Venture Leader Technology Sasha Schriber's Startup Nanos Symplifiying Online Marketing Heading to Silicon Valley

10.02.2020 11:46, Guillaume Tinsel

Digital advertising can and should be a superpower for businesses, transforming how they market themselves, enabling them to reach more customers, more easily, more often, ultimately creating more revenue. But right now, only big businesses, with specialist marketing functions, are taking advantage of this transformation. Based in Zurich, Nanos is a Swiss tech company of machine learning technologists, programmers, and marketing experts, as well as content makers and shakers delivering a very smart app with integrated machine learning technology to simplify online marketing. Nanos' founder and CEO Sacha Schriber is now part of the Swiss National Startup Team and will travel with the Venture Leaders Technology to Silicon Valley in March. We interviewed her about Nanos' innovation and her expectations on the Venture Leaders Technology roadshow.

How is NANOS changing your industry?
Irrelevant or non-existent marketing is the reason why more than 50% of small businesses (SMBs are 99.9% of all businesses in the US, with GDP contribution above 44%) fail. Marketing is not a science, it's highly experimental and not everyone can afford to hire a marketing agency and have big budgets for continuous A/B testing until the perfect go-to-market formula is found.
Additionally, the global tendency of reshuffling marketing budget from offline to online poses a high entry barrier into online marketing, which means a high-entry barrier to succeed as a business. Nanos lowers the entry barrier into online marketing, by having built a machine learning technology that automatically creates, places and continuously optimizes online advertisements, with minimal input from a non-expert user.
The patented technology is wrapped in a simple and intuitive interface so now anyone without marketing, design or technical knowledge can be visible online even without a website within 10 minutes, starting from as little as $5.
 
How important is it to be in Silicon Valley?
Many are choosing Silicon Valley specifically as the first entry point into the country. Ava and Beekeeper, the two examples of successful Swiss startups, that exclusively opened their first sales offices in San Francisco. A coincidence? Rather a rule to play by. The US is not cheap to start with, as cost per client acquisition and sales reps’ salaries are way higher compared to, for instance, LATAM. But the homogeneity of the language (it's just English), general pro-business and sales-oriented attitude and openness to new technologies do position Silicon Valley as a very attractive early adopters’ market to start with.
 
What do you hope to achieve from the Venture Leaders Technology 2020 roadshow?
Switzerland stands for deep tech, thanks to the two scientific titans – ETH and EPFL. The number of patents per capita is the highest in Europe and 6th in the world, after the USA and Israel, among others. However, there is still an opportunity to grow when it comes to venture funding for tech startups aiming at raising "Above the Seeds". 
Thus, besides growing the network for prospective investors for the next round of investment and securing first-hand contacts for strategic distribution partnerships and sales offices on the West Coast, I am very keen on being part of the Venture Leaders and the Swiss National Startup Team. I’m also excited to raise overall awareness about the Swiss tech ecosystem among far-fetched Silicon Valley investors. It can also be seen as a two-way street: during the upcoming trip to the Silicon Valley, I am hoping to meet aspiring US entrepreneurs and their foundries who shall also become aware of the benefits Switzerland provides as a base country for their next R&D spin-off (access to tech talent, easy seed funding, affordable legal services, just to name a few), bringing their business and network to Switzerland in return. 

Meet Sasha at the Startup Champions event at ETH to discover more about NANOS.