Pinch [SMART 100, 2018]

This SMART 100 profile and the information it contains is a duplication of content submitted by the applicant during the entry process. As a function of entry, applicants were required to declare that all details are factually correct, do not infringe on another’s intellectual property and are not unlawful, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, obscene, or otherwise objectionable. Some profiles have been edited for reasons of space and clarity.

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1. THE BEGINNING

This innovation initially came to life when…

After Chris Raethke’s last venture, Bugcrowd (raised $48.7M), when he started looking at companies on track to become $0.5B dollar businesses, and investigating what was preventing them from becoming $5B dollar companies. What did he find? Problems surrounding people! He recognised the need to provide more transparency, alignment and empowerment to ensure the right things were being done by the right people, at the right time, and with the appropriate context. Chris went through Y Combinator’s Startup School Accelerator (2017), focusing on communications at company bottlenecks (operations/middle management), and teamed up with co-founder Becci Medhurst.

2. WHAT & HOW

The purpose of this innovation is to…

…use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to capture voice in the workplace, better create accountability and deliver results from meetings; allowing you to store, search, aggregate and analyse all verbal conversations in the enterprise.

It does this by…

…by learning to “pinch” important points in conversations, using layered digital signal processing (DSP), speech-to-text (STT) and natural language processing (NLP). Pinch incorporates two key innovations associated with VoiceFlow and TextFlow. Pinch listens to meetings, extracts knowledge, takes notes, identifies action items and creates follow-ups, integrating with meeting software, CRMs, communication and task tracking tools.

3. PURPOSE & BENEFITS

This innovation improves on what came before because…

By taking a hybrid approach to development: introducing AI, leveraging best of breed technologies available, bringing them together, and layering Pinch’s machine learning algorithms on top. This enables Pinch’s customers with a single common pre-trained contextual element (Pinch’ business bingo), and provides the simplest version handling all customer verbal communication needs!

Its various benefits to the customer/end-user include…

Extracting and sharing insights in a more effective/efficient way, accessing learnings in how to improve meetings and other verbal communications, and making it easier to document and share important context around business decisions.

4. COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

In the past, this problem was solved by…

Expensive/unscalable note-taking, basic audio recording and human transcription. “I pay someone $200,000/year, 60% of his time is spent note taking in meetings, and this doesn’t include following up to make sure everyone knows what they need, has what they need, and is doing what they need for the business.”(Fortune 100 potential customer).

5. TARGET MARKET

It is made for…

Middle managers/operational executives from companies in the corporate and enterprise space with a potential 50-250 employees/users who have a large number of audio interactions, use conferencing software, are tech savvy, and are responsible for the delivery of things post meeting. With an estimated 55 million meetings held each day in the US alone, and ineffective meetings costing US companies $37B every year, Pinch can be adopted by companies across all industry sectors. By working closely with, and by learning from Pinch’s customers, large corporate and enterprise companies are excited to scale their meetings with Pinch!

It is available for sale through…

Pinch’s website www.heypinch.com, and accessible via social media (twitter @hellopinch, facebook.com/heypinch, Instagram @heypinch and linkedin.com/company/pinch-labs/). As a collaborative platform, Pinch also acquire customers/users through in-product collaboration, content sharing and referrals.

Our marketing strategy is to…

Have fun using Pinch as part of the process, illustrating how we differentiate, providing the simplest version handling all our customers’ verbal communication needs, and building customised results using our inbuilt machine learning algorithms. We are utilising direct B2B communications, social media, content sharing, and in-product referrals, and can handle a 1,000X monthly growth!

 

FINE PRINT: This SMART 100 profile and the information it contains is a duplication of content submitted by the applicant during the entry process. As a function of entry, applicants were required to declare that all details are factually correct, do not infringe on another’s intellectual property and are not unlawful, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, obscene, or otherwise objectionable. Some profiles have been edited for reasons of space and clarity.

Maven Judge Vote: Pinch – Smart 100 2018
(Please note – The form below is for judging purposes only and is restricted to the public)