Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Graphext (A REVOLUTIONARY SYSTEM IN THE EMERGING MARKET OF ADVANCED ANALYTICS. Graphext bridges the gap between Data Science and Business Intelligence, democratising Advanced Analytics.)
Période du rapport: 2018-06-01 au 2018-11-30
1.1 OVERVIEW OF THE WORK DONE AND RESULTS
In our SME Instrument Phase 1 application, we committed to conduct a feasibility study to verify the technological, practical and economic viability of the our proposed product Graphext to provide advanced analytics solution to the market. Over the course of 2018, our conducted through research in each of these areas, and this is what we have achieved in summary.
Technological Viability:
● We continued to research and develop our product vision under the scientific guidance from world renowned data analytics / visualization researchers from MIT, industry experts, as well as feedback from customers
● We defined a full product roadmap aligned with market requirements for 2019-2020
Practical Viability:
● We have conducted competitive analysis of over 100 competitors in the space of data visualization, data analytics, data science, etc. to understand their strengths and weakness. From this research, we defined our unique product differentiation
● We also defined requirements for operational capacity to enable rapid scaling, which include staff, IPR, infrastructure, equipement, etc.
Economic Viability:
● We further tested our pricing and delivery methods with 20 new trial customers to our portfolio
● We have identified three partnerships to help expand our business internationally
● We built a robust business expansion plan based on what we have learnt from the market and from our customers
● We have engaged with VCs from US, Germany, UK, France and Spain to discuss funding options and developed a funding requirement analysis
In our SME Instrument Phase 1 application, we committed to conduct a feasibility study to verify the technological, practical and economic viability of the our proposed product Graphext to provide advanced analytics solution to the market. Over the course of 2018, our conducted through research in each of these areas, and this is what we have achieved in summary.
Technological Viability:
● We continued to research and develop our product vision under the scientific guidance from world renowned data analytics / visualization researchers from MIT, industry experts, as well as feedback from customers
● We defined a full product roadmap aligned with market requirements for 2019-2020
Practical Viability:
● We have conducted competitive analysis of over 100 competitors in the space of data visualization, data analytics, data science, etc. to understand their strengths and weakness. From this research, we defined our unique product differentiation
● We also defined requirements for operational capacity to enable rapid scaling, which include staff, IPR, infrastructure, equipement, etc.
Economic Viability:
● We further tested our pricing and delivery methods with 20 new trial customers to our portfolio
● We have identified three partnerships to help expand our business internationally
● We built a robust business expansion plan based on what we have learnt from the market and from our customers
● We have engaged with VCs from US, Germany, UK, France and Spain to discuss funding options and developed a funding requirement analysis
SPECIFIC ACTIONS PERFORMED BY THE TEAM:
Task 1: Market and Customer Analysis with risk assessment
We conducted a six week market research study where we read over 100 reports to understand the overall market size and growth trend, specific market segments, key players, and overall market dynamics.
Following the study, we conducted in-depth interviews with 50 target customers across Spain, UK and US to understand their specific needs
Task 2: Marketing/Sales Strategy
On the Marketing side, we participated 6 industry events across Madrid, London and San Francisco. Our CEO Victoriano Izquierdo has been interviewed three times by different Radio and Podcasts. Our company and product has been mentioned 7 times by various media including major newspaper El Confidencial and El Pais. In addition, we have been actively promoting our brand across Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram. We also started our company blog.
On the sales side, we recruited our first sales representative in May, and experimented with different sales strategies, and set up a sales process using Hubspot.
Task 3: Stakeholders engagement and evaluation
We spoke with more than 50 target customers across US, UK, France, and Spain to demo our product and seek feedback. We have further tested our use cases with a variety of paid and unpaid customers in order to test customer acceptance and pricing level.
We also put a strong effort in identifying strategic partnership for distribution and integration. So far we have verbal agreement to establish 3 formal partnerships.
We have also spoke with more than 40 investors across Spain, UK, Germany, France, and US. We developed relationships with both seed investors and investors that specializes in Series A and beyond. From there, conducted research on funding / financing strategies and assessed options.
Task 4: Technology analysis and innovation roadmap
We divided our product into four components and analyzed each component based on customer feedback and competitive offering in order to develop our product roadmap.
In our analysis, we divided our product into: data preparation, analysis, prediction and reporting. In 2018, we focused on enhanced the analysis component of our product, with features such as clustering, filters, collection, etc.
In the future, we have three product development focuses:
● Create a intuitive data preparation process, providing step by step guidance to customers so they could properly prepare their data for analysis
● Add reporting capability to our tool. Our users should be able to share their findings from the analysis so their community could consume the information.
● Enhance our analysis capabilities to find and communicate more insights so we could maintain and strengthen our core competencies
Task 5: Freedom to operate: IP, regulations, standards compliance and policies
We have analysed different sources to develop a FTO “freedom to operate analysis”. In addition, as we are a data analytics company and GDPR regulation went into effect in May 2018, we employed lawyers to review our document and processes to make sure we are fully compliant with the GDPR regulation.
Task 6: Operational, Technology and Financial requirements analysis. We will analyse and assess the operational (staff needs), technology (product design and scalability needs, interoperability. Staff needs and training requirements, facilities. Customer service and assurance needs. Identify Operational and Financial risks and mitigation strategies.
We run multiple company workshops to identify talent gaps in our commercial, product and operation teams. Following the workshops, we developed a detailed 5 year financial plan that outlines our resources and financial needs. From the model, we then defined our funding strategy.
Task 1: Market and Customer Analysis with risk assessment
We conducted a six week market research study where we read over 100 reports to understand the overall market size and growth trend, specific market segments, key players, and overall market dynamics.
Following the study, we conducted in-depth interviews with 50 target customers across Spain, UK and US to understand their specific needs
Task 2: Marketing/Sales Strategy
On the Marketing side, we participated 6 industry events across Madrid, London and San Francisco. Our CEO Victoriano Izquierdo has been interviewed three times by different Radio and Podcasts. Our company and product has been mentioned 7 times by various media including major newspaper El Confidencial and El Pais. In addition, we have been actively promoting our brand across Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram. We also started our company blog.
On the sales side, we recruited our first sales representative in May, and experimented with different sales strategies, and set up a sales process using Hubspot.
Task 3: Stakeholders engagement and evaluation
We spoke with more than 50 target customers across US, UK, France, and Spain to demo our product and seek feedback. We have further tested our use cases with a variety of paid and unpaid customers in order to test customer acceptance and pricing level.
We also put a strong effort in identifying strategic partnership for distribution and integration. So far we have verbal agreement to establish 3 formal partnerships.
We have also spoke with more than 40 investors across Spain, UK, Germany, France, and US. We developed relationships with both seed investors and investors that specializes in Series A and beyond. From there, conducted research on funding / financing strategies and assessed options.
Task 4: Technology analysis and innovation roadmap
We divided our product into four components and analyzed each component based on customer feedback and competitive offering in order to develop our product roadmap.
In our analysis, we divided our product into: data preparation, analysis, prediction and reporting. In 2018, we focused on enhanced the analysis component of our product, with features such as clustering, filters, collection, etc.
In the future, we have three product development focuses:
● Create a intuitive data preparation process, providing step by step guidance to customers so they could properly prepare their data for analysis
● Add reporting capability to our tool. Our users should be able to share their findings from the analysis so their community could consume the information.
● Enhance our analysis capabilities to find and communicate more insights so we could maintain and strengthen our core competencies
Task 5: Freedom to operate: IP, regulations, standards compliance and policies
We have analysed different sources to develop a FTO “freedom to operate analysis”. In addition, as we are a data analytics company and GDPR regulation went into effect in May 2018, we employed lawyers to review our document and processes to make sure we are fully compliant with the GDPR regulation.
Task 6: Operational, Technology and Financial requirements analysis. We will analyse and assess the operational (staff needs), technology (product design and scalability needs, interoperability. Staff needs and training requirements, facilities. Customer service and assurance needs. Identify Operational and Financial risks and mitigation strategies.
We run multiple company workshops to identify talent gaps in our commercial, product and operation teams. Following the workshops, we developed a detailed 5 year financial plan that outlines our resources and financial needs. From the model, we then defined our funding strategy.
Graphext offers a completely disruptive market positioning, as it brings a new approach, bridging the space between complex and costly Data Science methods and now mainstream BI market. Graphext fills this gap by automating many of the actions currently patched together and involving costly processes: from raw data through to visualisations and insights for analysts and managers.
Our unique competitive advantage is to combine extraction and analysis of complex data, together with user-oriented workflow algorithm and UX. Graphext applies automated Advanced Analytics, the realm of Data Scientists, direct to the data analysts, through powerful interfaces and visualisation tools all through a single SaaS solution. The analyst can self-serve and also receive push notification on automatic insights.
By providing an accessible, easy-to-use and affordable offering, Graphext democratises access to knowledge otherwise reserved to a few with access to large resources and budgets. As such, many SMEs and professionals will benefit from Graphext, creating a new market for delivering knowledge from complex data, while also helping social and environmental organisations typically tight on resources. In fact, the increasing availability of complex data is a huge opportunity to help gain insight into societal challenges.
Below we compare the alternative options:
Mainstream BI systems:
STRENGTHS: Suitable for standard business analysis for business performance reporting.
WEAKNESSES: Requires highly qualified Data Science expertise. Complex algorithm to be adapted to each data model.
Costly investment in time and resources per project.
Statistical and data-science systems:
STRENGTHS: Ability to treat large volumes of complex data and extract valuable insight not otherwise possible.
WEAKNESSES: Not suitable for treating complex scenarios and deriving answers from a network-based relationship across data sets. Rigid data models and conventional analysis on data, mainly based on history, presented in conventional KPI dashboards, scorecards, charts and reports.
Data handling and data cleaning management tools:
STRENGTHS: Helpful in structuring unstructured data to fit into conventional databases.
WEAKNESSES: Time-consuming and requiring experts able to use the tools and clean distinct data-sets. A separate upstream process that is not directly connected with the downstream results creates disparity and communication challenges.
Therefore Graphext is disruptive for the following reasons:
Graphext disrupts the disconnected silos by combining these into a single ecosystem from upstream data gathering and management, to automated analysis of complex data and relationships applying advanced data-science algorithm, and through to visualisation and deriving of actionable conclusions. Graphext provides a method for a faster and more economical way to extract “VALUE” from the data, exploring insights that only highly qualified data scientists would see.
Graphext is highly scalable and provides rapid economic adaptation to multiple platforms.
Our unique competitive advantage is to combine extraction and analysis of complex data, together with user-oriented workflow algorithm and UX. Graphext applies automated Advanced Analytics, the realm of Data Scientists, direct to the data analysts, through powerful interfaces and visualisation tools all through a single SaaS solution. The analyst can self-serve and also receive push notification on automatic insights.
By providing an accessible, easy-to-use and affordable offering, Graphext democratises access to knowledge otherwise reserved to a few with access to large resources and budgets. As such, many SMEs and professionals will benefit from Graphext, creating a new market for delivering knowledge from complex data, while also helping social and environmental organisations typically tight on resources. In fact, the increasing availability of complex data is a huge opportunity to help gain insight into societal challenges.
Below we compare the alternative options:
Mainstream BI systems:
STRENGTHS: Suitable for standard business analysis for business performance reporting.
WEAKNESSES: Requires highly qualified Data Science expertise. Complex algorithm to be adapted to each data model.
Costly investment in time and resources per project.
Statistical and data-science systems:
STRENGTHS: Ability to treat large volumes of complex data and extract valuable insight not otherwise possible.
WEAKNESSES: Not suitable for treating complex scenarios and deriving answers from a network-based relationship across data sets. Rigid data models and conventional analysis on data, mainly based on history, presented in conventional KPI dashboards, scorecards, charts and reports.
Data handling and data cleaning management tools:
STRENGTHS: Helpful in structuring unstructured data to fit into conventional databases.
WEAKNESSES: Time-consuming and requiring experts able to use the tools and clean distinct data-sets. A separate upstream process that is not directly connected with the downstream results creates disparity and communication challenges.
Therefore Graphext is disruptive for the following reasons:
Graphext disrupts the disconnected silos by combining these into a single ecosystem from upstream data gathering and management, to automated analysis of complex data and relationships applying advanced data-science algorithm, and through to visualisation and deriving of actionable conclusions. Graphext provides a method for a faster and more economical way to extract “VALUE” from the data, exploring insights that only highly qualified data scientists would see.
Graphext is highly scalable and provides rapid economic adaptation to multiple platforms.