Startups Leap Forward with Modern Cloud

ServicesCopyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | 070921

Running in the cloud offers much more than the standard differentiators of better performance and lower costs.

Modern cloud technologies give builders agility, elasticity,

portability, and autonomous capabilities that drive new innovations

in a scalable and secure environment. From microservices to

serverless architectures to machine learning, these technologies

enable innovation on a scale—and timeline—we’ve never seen

before. We can reimagine what is possible, from smart cities to

medical breakthroughs, global challenges solved and new business

models born.

Although powerful and versatile, cloud-native technologies can be

complex, which can make staying up-to-speed on these services

challenging, even for seasoned IT and development teams. Today,

most cloud providers offer managed services that handle the

complexities of these workloads, making deployment and operations

easy. Managed cloud services, like Oracle Cloud infrastructure, let

development and IT teams take advantage of new and sophisticated

cloud capabilities without having to develop advanced skills.

With an enterprise-grade public cloud, Oracle offers a growing

list of services and utilities for constructing new cloud-native and

modern apps, all on a unified platform and networking fabric. With

an integrated solution strategy based on open standards, Oracle’s

platform is technology-agnostic and provides choice and portability.

With Oracle Cloud infrastructure, a multitude of technology-agnostic

and portable platforms can be used to give developers the ability

to use containers, microservices, API-based and serverless

architectures, and DevOps processes and tools. And Oracle’s AI and

ML capabilities are working behind the scenes, all the time, to keep

systems running optimally.

From container-based services like Kubernetes, to event-driven

architectures like Functions, to next-generation autonomous

databases, startups in Oracle for Startups are finding Oracle’s

modern cloud services a springboard to innovation and new

business growth.

Let’s look at a few of these modern cloud solutions and the

startups building with them.

Having the ability to run different types of software, like Kubernetes, and different types of database software is a big deal for us. It’s very important that cloud providers allow the latest, most widely used tools in their cloud, especially as startups like us deploy on client cloud. Oracle gives us the flexibility to spin up an instance so our enterprise clients can have the functionality they need.”

— Tony NashCEO and Founder

Complete Intelligence

We leveraged Oracle’s Cloud Native services to go from a static application to a dynamic microservices-based application that allows us to on-board customers daily.Oracle Cloud is a simple, low-cost process that allows us to bring growers the best practices in agronomy, helping the growers detect disease and pests, which helps them grow more and provide food security for the world.”

— Simcha ShoreCEO and Founder

AgroScout

Automating the orchestestration of application deployment

Kubernetes is an open-source, container-orchestration system

for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and

management. Container infrastructures are resilient, scalable

and support real-time application development with the ability

to reliably and repeatedly deploy to a range of environments

throughout all stages of a product’s lifecycle. This provides

portability and avoids lock-in.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Container Engine for Kubernetes

(OKE) is a fully managed, scalable, and highly available service

that can deploy containerized applications to the cloud. Unlike

most providers, Oracle offers OKE as a free managed service,

running on higher-performance, lower-cost compute shapes.

DevOps engineers can use unmodified, open source Kubernetes

for application workload portability while simplifying operations

with automatic updates and patching.

One of the key reasons we were excited to move from AWS to OCI was Oracle’s renewed focus on utilizing, and contributing to, open source projects. Our technology stack has always been powered by open source technologies like Kubernetes and Istio. This has allowed us to focus on our core product differentiators, the things that really impact our customers, rather than reinventing the wheel.”

— Jonathan Girven CTO and Cofounder, Sauce (acquired by Oracle in 2020)

OKE in action

AWINI Saudi Arabia-based startup Awini is an Uber-style application that transports goods instead

of people, using trucks. To expand its driver network, customer base, and franchise programs across new

geographies and markets, Awini needed a platform that was easy and fast to deploy but delivered control

and scalability. Awini uses OKE to add new features and enhancements such as route management, driver

safety, and fuel tracking capabilities.

“We wanted to change our solution architecture from VM-based to containers-based

architecture, as the latter provides more control and efficient operations. And Oracle Cloud

Infrastructure (OCI) provides managed Kubernetes services, which gave us the freedom to

design our solution the way we see fit and helps new members on our team to get on board

easily and fast. And Oracle Cloud did not disappoint regarding this point. We found that the

openness of the platform is very important.”

—Dr. Abdulrahman AlsultanCEO and Founder, Awini

COMPLETE INTELLIGENCE Complete Intelligence, a Houston-based startup, maximizes profitability

for a variety of global businesses by streamlining the cost and revenue planning decision process through

actionable AI forecasting. More than 15 billion data points run within the Complete Intelligence platform

daily, making hundreds of millions of calculations, across 1,400 industries. Dealing with massive data sets

while working with large enterprise customers, Complete Intelligence needed the flexibility and portability

provided by cloud-native services like Kubernetes. Oracle’s Kubernetes services have been essential as they

scale their solutions for their growing portfolio of multinational cutomers.

“For us, it has a lot to do with the scale of data and the intensity of computation.

Kubernetes is a specific and essential tool, that’s widely accepted, and we need it to get

our work done. Having access to the most widely used tools, especially as startups like

us deploy on client cloud, gives us the flexibility to spin up an instance so our enterprise

clients can have the functionality they need.”

—Tony NashCEO and Founder, Complete Intelligence

JOULICA Joulica is a real-time analytics solution for continuous customer experience optimization.

The solution harnesses data from all customer interaction channels into a unified, actionable platform. By

complementing existing CRM systems, Joulica offers personalized and consistent experiences, helping

customers adapt their servicing strategies and workflows in real-time. Joulica’s customers include Fortune

50 organizations and operators of some of the largest call centers on the planet. Oracle’s Kubernetes

services has been essential for their scale, allowing easy migration of their CI/CD system while providing

fine-grained control, automation, and security. The ease and consistency of deployments lessened the

learning curve for their developers, reduced time to deliver new features, and lowered costs by enabling

clusters to be efficiently spun up or torn down.

“With the OKE tools and APIs we found it easy to migrate our CI/CD pipeline to OKE and

achieve our goal of fully automating the CI/CD process. With a handful of steps developers

can quickly deploy a single service or a full production environment. Auto-scale and self-

healing capabilities of OKE gives us confidence that our application remains in a healthy

state, which is key to us being able to build resilient mission critical solutions. A selection of

monitoring tools and established serviceability patterns give both us and the customer the

visibility to troubleshoot and optimize production environments.”

—Tony McCormackCEO and Founder, Joulica

YELLOWDOG London-based YellowDog helps film studios render full-length feature films in the cloud,

deploying as many as 198,000 compute cores in about 30 minutes. YellowDog has been running its rendering

platform on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) since 2017. Animators can build out their scenes and sync each

motion, movement, and texture as they create them. And with YellowDog, there’s no waiting. Artists can

provision a machine and start rendering a workload—sometimes within seconds. Being able to provision

machines quickly is a top priority for YellowDog, and a key reason it runs on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

“It’s really important that the initial run-up

time is absolutely minimal. People want to be

able to burst on a massive scale. They want

to provision 200 or 300 machines instantly.

Pairing Oracle with automated provisioning

tools, such as Terraform and Ansible, makes

it much easier for us to bring up nodes very

quickly and manage these huge jobs across

the entire infrastructure.”

—Simon PonsfordChief Executive and Technology Officer

YellowDog

Provisioning infrastructure without the manual processes

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is the managing and provisioning of infrastructure through code instead of manual

processes. IaC provides a single source of truth – your declarative code – which has many advantages that ensure

you’re creating resources consistently without error while reducing time to manage and set up. Benefits include

increased speed in deployments, reduction in errors, improved consistency, and elimination of configuration drift.

Oracle Resource Manager is a fully managed service that lets you provision infrastructure resources on Oracle

Cloud infrastructure using Terraform, HashiCorp’s open-source, industry-standard IaC software tool. You can bring

in your Terraform template definition and easily create and manage your infrastructure resources, or choose from

our many available quick-start and sample solutions, using infrastructure-as-code to automate provisioning across

all OCI resources including Compute, Networking, Load Balancers, Block and Object Storage. Resource Manager

also integrates with Identity and Access Management (IAM) so you can define granular permissions for Terraform

operations. It currently has support for CLI, SDK and Console.

Oracle Resource Manager in action

“Resource Manager has some fancy features that

enhance your Terraform projects. In addition to

speed, it provides better collaboration across teams,

making work more transparent, consistent, reliable,

and continuously improved upon. Since Resource

Manager is built upon the widely adopted Terraform,

developers can be sure their scripts will work across

cloud providers. This provides portability, which

is key in today’s multicloud world, especially for

startups needing interoperability and agility.”

—Todd SharpDeveloper Advocate, Oracle Cloud

Functions to us is a requirement, our standard in terms of infrastructure. Our solution consists of field IoT sensors monitoring waste bins and tanks integrated to our cloud platform, and that is the way we bring data to our data lake. Considering that sensors are sending information frequently, but not all the time, you don’t pay for idle time of infrastructure, only when it’s used. The other great advantage is you don’t need to take care of infrastructure, the Cloud’s backend takes care of it for us.”

— Frederico Ferreira CacadorBusiness Development Director, Waste2Go

Writing code instead of monitoring infrastructure

Serverless, functions-as-a-service (FaaS) computing allows

developers to focus on writing code, instead of managing and

monitoring infrastructure like servers, clusters, networks, and

storage. Oracle Functions is a fully managed serverless cloud

service based on the open source Fn Project, allowing developers

to create applications that can be easily ported to other cloud

and on-premises environments. Oracle Cloud Functions lets

developers create, run, and scale applications without managing

any infrastructure very quickly and paying only for what they use.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Events is a managed event-routing

platform based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

(CNCF) standards. Events allow cloud users to subscribe to changes

and automatically react to them using a variety of Oracle Cloud

Infrastructure services. Oracle Functions and Events work together

to provide an event-driven serverless platform for cloud native

application development.

Utilizing Oracle Functions can reduce costs significantly while letting users leverage Oracle Cloud’s high performance infrastructure. And since Oracle Functions is based on the Fn Project, users can develop using any language and provide services on Oracle Cloud without any complicated operational tasks.”

— Kosta DjukicCloud Specialist

Oracle for Startups

Bringing autonomy to the database

Let’s be realistic. Large, high-profile companies can survive data

breaches. Startups trying to impress enterprise-level partners are

going to have a more difficult time. A data breach could signal the end

of your credibility and your business.

Oracle Autonomous Database is the world’s first cloud-based

autonomous data management system that automates

database optimization, security, backup, updates, and other

routine administrative tasks traditionally performed by database

administrators. Autonomous databases perform all of these tasks

through machine learning, not human intervention. It’s a next-

generation database that reduces operational costs by up to 90%

with a multimodel converged database and machine learning-

based automation for full lifecycle management. This allows better

operational efficiency, usage of resources, and a highly available

database with improved performance and enterprise-grade security.

Oracle Autonomous Database runs natively on Oracle Cloud

Infrastructure while providing scalability and workload-optimized

cloud services for transaction processing and data warehousing.

• Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW): ADW is primarily used

for business intelligence and analytical processing, typically

dealing with huge amounts of data that require faster, efficient

database scanning. All your reporting, dashboards, and data-

driven applications can use ADW as a primary source of data.

ADW provides elasticity, continuous query optimization, scalability,

superior performance tuning, repairing of the data warehouse,

etc. This database is also used in visualizations, machine learning

analysis, analytical models, and general database capabilities.

• Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP): ATP is built for

time-based transactional data for mission critical applications.

ATP can perform multiple administrative operations to support

applications, and it can be deployed in a few minutes and natively

supports multiple data types, including document, graph, spatial,

JSON, XML, and more.

BOTSUPPLY Copenhagen-based startup BotSupply develops conversational, multilingual AI-based

interfaces for customers in a range of industries. In addition to testing and building its cutting-edge

chatbot platform using Oracle Digital Assistant, it’s now developing an offering on Oracle Autonomous

Data Warehouse (ADW) that further extends its chatbot capabilities into the realm of deep-data analysis.

BotSupply’s chatbot solution collects lots of data that businesses want to tap for additional insights.

Using Autonomous Data Warehouse, the startup’s Insights product gives customers a new way to

derive actionable insights from emails, transcripts, and other data sources to then discover and visualize

trends hidden within that vast collection of data to clearly show user intent. For example, by analyzing

the data collected from emails, phone calls, and chatbots, Insights could reveal that 70% of a company’s

conversations with customers are about delivery status.

“We want customers to dive one level deeper and understand the why behind the conversations,

extracting new insights and making those insights actionable. But we needed a platform that

is highly secure, automated and can analyze massive amounts of data quickly for our large

enterprise customers. The Autonomous Database does that. It takes databases to a new level,

it’s the future.”— Francesco Stasi

CEO and Cofounder, BotSupply

Autonomous Database in action

THIGBE Thigbe was founded on the simple idea that it should be easy to find the best rate and manage

residential and commercial utility bills through a simple process. Thigbe offers full concierge services for

clients, takes the leg work out of finding the best supplier, and helps customers break free from the burden of

managing utility purchasing processes. The company applies data management to industries that everyone

needs but few understand. They’ve also built charitable giving into the company structure, by giving one-third

of what customers pay them to local charities. To manage their complex data streams seamlessly, Thigbe

turned to Oracle’s Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) to run the core infrastructure of their business,

noting ATP’s scalability, connectivity, and security.

“For a startup like us it has been a great relief to not have to worry about managing our own

database server and software. With our system in the cloud, we were able to seamlessly adapt

to the challenges of the pandemic and continue to serve our customers and to grow. With

Oracle’s autonomous services, we have the confidence and capability to move ahead with

data intensive projects for customers, knowing the infrastructure will be there to meet the load

when needed. We’ve saved at least 10 man-hours per month from our developer group, and

I’m probably dramatically under-estimating that time.” — Mike Brasovan

President and Founder, Thigbe

OMNIINDEX Developed with 13 patents and AI throughout, OmniIndex takes unstructured data and

messages and puts them into a format that enables them to be analyzed. Currently, most analytics

software only works on traditional ERP and CRM systems, which only account for 20% of data.

OmniIndex enables analytics on the other 80% and creates a coherent index for business intelligence

analytics, compliance, and cost containment information. To process massive amounts of unstructured

data quickly, efficiently and securely, OmniIndex turned to Oracle’s Autonomous Transaction Processing

(ATP) and Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW), using ATP for indexing of desktops, cloud stores, email, etc.

ADW takes care of the analytics processing.

“Speed is so important for us—deployment and performance. We needed a database that

can handle massive workloads fast and needs little intervention. For the amount of data that

we’re putting on, we have to ensure the analytics aren’t hanging around, and data scientists

aren’t waiting for results. You just spin up an instance and get on with what you do best, which

is your application. It’s incredibly easy to get up and running, taking about three minutes. It’s

super fast. And it’s very, very important to us.”

— Simon BainCEO and Founder, OmniIndex

Bringing flexibility to data science

Effective machine learning models are the foundation of successful

data science projects, but the volume and variety of data facing

businesses can be overwhelming. A comprehensive enterprise-grade

data science platform can greatly increase the productivity of

individual data scientists by automating their entire workflow and

providing strong collaboration tools to help ensure that data science

projects deliver real value to businesses.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science is data source agnostic

and gives data scientists flexible tools to build, manage, deploy, and

monitor machine learning models. Data scientists use machine

learning algorithms to extract knowledge and insights from a

given data set. These insights can be used by applications and

business analytics systems to drive decision-making. Almost every

organization and every function will leverage machine learning in

some format to advance and optimize their business functions.

AGROSCOUT AgroScout is an AI-based agritech

startup focused on the early detection of disease and pest in

field crops by giving farmers drone-enabled AI technology to

spot problems earlier. Machine learning algorithms analyze

collected image data and tell farmers when and where to

spray. By knowing which pests and diseases to treat, growers

can save money, improve yields, and feed more people.

AgroScout migrated to Oracle Cloud from AWS, and their

performance on OCI has increased by orders of magnitude.

The speed of downloading thousands of pictures of crops

from fields and analyzing has been reduced from several

minutes to only a few seconds.

Oracle Data Science Platform in action

We were privileged to be one of the first users of the Data Science Platform and it’s where we’ve been doing all the deep learning. New horizons have opened up with the recent addition of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science that improves our ability to collaboratively build, train and deploy machine learning models. This addition has reduced costs, increased efficiency and has helped us increase our global footprint faster.”

— Simcha ShoreCEO and Founder

AgroScout

Unleashing low-code development

Low-code and no-code development is growing in popularity as

businesses desire to make it easier for business users to develop

apps faster with less coding expertise. Oracle APEX is a managed cloud

service that allows developers and novices to build data-driven enterprise

applications quickly and easily, running against Oracle Autonomous

Database as a serverless service. A low-code development platform,

Oracle APEX is a visual drag-and-drop development environment

intended for business users, not professional programmers, although

it can make experienced programmers more productive. A recent

study from Pique Solutions showed that developers could build

enterprise applications 38x faster with the Oracle APEX service without

having to learn complex, full-stack technologies.

IDENTV IDenTV provides advanced video analytics

based on AI capabilities powered by computer vision,

automated speech recognition, and textual semantic

classifiers. IDenTV’s suite of more than 30 AI processing

engines—including computer vision, automated speech

recognition, machine translation, and natural language

processing — provide automation, optimization, and big

data analytics for deep understanding and data-driven

decision-making that had been unattainable in the past.

IDenTV believes that Oracle’s Data Science product, in

conjunction with Autonomous Database, gives them a

unique edge to be competitive and unique in the market.

With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science, we are able to deliver business value faster than ever before. Our data science teams can now seamlessly access data without worrying about the complexities of data locations or access mechanisms. While using open-source capabilities like TensorFlow, Keras, and Jupyter notebooks embedded within the environment, we can streamline our model training and deployment tasks resulting in tremendous cost savings and faster results.”

— Amro ShihadahCOO and Founder

IDenTV

A variety of modern tools, like Oracle’s APEX, makes Oracle a valuable service provider. I would highly recommend Oracles system because of the service and because of the tools they provide that allow you to very quickly take your ideas from concept to reality. APEX is a game changer!”

— Mike BrasovanPresident and Founder

Thigbe

Oracle APEX allows citizen developers, business analysts, and professional developers to rapidly create and deploy complete, responsive, data-driven applications with minimal effort. Offering a wide-range of cloud services, including low-code solutions, it provides businesses of all sizes versatility, flexibility, and scale in building and deploying applications quickly and easily.”

— Kosta DjukicCloud Specialist, Oracle for Startups

Unlocking trust and transparency with blockchain

Although blockchain rose to prominence alongside cryptocurrency,

there are abundant applications beyond Bitcoin. Blockchain is behind

new solutions for sustainability, supply chains, food certification, and

other complex problems that require transparency and immutability.

When what’s required is a secure collaboration network across

multiple entities, blockchain brings everyone together in real time to

ensure business trust.

Oracle Cloud Blockchain platform is a preassembled enterprise-grade

solution for building blockchain networks. It’s built on top of The

Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric, and it has all the underlying

infrastructure dependencies, contains lifecycle management, event

services, identity management and REST proxy, and a number of

operations and monitoring tools.

Oracle provides end-to-end visibility of multi-entity networks,

establishing trust between participating partners and reducing

development and deployment time. The Oracle Blockchain Platform

Cloud Service also connects well with Oracle Autonomous Database,

which helps businesses save money and time as they scale their

database needs up or down.

RETRACED Award-winning German startup retraced is

using Oracle Blockchain Platform Cloud Service to optimize

sustainability in fashion supply chains. Their supply chain

management tool helps fashion brands map and verify

their sustainability data includes certifying details about raw

materials, textile manufacturers, fabric dyers, designers,

craftspeople, factories, and seamsters. A QR code is built

automatically as the information is gathered. Scanning the

code, brands receive supply chain data they can analyze,

while consumers can check for ethical sourcing and

sustainability. The platform’s dynamic scalability is critical

because of the seasonality of the apparel market.

Oracle Blockchain In action

The dynamic scaling is extremely important for us, because we can allow running full throttle massive engines when we need them but cut costs when they are not required. There are just so many products in the market that aren’t ready to use, and Oracle’s was. It was comparably easy to set up and work with because of all the pre-installments.”

— Peter MerkertCofounder

retraced

Email: OracleStartup_WW@oracle.comTwitter: @OracleStartupFacebook: @OracleStartupsBlog: blogs.oracle.com/startup

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CIRCULOR Circulor’s mission is traceability of materials

in industrial supply chains including the automotive

industry. Oracle for Startups helped introduce Circulor

to a major automotive customer, who is now using the

platform to track supply chains of critical minerals used in

electric cars. The Circulor platform tags, tracks, and traces

conflict minerals from the local mine to the manufacturers.

Oracle’s pre-assembled blockchain enabled Circulor to

focus on their specialty—minerals tracking—without

spending time and effort building hardened blockchain

infrastructure. The startup found it substantially sped up

time to market while providing confidence to end-users.

We can transparently record and share the source of all raw materials using distributed ledger, which prevents unethically sourced minerals from passing through the supply chain. This will also cut costs for miners who currently shoulder this compliance cost in our industry. If you are trying to sell an enterprise-class solution, you need to be able to demonstrate that it is secure and scalable. Having a partner like Oracle means I don’t have to spend too much time explaining that it is secure and scalable.”

— Douglas Johnson-PoensgenCEO, Circulor

Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | 070921