80% of corporates want to work with startups, and 65% already did in the last three years. However, when companies look for innovative startups to feed their strategic agenda, to partner with for new products, or to acquire, they usually rely on databases like Crunchbase or Pitchbook. However, these tools focus on financials, with little information about real activities of startups. Companies are not investment funds: they need real-world data first. Besides, databases are one-size-fits-all tools, your competitor entering the same keywords will have the very same results, but your DNA is obviously unique. As a result, analysts spend thousands of hours disqualifying bad candidatures. That’s what we call the SAD syndrome: Spot, Analyse, Drop – and repeat.

To solve this, Novable brings a next-generation solution for corporate venturing. We have developed an AI-powered match-making engine that automatically matches complex innovation strategies with the context of startups, in real time. With 1 million startups in database, we are able to deliver top-matching results in less than 1 second, thanks to a unique technology based on natural language processing.

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Q: Can you give us more insights into your services?

A: We consider that a startup, or an innovation cluster, is not an isolated, standalone entity. Behind the startup name, you have founders, employees, real persons that interact with an environment: a technology, a business model, customers, partners, investors, stakeholders. Their activity is described on their website, on social media, in patents, in Linkedin profiles. They are living nodes.

We collect all this data around each startup to create a context, made of text and pictures. This context is vectorised semantically with data science and AI, and as we do the same with our customers briefings, we can identify matches, based on real things, not just keywords or sectors.

Our customers provide Novable with an elaborated briefing on the platform, and it generates a “golden basket”, a ranked list of the top-matching startups against the briefing. The user has a global view on the list, has some details on the startup activity and filmographics, and he can also state if that specific startup really matches the briefing or not – as this is based on machine learning, this feedback improves the algorithms quality on a permanent basis, the longer you use the tech, the better it becomes, so that you can devote your time to the most relevant startup candidates, instead of repeating the SAD syndrome again and again.

Q: What are some of the real-world results companies can expect with your solution?

A: By doing this, we are able to deliver on the promise of reducing the time spent on that syndrome by 80%, and the deal closing time by half. In a nutshell, Novable is your dedicated innovation scout and analyst, to which you delegate 80% of the tedious tasks of scouting, analysing and qualifying candidates. The machine is much faster, much cheaper, never sick, never tired.

Q: What’s your revenue model? How are you funded?

A: We charge customers with a yearly subscription to access the technology, with an unlimited number of seats. On top of that, we have optional engagement steps that companies can take towards startups: deep-dive analysis, valuation, cultural fit, lookalikes… all these actions are charged on top or are included in your plan.

We have financed the first year of Novable on our own funds, and we just closed a late-seed round with private investors and ourselves. We also have the support of the local government. We are planning another round early 2021.

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Q: What can we expect from Novable in next 12 months?

A: Our ambition is to go-to-market by February 2021 with our online platform. We will first focus our business development on Western Europe, even if we have some inquiries from around the globe. In the meantime, we already deliver the value through open-end assignment with an early bird offer granting a substantial discount.

Last Updated on January 17, 2021