Wolfville, Nova Scotia's Singolar partners with SAP through San Francisco accelerator

Wolfville, Nova Scotia-based Singolar has been admitted into SAP’s start-up program, after participating in the Onboarding/Business-to-Business component of the Canadian federal government-sponsored Canadian Technology Accelerator (CTA) program in San Francisco this past February.
Singolar is working towards its first round of funding, targeted between $1 million and $1.5 million, and had two clients going in to the CTA program before meeting representatives from German multinational enterprise software company SAP.
Wolfville, while not renowned as a technology hub, is home to Acadia University, where Singolar CEO Suman Kalyan was recruited by Dr. Danny Silver of the Acadia Institute for Data Analytics in 2013, after an 18 year career as a consultant to a wide variety of technology companies around the world.
The relationship with SAP developed after an initial series of match-making information sessions, after which an option to arrange for a second meeting was initiated by SAP.
The Singolar platform is a B2C solution designed to track the customer experience across a variety of touchpoints in interactions with companies, via call centres, social media, or the company website, while monitoring to find ways that companies can improve their interactions with customers.
This sort of advanced business intelligence, which Kalyan refers to as a “conversational engine”, is meant to enable smarter strategic business decisions when it comes to customer relationships, enhancing loyalty, reducing the cost of customer acquisition, increasing lifetime customer value, and reducing costs overall.
“Suman and his team at Singolar offer a unique blend of technical and business knowledge and experience in the areas of data analytics and business intelligence,” says Dr. Silver. “They understand how to capture, analyze and extract business insights from customer data that has been acquired from multiple channels of interaction with a company. I and one of my graduate students have been fortunate to work with Suman on a novel machine learning project.  Having completed his education, that student is now working full time with Singolar in Wolfville on predictive and prescriptive analytics.”
Soon after his experience at the Institute for Data Analytics, Singolar took up residence at the nearby Rural Innovation Centre.
Singolar’s participation in SAP’s start-up program means that it will work on implementing its software for SAP clients over the next year.
One of Singolar’s clients, Azorus Inc., is piloting an enhanced customer relationship management (CRM) recruitment tool with the University of Warwick and the University of Leicester in the U.K., and Ryerson University in Toronto.
Singolar was one of 12 Canadian companies selected to participate in the CTA cohort at RocketSpace Inc. this past February, and the only company from the Maritimes.
The CTA also runs programs in Boston and New York, giving Canadian entrepreneurs access to American markets, as well as networking opportunities with companies who, as in the case of SAP and Singolar, may eventually become clients.
Singolar now has seven employees, including a co-founder based in Denver, Colorado, as well as two co-op students at Acadia University in Wolfville.