Alacrité France Launches First Two Start-ups
Alacrité (France) is located in LILLE, a commercial and industrial city 200 kilometers North of Paris. During the Quarter, the fund housed four project teams (teams working on their first business/product ideas) as well as two newly-incorporated start-ups.
Called ReactEvent and Diskyver, the two new companies have been incubated in the Alacrité program over the past year. Both are now staffed and financed for the next critical steps in their journeys toward business success, and each is bringing an original solution to a market opportunity that is not addressed currently. The customer needs behind each of the solutions were brought forward by Wesley Clover International and Mitel Networks (both key stakeholders in Alacrité France), as part of the Alacrity company building model.
ReactEvent has created a new video-based business intelligence platform for brick-andmortar businesses that helps owners and managers identify and react to events in their stores more rapidly. Automating these procedures and generating the insight the solution provides helps clients improve their bottom line. The insight comes from connecting existing customer video-surveillance systems together with ‘point of sale’ (POS) terminals and other network-connected business systems to provide video/data records of specific business events.
The ReactEvent platform is based on intellectual property sourced from Solink, an affiliate of the Wesley Clover ecosystem. Solink provided the IP to kick start the project and enable a complimentary solution to what they already offer. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) is in place between both parties, and the two are working on even greater technical and business collaboration moving forward.
Diskyver, on the other hand, is developing cybersecurity solutions for enterprise telephone systems. This is a traditional market space, but is one where customers introduce risk when evolving their systems to newer IP and cloud technologies. The market need was identified and further defined by Mitel France shortly after the Alacrité fund was formed a year ago. They were observing first-hand how new IPBX (digital office telephone) installations from all manufacturers were being attacked by criminal elements in scams that according to the Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA) were resulting in worldwide financial losses amounting to $29.2 Billion!
It was evident that telecommunications cybersecurity solutions on the same level as those available to the IT sector were required, and that the need was not being addressed by existing cybersecurity firms. In response, Diskyver has now applied artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to the design of a software platform that provides this protection in real-time. The new platform will be available shortly.
In the case of each of these new companies, they have taken steps to ensure their solutions will be relevant across as broad a range of customers as possible. But like all good start-ups, they are resisting any temptation to try and be ‘all things to all people’. They are keeping distractions to a minimum, and taking small, calculated steps to build their new businesses. Again, exactly as the Alacrity model and program encourages.
We look forward to reporting about more of their growth in future issues of Q. alacrite.fr