reportbrain: AI Platform for smart business
Despite all technological advances and progress made the vast amount of information available online can be dizzying. With reportbrain, the Greek venture that won the 2nd prize during MITEF Greece Startup Competition 2015, making sense out of tons of information has become easier!
Have you ever felt intimidated by the overwhelming quantity of information while searching online for a new movie, an interesting interview or newly released music? Depending on your query, there’s likely at least a dozen, if not hundreds, of articles on the topic, a similar number of blogs and many more books. And most importantly apart from looking up, you need to learn and digest. Imagine how difficult it could be for businesses to overcome this “information overload”, gain insights and make decisions with confidence to outperform in their market.
Information clutter causes by too much-unstructured information resulting to inefficient business operations and decision-making. Reportbrain deciphers millions of documents, news of social posts at scale, to provide you with in-depth media monitoring and analytics. Whether it’s about your company, your competitors or a research assignment reportbrain helps you discover all information needed in numerous countries and multiple languages. Reportbrain explores relations between persons and organizations lost in the clutter, uses subject-matter know-how for deeper insights and finally enables professionals to communicate actionable insights to their organization and team. “Media monitoring has been, and still is, a preferred way of reviewing editorial content by news agencies, social media trends, word of mouth mentions, TV commentaries, etc., since press clipping grew out of fashion. According to research published on globalnewswire.com under the title “Media Monitoring Tools Market to touch US$4.22 Billion by 2022“, explains Alexandros Kostopoulos, CEO at reportbrain.
Driving knowledge for smart business
Every business’s ability to make decisions is related directly to the information it finds and how it uses those data. Reportbrain is a knowledge engine that helps you make better decisions as it automatically collects, cleans, analyses and stores information easily retrievable by their clients faster, more accurately and above all having relational analysis already in place. Reportbrain uses cutting-edge, proprietary technology based on NLP (Natural Language Processing), advanced clustering methods, and NER (Named Entity Recognition) algorithms. We create beautifully designed intelligent tools so our users distil information and make data-driven decisions with confidence. “While media monitoring’s prominence cannot be questioned, the digital environment never ceases to change and evolve and so should businesses. This is where Media Intelligence comes into place. Media Intelligence is the ‘homo sapiens’ of Media Monitoring, its next level, and it relies on social listening, data management, advanced measurement and analytics and distribution. We are proud to provide the most comprehensive knowledge platform in the market at less than half the price of our competitors”.
We believe in knowledge!
“When I was working as a Corporate Finance adviser I had a customer selling a major asset in Greece and as a result, a number of different stakeholders were to be monitored in order to understand different forces influencing the deal. I had no single tool to do that. I had to go through each and every article to find the information I wanted and when I did it took me the rest of the day to put everything together in a comprehensive report”, says Alexandros Kostopoulos. Now with reportbrain, the same tasks take a fraction of that time!
Alexandros Kostopoulos, CEO, and Vasilis Sotiridis, Chief Software Architect.
Later on, a good friend of Alexandros introduced him to some amazing people in order to build his dream team. “I had developed a draft prototype secured the first customer and I needed to expand the team to more knowledgeable people. I was lucky to find the best matches I could. Over time working closely together we are now good friends. Shortly after we decided to participate in the MITEF Greece Startup Competition that helped us to better focus our presentations on customers and investors by giving access to people who have the skills, experience and knowledge to give us in-depth views. This startup competition is really an oasis in the desert of Greece, where handsome and methodical knowledge is provided which, unfortunately, is not easy to find in our country. We feel lucky to have participated and taken advantage of every opportunity they gave us”. Three years after MITEF Greece’s competition reportbrain has expanded its AI platform, has raised 1.2m from private investors and has reached break-even just from sales in Greece. There are 45 more countries to go! Moreover, Alexandros is planning to open an office in Brussels and possible elsewhere to leverage the ability of reportbrain’s technology to cover multiple regions in multiple languages.
Overcoming challenges
“The vast majority of the startup community in Greece was not caught by surprise and have taken measures to deal with the instability in Greece long before the referendum. We anticipated this for years and have prepared in advance. We’ve established operations in the UK and do all our business out of London. This course of action proved to be the single most important business move we did so far to protect our growth. Other Greek startups have also incorporated abroad, namely in the UK or the US“. Reportbrain was protected, banking in the UK and US, switching to annual payment plans so all proceeds had already been received months ago, and paying tax in the UK — it means its Greek employees will not need to relocate in future; their paycheck is secure.
“We started pitching to investors in order to secure funding. We met with an investor that I knew many years back but his focus was on returns. This attitude is quite hard to handle. But we succeeded with minimum delusion“. Creating and bringing to the market a startup is part of daily doing business. As a businessman and shareholder, you need to go through the hard times by sticking to your own resources. Otherwise, you get diluted early and after many rounds of financing, the business itself doesn’t really make sense. “There is always the argument of having a smaller piece of a bigger pie yet that’s now really the way it works in Greece. Other reactions coming from family or the friendly environment when you announced them that you were going to implement the idea and abandon the security of our previous career? “This is the most important part of all. If you do not have the backup of your family and close friends, NEVER go into a startup or start one. They will be the shoulder to lean on when hard times come and they will back you up when you need to take a hard decision“.
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About the Author: Christina Kalli
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