In October, ERA Global (https://www.eranycglobal.com) welcomed the Japanese startup participants of the JETRO X-HUB Accelerator Program to its New York City offices. The in-person program was one phase of the three-part B2B Sales Accelerator Program, in partnership with JETRO Tokyo Headquarters and New York Offices, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. 

Throughout the week, the teams participated in B2B Sales workshops and pitch practice sessions, refined their pitches with ERA Pitch Coach Pauline Chiou, and met with ERA Global mentors. The teams had the opportunity to expand their network at the first Welcome Reception at JETRO NY and a Happy Hour with ERA Founders at the ERA office. 

In between the program workshops and external meetings with customers, the participants had the chance to meet key players in the NYC tech ecosystem. Sherry-Li Frucher, Head of SAP.iO, hosted the startups at the Hudson Yards offices to share more about the SAP.iO Foundry accelerator programs around the world. They also met with Sander Dolder, Senior Vice President of Industry Initiatives at New York City Economic Development Corporation to learn more about the priorities and initiatives of the NYC EDC. To conclude the week, the teams visited Google at Pier 57 with Ladan Mohamed, Rama Afullo, and Jinqing Li. During the visit, the teams learned about the Google Cloud for Startups program and pitched their ventures to the Google team. 

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On the penultimate evening of the week, ERA Global featured each team in the Sales Pitch Showcase, where all teams presented their products to a group of potential customers and partners. A networking session followed the event, and the founders were able to make valuable connections within the ERA network. 

Currently, all of the teams are in the “post-program phase,” which consists of three monthly group calls and three one-on-one meetings with the Global team to track and report on their KPIs and goals for this program. As each of the teams move forward with their US and global expansion plans, the ERA Global team is committed to support their acceleration and growth in the US market. 

Read more about the participating teams below:

Closer is an AI-enabled high-speed, bulk picking, packing, and palletizing food automation system. The system can be easily implemented without major modifications to existing lines and can handle multiple product types by using AI image processing and robot control.

FingerVision Inc. develops tactile sensors for robot manipulation. The tactile sensors are vision-based sensors. The sensors are multimodal, easy to manufacture, physically robust, and cheap. 

Gigalogy is a Saas solution for e-commerce businesses, using AI and LLMs to enhance product discovery, user engagement, revenue growth, and user loyalty. 

Palan provides an easy AR CMS Saas for anyone create professional WebAR, mobile AR experiences without any code. 

Pretia is a cloud platform that allows manufacturers and construction companies to develop AR solutions.

Poetics AI’s product, JamRoll is an AI Saas revenue intelligence, which automatically records, transcribes, and analyzes all sales communication. 

Qlay is an LLM-powered consumer research tool for CPG product developers and marketers. Qlay extracts consumer sentiments from online reviews and social media feeds and visualizes them on a dashboard. 

Spider Labs’ product Spider AF provides anti-ad fraud solutions from in-app to web advertising for advertisers, ad networks, agencies, and publishers. Spider AF offers real-time blocking for web advertising and detection for in-app advertising. 

Unerry utilizes GPS and beacon technology to collect 40B+ data entries and 150M IDs from smartphone apps a month. Unerry’s AI analyzes big data on indoor and outdoor human flow obtained from smartphone GPS and beacon technology. 

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