SAP CEO Bill McDermott announced €2 billion investments in France over the next five years.
SAP’s second SAP.iO Foundry in Europe will provide mentorship, technology and access to more than 50 start-ups. SAP.iO Fund will make investments in French startups in the seed or Series A round.
SAP will also be spending €150 million in research and development (R&D) annually over the next five years.
SAP also announced the acquisition of Recast.AI, a leading start-up in France, to accelerate development of SAP Leonardo Machine Learning capabilities. The business software major did not disclose the financial details.
The latest initiatives will assist SAP to accelerate the company’s growth in the cloud and create a technology community focused on machine learning (ML), blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT) and software as a service (SaaS).
“We see immense potential in the entrepreneurial spirit of France to disrupt business models, create modern jobs and unleash exciting new opportunities that help the world run better,” said Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP.
The acquisition of Recast.AI will help SAP enhance the natural language processing capabilities in SAP solutions.
SAP aims to simplify business interactions and processes by employing conversational user experience technology. SAP intends to use the CoPilot digital assistant, a Web application, and an in-house platform to build conversational applications, across a wide breadth of its portfolio.
Recast.AI, located at the incubator Station F, serves international customers in France, including large banks and insurance and tech companies. Recast.AI provides a modern ML-based technical architecture and owns proprietary algorithms that understand natural language.
