At Vivatech, LVMH awards its innovation prizes to Kahoona, Genesis, and OMI

Fashion Network

a day ago

At the Vivatech trade show in Paris, French luxury giant LVMH celebrated the innovative companies that collaborate with its houses. For its ninth edition, the event awarded three prizes to some 15 innovative companies. A jury made up of executives from various departments within the luxury goods group selected the winners. After the Group's Deputy Managing Director Stéphane Bianchi celebrated LVMH's approach to innovation, extolling a vision in which people come first, the start-ups were highlighted and congratulated by Antoine Arnault, the Group's Communications Director, who came to stand in for his father Bernard Arnault, who was absent to "meet diplomatic obligations".
New York-based Kahoona has been awarded the Best Business Prize. The company, founded three years ago, has been working for nine months with Dior, which uses its solution on its e-commerce site.
Kahoona highlights its ability to perform real-time predictive segmentation of site visitor profiles. "When a customer enters a store, the sales assistant is able to analyze their behavior and posture, so as to best meet their needs. We've created a digital body language analysis," explains Gal Rapoport, co-founder of the 27-strong start-up, who previously headed the team in charge of personalization topics for Amazon 's Alexa solutions. "We analyze the behaviors of the anonymous Internet user, where they click on their smartphone, the products they zoom in on, to define their profile."
The solution seems to be convincing the luxury giant: houses other than Dior will soon be deploying this solution to better bring targeted offers in real time to Internet users who are not yet customers. Kahoona, which is developing its offering for players in the fashion and beauty sectors, as well as the banking and automotive industries, is preparing a round of financing that should be finalized in the second half of the year.
Genesis, which won the Best Impact Prize, is also moving towards a new round of financing, having raised nearly 3 million euros last year.
The Paris-based company, co-founded by Quentin Sannié and Adrienne de Malleray, works with Moët Hennessy and various LVMH Group wine houses. Its data-driven digital platform measures, monitors, and improves soil health. Its solution can be applied to a range of crops, from cotton fields to livestock breeding.
"We are working with LVMH on beet crops, wool, and flowers. The vision behind Genesis is that, while it is currently possible to source raw materials, we are experiencing a decline in the accessibility of these materials and in soil quality. The first phase is to improve our knowledge of soil quality, and then propose best practices for soil maintenance and protection," explains the co-founder of the twenty-strong company. The aim is to create a common language to raise awareness among decision-makers in major groups. To make the connection between agricultural constraints and the issues at stake, because these are worlds that don't speak the same language."
On the executive committees of luxury and beauty companies, the rising cost of raw materials is becoming an increasingly critical constraint. As a result, interest is growing. "If we can get finance on board, we'll have won," says Adrienne de Malleray.
The third prize-winner to take to the main stage of Europe's leading tech event, to receive the golden Most Promising Prize trophy produced by the American brand Tiffany, is French start-up OMI. The company, founded five years ago by brothers Hugo and Paul Borensztein, deployed its virtual photo studio solution for Guerlain, enabling brands to deploy product images on a variety of print and digital media.
The company, which raised 13 million euros last year and opened a New York office, has enhanced its solutions with videos exploited by brands on social networks.
As well as showcasing the prizes, the various solutions deployed by the start-ups were on display in the very central "LVMH Dreamscape" pavilion. Eleven examples of innovation integration were presented in a playful, easy-to-understand manner. With a special mention for Sephora 's pinball machine, an example of original, physical gamification (which has a digital twin) imagined with teams from start-up Cosmic Shelter.
Beyond the fun, Anca Marola, Sephora's Director of Digital, points out that the online initiative, linked to a lipstick launch, resulted in twice the conversion rate. The perfect example of LVMH's quest for efficiency in innovation.