Trade & Transport Impact

A common problem among our corporate partners is breaking away from legacy business lines to test new, more profitable business models, products, and services. Startups can be an effective medium for exploring new revenue streams for a business in its transition to a new way of doing business, for instance, the transition to green energy production and transmission. 

We provide the mechanism for using early-stage market insights to determine what to build, why, and how, along with startup and corporate deal flows. This perspective takes a bottom-up approach based on using early signals of innovation to determine areas of new revenue in the coming years for enterprises who wish to take action through a first-mover position. This is a key method to unlocking new competitive advantages.

Most engagements established with a corporate partner has a monetary value attached, whether this is through establishing a proof of concept pilot (3-6 months), a vendor relationship to procure services/products, or even for an investment/acquisition. If your solution is or could be just what a corporate partner needs, revenue growth is on the horizon. 

Startup partners gain access to multiple corporate partners in one go. This means that there's potential (if selected) for multiple revenue-generating engagements at the same time. Successful initial collaborations, such as pilot projects, often lead to further collaborations outside of the program, which can fuel further revenue growth.

Exploring new solutions, new markets, or new applications will enable new ways for a startup to scale and subsequently grow revenues. Even if a collaboration ends up not being fruitful, participating in our program will likely lead to an improved understanding of the perspectives and use cases of your products or services to boost your internal development.

Through a deep understanding of the market, emerging business models and technology, along with our corporate partners' organisation, we hold a strong position for identifying and prioritising new business opportunities. This knowledge is fully accessible to you, and we share only the most relevant insights. 

We tap into existing problems as a base for orchestration. We orchestrate value between partners through problem area working groups to go deep and arrive at specific solo or joint solutions. This helps cross-disciplinary discovery and finding new avenues for innovations. 

Utilise our industry-recognised innovation platform for developing and scaling solutions. Our tested and proven framework ensures timely and impactful results and is a great vehicle of exploration for both your company and the startups involved. 

We provide a unique environment to experiment, test and validate business concepts with the supporting capability to execute in building. This ensures a smooth, agile and risk-free process for you and your company, as well as a solid foundation for future collaborations. 

The majority of startup partners who enter the program have industry-agnostic technology yet may not have experience within a certain sector, e.g. maritime. We have the industry expertise to facilitate successful application in a supply chain context and to take your company to the next level. 

Through the Trade & Transport Impact program, you can test your solutions in new use cases, new sectors, and for new customer profiles, which in turn will provide you with a range of new, sometimes unforeseen, business opportunities. Startups are often challenged in everything from technology and scope to implementation and scale of their solutions, strengthening them for future funding searches. 

We work alongside you as a startup partner and with our corporate partners to help craft the best possible use case to solve the challenge at hand. This has often helped startups see their solution in a new light and how it can be applicable to entirely new segments. The combined efforts of both parties often open several new doors for innovation.

Utilising an open innovation approach allows you to launch new products and scalable innovations in less than 12 months at a fraction of the cost it would otherwise require. At the same time, you have less risk by not investing heavily in internal resources. 

Our digital-first approach and industry expertise enable us to ensure global reach in crowdsourcing relevant, innovative solutions to partner problems, reducing the cost to find solutions and the time to value for implementing them. 

Running internal programs dedicated to, for instance, open innovation is a demanding OPEX and time investment. Through Rainmaking, those financial and time resources are substantially reduced whilst enabling you to get started immediately.

We solve problems by partnering corporates and startups. A common problem is high expenditure in a business's operations that can be reduced through more efficient, digital solutions. Typically, engagements in this scenario see a % of cost reduced by leveraging external startup technology, which also reduces time to market.

One of the largest risks to a startup in the wild is running out of financing that, combined with limited customer demand, can be disastrous. Startup partners who are selected for our program gain exposure to corporate partners who provide both financing and demand. Each component provides security to early-stage companies to cover costs, grow, and scale.

The startups selected by Rainmaking as possible solutions to industry problems do not need to pay to play. The cost of entry is free beyond holding a high-quality solution that may be attractive to a corporate engagement. This ensures a level playing field regardless of funding stages, which reinforces focus on the best solution.

Engaging in the Trade & Transport Impact program will enable your startup to skip tedious and costly marketing spend and internal resources used in outreach efforts. Our network ensures un-gated, direct, 1:1 access with top-level decision-makers in relevant enterprise companies in your industry.

We offer codified insights on market signals, emerging technology, proven business models, regulatory pressure, customer needs and priorities and more. In addition, we constantly monitor a wealth of supply chain, logistics and tech startups that we can match and tailor to your specific set of challenges. 

We are focused on delivering actionable and sharable expert insights on both organisational and market-related challenges, solutions as well as best-practice methodology. We dive deep into the specific challenges you face and force ourselves to become experts in that problem area while applying and developing our proven framework and methodology to find paths to solving that problem. 

We open the doors to a network of industry leaders, academic experts, founders, government specialists, and high-growth startups to bring that collective knowledge, conveyed through a range of means such as events, panels, 1:1 introductions and more. This new network can be leveraged long after any collaboration has ended, making it a valuable resource to you and your company. 

You can improve alignment and upskill internal stakeholders by establishing a decentralised program team for each partnership. This team provides continuous input to ensure real challenges are being verified and solved, startups are being engaged, and faster decisions are made on how to move forward with the collaborations. Over multiple cycles of our programs, partners and their stakeholders will be attuned to the process of corporate-startup engagement.

We help entrepreneurs, and startups like yours navigate the corporate world and derive significant growth from corporate partnerships, regardless of the funding stage you're at. This could be leveraged further by obtaining venture studio capability.

We offer startups and their founding team insights into what corporates need, how they approach conversations, hard requirements, good governance and more. All of this can be extremely useful learnings for an early-stage company looking to land its first corporate engagements or to build on existing partnerships.

Collaborating with corporate partners enable startups to see their solutions from new perspectives, uncover new applications or engaging new markets, all of which helps build a deeper understanding of future scaling of the company.