SAN FRANCISCO, April 18, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- BootstrapLabs Applied Artificial Intelligence Conference featured entrepreneurs and innovators who shared the newest developments in the field of AI from research and business development to investing and business transformation.
One of several distinguished speakers was Chris Hale, CEO and Co-founder of Kountable, a managed marketplace for global trade, which focuses on collaboration in the supply chain, bringing together SMEs, multinational suppliers and end customers onto a single platform.
In a conversation with Jonas Svensson, Head of Global Innovation and Technology, Hale demonstrated the role Kountable can play in accelerating progress of the world's biggest organizations towards equipping people for success in underserved markets.
Kountable focuses on aggregating the demand side in trade by partnering with high quality entrepreneur owners of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), bringing access to world class goods to underserved markets and accelerating progress towards the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs).
"The Global South is home to some of the fastest growing economies on the planet, despite being challenged by a general lack of traditional infrastructure, scarcity of information, trade frictions, political and currency risks or even corruption," said Hale.
"Nevertheless, the benefits to bringing the next billion people into the global trade economy outweigh the risks and massive investments are being made in infrastructure, healthcare, IT, and transportation by governments, and other global organizations like the UN, Red Cross, World Bank, The Gates Foundation, or Buffet Foundation."
Kountable is making this possible by building a data acquisition, normalization, and scoring platform that measures the behaviors of the best trades and their traders in these emerging markets. With unique data describing the last mile of the supply chain and unique data on the traders in these developing markets, Kountable is building behavioral analysis for historical and live-updating trader behaviors, NLP to analyze the type of goods being requested/provided, matching algorithms to identify best-fit for traders and trade opportunities, time-series analysis on historic FX rates and fluctuation patterns, image recognition to automatically recognize and categorize key documentation, as well as SNA to assess reliability and competency of traders and buyers without traditional "scoring" mechanisms.
"We're leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence to help us find, resource, train, grow and promote these traders who are generally small and medium enterprises (SMEs)," said Danielle Russell, Head of Product at Kountable. "These traders are the engines of growth in these rapidly growing economies and connect the largest buyers in these economies to the top suppliers and brands in the world and are literally the point of access to global commerce for their respective countries."
About Kountable: Kountable is a global marketplace that harnesses the massively transformative capabilities of entrepreneurs in emerging markets who are solving some of the world's biggest problems. In developing economies, entrepreneurs serve as a vital link between institutions and foreign suppliers of specialized goods and equipment. Kountable's marketplace connects these local entrepreneurs with multinational suppliers and top-quality goods that are then delivered to end payers such as governments, NGOs or corporations looking to complete large scale projects. Kountable, based in San Francisco, launched in Rwanda in 2015 and now has offices in Rwanda, Kenya, Ghana, and the US. For information, visit www.kountable.com.
About BootstrapLabs: Founded in 2008, BootstrapLabs is a leading Venture Capital firm based in Silicon Valley and focused on Applied Artificial Intelligence. The company invests in founders that dream big and are solving today's hardest problem by applying artificial intelligence to shape a better future. BootstrapLabs is often the first institutional money and acts as a lead investor in the early stages, with follow-on capital at the growth stages. Ultimately we believe technology should always be used to create a positive impact on society, and that founders should always place fellow humans at the heart of their vision. For more information, visit https://bootstraplabs.com/.
SOURCE Kountable
