How have data discovery & Data Loss Prevention (DLP) technologies evolved? How have your products adapted to it?

Modern data discovery technologies use advanced algorithms and machine learning models to analyze large amounts of data in real time, identify sensitive data, and categorize it based on various attributes. Additionally, DLP technologies have had to adapt to the increased usage of cloud-based applications and storage. At Metomic, we use natural language processing to detect and classify sensitive data, monitor user behavior, and automate the alerting and redaction within SaaS apps.

Can you share Metomic’s mission of protecting sensitive data in SaaS applications?

As the explosion of SaaS apps has continued to rise, we believe it is too easy for sensitive data to get passed through these apps. We want to provide our customers with the tools to find the data that matters to them, easily notify employees, and automatically redact the data.

Metomic has raised significant funding of $20 Million in the Series A round recently. What changes in the product can we look forward to?

We’re super excited about the upcoming changes! You can expect to see plenty more integrations, more granular controls, and a lot more customization so that our users can easily find the risks that matter to them.

As a woman in tech, tell us about your career journey to this role as a Product Head.

I transitioned into Product from Data Analytics five years ago and found my first Product Analyst role at a tech jobs fair in London. I knew within the first few weeks that Product Management was the career for me, and I became obsessed with knowing everything about all the products I worked on. I spent over three years at Tray.io, where I became a Lead PM, leading the workflow-building experience. Without a doubt, the best skills I developed were my product sense and technical knowledge; I wasn’t afraid to ask those around me questions regarding the technical complexities of both the product itself and the implementation of new features and bug fixes, and the product sense came from spending hours listening to sales calls, speaking with customers and using the product on a daily basis. I’m super excited to now be leading the Product team at Metomic!

How are you planning to reach a broader audience and capture newer markets?

We’re going to be focusing on time to value, as we know that security teams are constrained by time and resources; surfacing the sensitive data within their SaaS apps within a matter of minutes is crucial for helping these teams understand where the risks are. We’ll also be continuing to offer more integrations across the SaaS spectrum to cover the increasing amount of tools that organizations use.

What product, marketing, and technology challenges may arise for SaaS businesses?

The innovation we are seeing within AI is going to push SaaS businesses to ensure they are staying competitive. However, these businesses need to consider the wider picture of data privacy within the use of AI tools and understand that even those with good intentions can breach data privacy laws.

What makes your company stand out from your competitors?

We focus on finding the risks that matter to each individual company via AI technology. Our competitors don’t triage risks in the way we do; we cut through the noise to make sure they can see their most critical risks and what they’ll need to address first.

We’re also helping companies enable the human firewall within their business by educating their employees continuously on security policies. Our employee notifications bridge the gap between security teams and their colleagues, enforcing policies automatically and helping employees resolve their own violations.

How do you align sales, marketing, and other customer success teams to drive organizational growth?

At this stage of the company, we are moving fast, and no two days are the same. It is my job to ensure that all the go-to-market teams are aligned with product and engineering, and I do that by regularly communicating the product roadmap and the underlying strategy that underpins it. One of my favorite methods of communication is video recordings, big shout out to Loom!

Which trends in the industry are you focusing on that will impact marketing and sales?

Our core focus is cloud security, specifically data security within SaaS apps. With the huge move to remote- and hybrid-working, building a security-aware culture plays a big part in what we are doing at Metomic. Our automated alerting and notifications help provide education to organizations without security teams needing to step in every single time; this plays a huge part in how we communicate with prospects, as we know that automation is now essential to modern security teams. 

What do you think lies in the future of Data Discovery & DLP?

As organizations continue to collect and store vast amounts of data within their SaaS apps, the importance of effective data discovery and DLP solutions will only increase. I think we will start to see the use of AI more and more to improve DLP capabilities, especially as security teams will be under more pressure to comply with privacy and compliance regulations.

Can you tell us about your background and how it led you to your current role as CRO?

Before joining Kibo, I led the teams at Oracle that were responsible for Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) and B2B Commerce. Then in 2018, I joined Kibo to lead the sales function and transitioned to the Chief Revenue Officer role following the spin-off of Kibo’s personalization business in 2022. By folding the sales and marketing teams under one function, we’ve been able to implement a holistic go-to-market strategy that helps leading retailers, manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers embrace composable commerce across the entirety of their commerce operations, including and beyond the storefront.

How do you approach revenue growth, and what strategies have been most successful for you?

First and foremost, we focus on strategies that will help our clients accelerate revenue growth—no matter where they are in their digital maturity. We’ve worked with companies with existing composable architectures and companies on a more traditional commerce approach with composable on the roadmap.

Modern composable commerce goes beyond the storefront, and we’ve been making thoughtful investments to build composable solutions that span across order routing, inventory management, subscriptions, cart and checkout, and more. We continue to invest in our partner ecosystem and provide them with tools that help them innovate and drive a higher ROI for our shared clients, including pre-built storefronts and starter kits. We’ve recently partnered with Builder.io to provide a seamless integration and unified frontend commerce experience, and we’ve launched a series of co-marketing efforts, including a video series with Ignitiv and PeakActivity and in-depth how-to guides with Cognizant and Wipro.

Can you discuss any trends or recent changes in the industry that are impacting businesses? 

We’re starting to see a shift in how people think about composable commerce as more businesses—both B2B and B2C—seek composable solutions for supply chain, fulfillment, customer service, and other areas across their entire enterprise.

As the commerce world moves away from feature-function solutions and towards composability, these companies need to ensure that they’re solving their unique use cases. There are composable solutions out there that provide the APIs, but you still have to build out your functions, processes, and workflows in another platform. Kibo provides 100% universal API coverage of commerce services within a single admin UI so users can easily extend and compose the platform.

How do you align sales, marketing, and customer success teams to drive revenue growth? 

Companies have so many options in the market that it’s becoming more complex to pinpoint their unique use cases and find a solution that can solve them. Our sales, marketing, and client success teams work together to simplify this process, starting with the first introduction to Kibo. Our sales and marketing teams introduce use case concepts externally through white papers and videos and bring them to life through on-demand webinars and interactive demos. The client success team focuses on capability adoption and ensuring clients understand how to unlock maximum value with our composable solutions.

Why are leading B2B companies adopting a composable commerce approach, and how are you different? 

Gartner suggests that B2B companies with digital commerce as part of their offerings will see 30% more revenue compared to competitors. By adopting a composable commerce strategy, B2B companies can scale their digital commerce ecosystem and more easily pivot as buyer expectations evolve. For example, Coastal Construction recently implemented Kibo’s composable eCommerce and Order Management solutions, and they now have a unified omnichannel B2C-like experience with streamlined B2B processes.

B2B organizations are historically less digitally mature than B2C, so Kibo built an omnichannel starter storefront to help them get to market quicker using modern technology that won’t be a risk to them in the future.

How do you measure the success of your revenue growth initiatives? 

We measure our success based on our clients’ successes. We prioritize helping our clients understand the broader and long-term value of composable commerce to ensure they maximize their ROI. If you want to see Kibo’s successes first-hand, visit acehardware.com as a shopper, which is powered by Kibo eCommerce and Order Management, or Google Ace Hardware—they were recently ranked as one of the top 10 franchises in the world for 2023 by Entrepreneur Magazine.

What do you think is the most effective marketing channel that, in turn, helped you drive more revenue? 

Our clients and partners have been our most effective marketing channels—when they see great results from Kibo, they recommend us to their colleagues. Analysts like Forrester and Gartner have also been effective in helping solidify Kibo’s place in the market. Kibo was named the Leader in the Forrester Wave: B2C Commerce Solutions, Q2 2022 report, and we ranked highest for the B2C Digital Commerce Use Case in the August 2022 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Digital Commerce Platforms report.

Would you like to shed some light on your technologies and how they help drive revenue? 

We use a variety of best-of-breed marketing technologies—with care—to ensure we’re providing the right information to the right people when they need and want it. We focus on delivering educational content for each stage in the buying process to help companies understand composable solutions for Order Management, eCommerce, and Subscriptions and determine if Kibo makes sense for their business.

How does Composable Commerce help deliver the desired results? 

The desired results for anyone pursuing composable commerce is to be able to satisfy customer demand in whatever way that might shift based on trends in the market. Kibo’s composable commerce helps companies simplify complex commerce by giving developers the freedom to innovate and business users the flexibility to create optimal experiences. Kibo’s end-to-end commerce capabilities seamlessly deploy, upgrade, and function in any combination to help companies meet consumer expectations and achieve their business objectives.

How are unified commerce and headless commerce revolutionizing the customer experience? 

Many of the benefits of headless are around performance—something as simple as improving the page load time at cart and checkout when multiple discounts are applied can make a huge difference in the customer experience, as proven by City Furniture. Home Hardware switched to headless and composable commerce with Kibo, and as a result, they saw a 3,000% increase in site speed.

Unified commerce is more than the customer experience—it’s about unifying the technology that powers customer experiences. For example, with Kibo’s headless and composable solutions, companies can bring inventory data to site search to ensure relevant results and boost product discovery.

Here are a couple of ways Kibo’s clients are achieving unified commerce:

• ExperienceNow, a ticketing platform for experiences, is currently using Kibo Search to deliver lightning-fast relevancy at scale and automate search suggestions to ensure customers have accurate experiences.
• Boscov’s unified their commerce technology by implementing Kibo eCommerce and Order Management—making it easier to roll out experiences like buy online and pick up in-store, which resulted in a 40% in-store upsell rate on BOPIS purchases.

What do you think lies in the future of composable commerce?

Three main things lie in the future of composable commerce:

1. Usability: There will be more focus on building composable solutions with daily business users in mind and enabling them to build ‘anywhere’ customer experiences.
2. True focus on unified commerce and composability: The market thinks these two things can’t live together without a significant amount of effort. Kibo has proven this untrue with our fully composable platform that allows companies to deliver unified experiences quickly.
3. Consolidation: We expect to see the consolidation of smaller solutions competing for their niche in the market.

What was the vision and purpose of Deliveright as it came to fruition, and how has it changed over time?

Deliveright was founded in 2018 to bring cutting-edge technology and final-mile delivery transparency to the big and bulky goods segment of the supply chain industry. There are many quality delivery providers, but there are few technology solutions available to them—and the big and bulky goods industry is even more hampered, as many delivery services like FedEx and UPS refuse to deliver anything weighing over 150 pounds. With digital commerce growing exponentially, online sellers needed a logistics solution for the delivery of big and bulky products. Deliveright’s Grasshopper platform was designed as a complete technology solution for these specialized companies, combining OMS (order management systems), WMS (warehouse management systems), TMS (transportation management systems), and more into one package, and we’ve improved these features and added new ones with each new version. After developing Grasshopper and implementing it for carriers and shippers all over the U.S., Deliveright began handling B2B shipments as well. Today, we have over 1,000 customers that rely on our network.

How does Deliveright differentiate itself from other heavy goods delivery service companies?

We are a technology-first, asset-light, big and bulky goods solution; our Grasshopper platform provides total transparency across every step of the process, not just integrating with outdated legacy processes but helping companies move beyond them. Deliveright has built an entire network of organizations servicing the delivery process, all running on the same platform, offering real-time tracking and various features to improve the experience.

Can you walk us through the company's growth and expansion process over the years?

From day one, we knew our mission was to bring technology to facilitate the big and bulky goods logistics process to the market. But while we started with the technology, we soon ended up with our boots on the ground in the delivery business ourselves. We learned early on that the best way to build our technology platform, Grasshopper, was by running a final-mile delivery network ourselves. We started with one terminal on the East Coast and quickly grew to three terminals. After 100,000+ shipments, we started to license Grasshopper to other delivery companies, and today we have a nationwide network of licensees, some of which also make big and bulky deliveries for Deliveright. Shippers can manage logistics and final-mile deliveries for almost every zip code in the U.S. through Deliveright. That early hands-on experience proved critical for insight into which solutions and tools truly meet shippers’ needs.

Can you share any exciting new developments or initiatives that Deliveright has in the works?

In line with our mission to always increase the level of transparency we offer our clients, we just released version 3.0 of our Grasshopper platform, which provides even more detailed visibility to shippers. In addition to further streamlining the integration of OMS, WMS, and TMS to provide real-time data, we’ve improved our user interface so that adopting Grasshopper is easier than ever.

Since you mentioned Grasshopper technology, can you further elaborate on how the AI-powered platform is automating complicated logistics? And how has Grasshopper upped the efficiency game in the digital supply chain network?

Grasshopper automates the entire fulfillment process in several ways:

• Automated scheduling based on capacity, volume, and drive time limitations: We enable customers to schedule deliveries on their own time without the need to involve the operations team.
• Warehouse allocation optimization: Making sure that pieces are placed in the right locations and picked in the right order to ensure accurate and optimized loading of trailers. These recommendations are based on insight from our own experience working with warehouses and are also reactive to new data about what configurations maximize worker efficiency and minimize damages.
• Routing optimization: Making sure that each route is optimized based on customer limitations like access hours, as well as drive time, truck capacity, and other factors that may vary based on the customer and the product.
• End-to-end visibility: Because our comprehensive solution can handle every step of the supply chain, Grasshopper provides true end-to-end visibility from the manufacturer’s loading dock all the way to the customer’s home. We don’t just connect and aggregate with other platforms, stitching together a unified view; we are the single operating system being used by all parties along the way.

How has Grasshopper contributed to saving time and reducing human error in logistics operations?

There are countless examples of how Grasshopper saves time and reduces human error, and at the foundation of all of them is the way it allows every item in every shipment to be tracked individually and precisely. This helps keep related but technically separate items, like a headboard and footboard, from being separated. Every warehouse worker uses Grasshopper’s mobile app to scan each item at the start and finish of any move. Then, the delivery team does the same, with all the information being gathered in the same place. This ensures the proper picking, handling, and loading of items from the designated location in the warehouse into the correct trucks. They are then directed and delivered to the correct location, all while minimizing damages and maximizing transparency. In doing so, Grasshopper has quadrupled the overall efficiency of a warehouse employee and greatly reduced lost or misplaced items.

What perks can one expect to gain through Grasshopper Lite?

Grasshopper Lite is our “try now, buy later” version, created for managing just one truck to help small organizations and give prospective customers a sense of the benefits of the full version.

Are you planning on any notable partnerships or collaborations in the near future?

Yes, we’re currently working on a major partnership with one of the largest digital commerce platforms in the world, which we’ll be announcing soon. We’re also launching Grasshopper-for-Vendors, which will allow vendors and shippers to manage all of their shipments on one platform.

How does Deliveright stay ahead of industry trends and continuously innovate its services?

Members of our research and development team are continually working to keep Grasshopper cutting-edge through improvements like upgrading to the latest tech stack, as well as projects to improve existing features and introduce new ones. With more than 1.5 million shipments already completed on our platform, we leverage what we’ve learned from how our customers use the platform to enhance both their experience and the consumer’s experience.

In your opinion, what does the future of delivery look like, and how does Deliveright plan to stay ahead of the curve with powerful platforms like Grasshopper?

The world is moving toward more accurate and holistic logistics management. As we continue to build the Deliveright/Grasshopper network and provide additional connectivity, we see Grasshopper becoming the backbone that enables retailers’ visibility into their third-party carriers. More and more retailers are understanding the benefits of providing consumers with tracking visibility during the checkout process, and we expect to expand this offering as more retailers see this as a requirement.

In general, the Deliveright/Grasshopper combination enables every local retailer to sell nationwide with little or no change to their model. Instead of just selling within a 100-mile radius of their headquarters, they can offer their products to a nationwide audience and let Deliveright handle everything. Deliveright’s nationwide capability has enabled significant growth for our brick-and-mortar retailers, who are now able to vastly expand their market.

As we know, Elastic Path Composable Frontend accelerates building modular, digital commerce, Next.js frontends based on users’ responses to a few questions. How do you see brands embracing this new experience?

Brands are eager to embrace a Composable Commerce approach as it enables them to deliver high-performance commerce experiences that exceed customer expectations and drive revenue. But complexity and risk are a concern for brands—with so many options available regarding frontends, the paradox of choice often presents an issue.

Composable Frontend offers brands an advanced starting point for their frontend build. Leveraging Next.js, it connects to our Composable Commerce APIs and is full of best practices for frontend development. This provides a high-performance frontend of the box without the plumbing, allowing businesses to focus on what they do best—building extraordinary, high-performing digital experiences.

What was your vision behind the launch of Composable Frontend?

More and more brands are pursuing a Composable Commerce approach to create the differentiated brand experiences that digital commerce businesses need to evolve.

The Composable Frontend extends the core principles of composable to the frontend experience. It enables brands to break free of the rigidity imposed by all-in-one monolithic applications without swinging the pendulum to a completely custom frontend that is expensive to build and maintain.

The Composable Frontend is a modular, extensible approach to frontend development, helping customers reduce time to market for new commerce experiences without the tradeoffs that all-in-one solutions impose. 

What, in your view, is the biggest strength of Composable Frontend?

Composable Frontend accelerates the development of frontend experiences, taking care of the necessary blocking and tackling needed to launch new digital experiences. It also removes much of the risk of the frontend build for a Composable Commerce application as it’s connected to Elastic Path Commerce Cloud’s APIs and leading third-party technologies, including Algolia and Builder.io.

Composable Frontend equips companies with a high-performance frontend with commerce best practices built right in, enabling teams to focus on launching and generating revenue ASAP.

How user-friendly is this solution from the end-user perspective?

Composable Frontend is for use by developers building frontend experiences. Built in Next.js, it takes advantage of development best practices to accelerate the time to launch. Developers can hit the ground running with Composable Frontend, focusing on their unique digital experience requirements. Many frontend components come pre-integrated with preferred third-party providers (search, CMS, payments, shipping) in addition to Elastic Path Commerce Cloud’s APIs.

How do you see Composable Frontend changing the market dynamics?

• Accelerate time-to-market: cuts launch times in half
• Speeds frontend experiences thanks to no extra bloat
• Reduces implementation risk

How does Composable Frontend – a business-ready solution help brands deliver high performance?

Composable Commerce enables brands to compose “best-of-breed” technology into one business-ready solution. Composable Frontend, however, automatically and quickly builds a modular, Next.js frontend based on users’ responses to simple configuration questions. It provides a high-performance combination of static pages and dynamic data on the frontend. Faster page load speeds result in better SEO since static sites are fast, light, and easy to scan, resulting in better conversion rates.

What’s in store for the future of Composable Frontend?

Going forward, we expect to add more elective components to Composable Frontend, broadening the range of prospective use cases it can address from the same high-performance framework.

Welcome, Philip!

Your background in music, with a Master of Music degree from Yale University, is quite impressive. Can you share how you transitioned from that background to your role at Apple and eventually founding Olyns?

For the first part of my life, I was a working musician performing at everything from corporate events to concert halls in European capitals. I also spent years writing music for advertising, movies, and TV series. I first started using technology to create music as an undergraduate in the ’80s. In those days, using software to make music often meant writing the software yourself. I had enrolled in a class called “Computers for Musicians,” which was a programming course on C. So, I learned how to code and loved it.

By the time I arrived at Yale, I was very much involved in the new Media Lab that started with the purchase of several NeXT computers. I worked for several semesters in the Media Lab, experimenting with using these computers to create music. After graduating, I went on to write for film and TV and won an award or two - you can still find some of my works listed in the IMDb.

I pivoted from music to technology after a visit to the National Gallery in London, where I was so impressed by my tour guide that I wondered how I could use technology to standardize and enhance that experience. That thought led to Wifarer, my first tech company, whose pioneering innovation in 2008 was using aggregate WiFi signals to locate mobile phones indoors. We were the first company to do this accurately and reliably in indoor spaces, and our tech was used to provide location-based information to guide travelers at airports, shoppers at malls, and, of course, visitors at museums.

Then Apple took an interest in Wifarer, and I soon found myself living in Cupertino, taking a lead role in the development of Apple Maps. I worked at Apple for 5 years, then moved on to start Olyns.

While at first glance, composing music and founding a tech company might seem very different, they actually have a lot in common. They both require unquenchable curiosity, creativity, and persistence, as well as an unshakable belief in one’s vision. All are critical attributes that help with navigating the roller coaster ride that is a technology start-up.

Tell us the story behind Olyns. How did you decide to make recycling fun and profitable?

The impetus for Olyns was to leave a better world for my teenage daughter and her generation. I was worried about the rapid escalation of the climate crisis, which I experienced firsthand through forest fires and floods in the Santa Cruz Mountains above Silicon Valley, where I live. When I learned that almost 90% of plastic NEVER gets recycled, I decided to try to do something about it. I set out to rethink recycling - to fix the broken system and reduce the plastic waste polluting our rivers and oceans, hurting our wildlife, and contributing to the climate crisis.

I knew the only way to increase recycling rates was to make recycling convenient, rewarding, and fun. I also knew I had to come up with a business model that would pay for this recycling service and that would be easily scaleable and financially sustainable.

So, my partner, John Buchowski, and I set to work. Utilizing John’s extraordinary technical skills, we built a recycling machine we called the Olyns Cube. Having learned the value of design at Apple, we designed the Cube to be beautiful as well as functional. It’s made of glass and stainless steel, and it’s futuristic and bold.

Aesthetically, it’s the opposite of a dirty plastic curbside recycling bin. We deliberately crafted the Cube to elevate the action of recycling to shift people’s perception of recycling, to help them see that an empty container was not a piece of trash but a vital resource that still had value and purpose.

One of the main goals I had with Olyns was to make recycling convenient for everyone. I was amazed to learn that 50% of Americans don’t have access to any sort of recycling, and for the vast remainder, access is often limited, especially in the 40 states that don’t have container deposit systems. To address this, I knew we had to design Olyns to work everywhere, not just in states with bottle bills.

I knew that our Cubes needed to be located at the entrance of places people already go, like grocery stores, drug stores, cinemas, airports, and gas stations, so that recycling could become just another part of people’s daily routine. We did a POC pilot with Safeway in the San Francisco Bay Area, which was a huge success and paved our way forward. In 18 months, our small 10-Cube pilot collected 5 million containers and was used by over 22,000 people!

I also wanted to make recycling rewarding to encourage more people to recycle. We built our software to provide a range of incentives to motivate different kinds of people: deposit refunds in bottle bill states, coupons and rebates everywhere, eco-impact metrics for the climate-conscious, and games and leaderboards for people whose jam was competition.

Finally, I wanted to make recycling fun. Over the last few years, we’ve developed custom recycling gamification for some of the biggest CPG brands, including Mars Wrigley and PepsiCo. When Mars Wrigley approached us for a creative way to encourage the recycling of candy containers, we set up the Cube like a slot machine. Every time a user deposited a candy container rather than a beverage container, we would identify it as such, and a slot machine screen would appear. The animated reels would spin, and instant cash prizes would be awarded to winning combinations. We used M&M characters for the reel, so it was a Mars Wrigley-branded experience, and we collected thousands of containers that would otherwise have ended up in incinerators or landfills.

We also developed a recycling game for PepsiCo that became the centerpiece of their Trash Talk activation at Super Bowl LVI. This was a collaboration with Canopy Brand Group and WovenMedia. Fans were given the chance to vote for either the AFC or NFC by depositing a beverage container in one of two Olyns Cubes. Each deposit would be instantly counted as a vote and, depending on the container type would trigger a different video featuring either Deion Sanders or Michael Irvin, who would either chide the user for depositing trash or praise them for depositing a recyclable container. Occasionally, a user would win a grand prize to much fanfare. Users had fun while learning about the difference between trash and recycling. We had about 150 people an hour using the Cubes at this Super Bowl and collected thousands of containers - it was a huge success.

You asked about profitability. The challenge with recycling is that while most people think it’s a good idea, no one wants to pay for it. If Olyns was going to succeed, we needed a scaleable business model to help us pay for our consumer recycling services. We came up with the idea of embedding a large video screen in each of our Cubes to display advertising, with the plan that as we scaled our recycling network, we’d also be scaling a storefront media network. This business model, together with our cutting-edge technology, has incredible potential to change the face of recycling.

What makes the Olyns Cubes different from other recycling machines? How does AI enable them to accept only clean containers and display ads?

The only similarity between Olyns Cubes and other recycling machines is that they both allow people to insert an empty container in exchange for a reward. In virtually every other way, Olyns Cubes are different.

First, Olyns uses AI at the point of deposit to identify and sort containers into one, two, or three bins. The AI can detect and reject containers that are dirty or that contain liquid, which minimizes contamination and maximizes recycling rates. So, unlike single-stream curbside programs, plastic containers deposited in our Cubes remain clean and uncontaminated. This means they can be transformed into food-grade recycled PET, which is in very short supply and highly sought after by CPG companies who are struggling to meet newly legislated minimum recycled content requirements as well as their own sustainability goals.

Olyns’ AI also identifies the brand and type of beverage container deposited. Importantly for advertisers, this allows Olyns to trigger ads based on the specific container deposited. For example, if a Kirkland water bottle were deposited, it could trigger a Dasani ad. This enables our advertisers to precisely target their ad spend to specific categories of consumers. Think Google Adwords for recycling. The deposited container data set is valuable in other ways, too, for example, to enable brands to assess the recycling rates of their own products compared to their competitors’.

Critically, our AI also enables Olyns to collect and identify ANY type of container, even those without bar codes. The AI can be trained to identify everything from empty shampoo containers to dish soap containers, hot cups, clam shells, and more. This opens up our recycling platform to a market far beyond that of conventional recycling machines, limited to beverage containers.

A final difference between Olyns and traditional recycling machines is our revenue model: each Cube is imbedded with a 55-inch high-def digital screen that runs the ads that help pay for our recycling services.

How does the partnership between Olyns and Screenverse, the DOOH platform, benefit companies by enhancing their ad engagement and supporting their sustainability efforts at the same time?

We made the decision to locate our Cubes at the front entrance of popular retailers for two reasons: First, so they would be convenient for recyclers, and second, so companies could reach their customers just before they started shopping. Research shows that 70% of consumers decide what to buy at or near the point of sale and that 92% of millennials are extremely likely to purchase products after seeing in-person OOH ads. By locating our Cubes at the front entrance of highly trafficked retailers in top DMA’s, Olyns allows brands to engage consumers when it matters most: just before they decide what to buy.

Our digital screens are imbedded in self-serve recycling machines, which means that advertisers are connected to sustainability in a truly impactful and highly visible way. Why does this matter? Because research shows that sustainability drives sales: A 2022 Stern-NYU IRI study showed that while sustainability-marketed products are only 17% of the market, they account for almost 30% of market growth, with a 5-year CAGR that is nearly 2x that of conventionally marketed products.

Brands advertising on Olyns can showcase their commitment to sustainability in a powerful way that their customers see daily. As people deposit their empty containers in the Cube, they are looking at ads on the Cube’s screen. As shoppers enter the store, they see ads on the Cube’s screen. It is a unique way for brands to associate their products with sustainability in the real world. And since sustainability drives sales, the benefit to companies is clear.

It’s important to understand that brands that advertise on Olyns quite literally pay for Olyns’ container recycling services. Their advertising dollars reduce plastic pollution, increase the supply of food-grade recycled PET, and accelerate the shift to a circular economy. Olyns provides sustainability metrics - containers recycled, carbon saved - for advertisers to quantify and share the positive impact their ad spend has on the environment. Brands advertising on Olyns show the world they are taking the lead on sustainability. This is important because surveys show that 88% of consumers want brands to help them live more sustainably.

Olyns’ partnership with Screenverse enables media buyers to easily find and purchase ads on Olyns’ media network that will engage their target audiences close to the POP and enhance their products’ sustainability credentials.

What plans do you have for Olyns going forward?

Olyns plans to continue its expansion to 1000s of Cubes in key DMA’s across the US, including LA, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Austin. We have been fortunate to partner with some of the biggest brands, including PepsiCo, the Coca-Cola company, Mars Wrigley, and Safeway, and will continue to work with these and other partners to extend our storefront recycling media network across the US.

How do technological advancements play a vital role in both supporting and hindering global sustainability goals, and what can we do to navigate this challenge effectively?

By and large, technology is greatly supporting and accelerating the advent of a sustainable future. I am an optimist and am buoyed by the extraordinary changes that have come about in such short order. Everything from the astounding growth of electric cars to sustainable energy, new forms of sustainable agriculture, and, of course, AI -- all point to things changing for the better at an incredible pace.

However, the speed of this change has left some in our community feeling uncomfortable in a future that looks so different and is still so ambiguous. I worry that this may create resentments that cloud objectivity and possibly hold back progress. As they blast forward, the challenge and responsibility for the trailblazers and the innovators is to ensure that the larger community is with them and that any concerns are addressed respectfully.

Based on your experience of founding two businesses, what are the critical components of a successful business plan in the current market scenario?

The keys to success in a tech start-up are persistence, creativity, and the ability to pivot. There are a lot of uncertainties in the market these days, from destabilizing wars to challenges around economic growth. 

Fortunately for Olyns, there seems to be growing support at the state and federal levels for more robust recycling and EPR legislation, both of which benefit our business. At the consumer level, research shows an increase in the percentage of Americans who think the climate crisis is real and are looking to companies and governments to help them live more sustainably. Olyns is well-positioned to benefit from new legislation and changing consumer priorities as we push forward with our mission to help reduce plastic pollution, increase the supply of high-quality r-PET, and accelerate the shift to a circular economy. 

On the advertising/revenue side, there is a clear motivation for companies to align themselves with the kind of sustainability that Olyns stands for. Many companies have been accused of greenwashing, and advertising on Olyns gives companies the opportunity to support recycling in a way that is truly impactful, easily measurable, and highly visible.

The biggest challenge for Olyns will be to scale quickly enough to meet the demand for our Cubes. This will entail being on top of our manufacturing supply chain, production schedules, and logistics.