EU Datathon 2022 teams behind the apps: meet Hermix
Understanding, predicting and recommending in the B2G market
‘The teams behind the apps’ is a series of videos made by the EU Datathon finalists. Get to know this year’s teams and their apps over a set of 12 episodes, twice weekly, in the run-up to the competition finals. On 20 October, the teams will pitch their apps to a jury that will select the winners. An audience will also be able to support their favourite team through the Public Choice Award vote. Register now to follow the finals online!
Hermix relies on big data analytics and artificial intelligence and has been built as a tool for strategic marketing analysis of the business-to-government (B2G) market. The team behind the app – Stefan Morcov and Bogdan Costea – joined us for a short interview in which we talked about the app, the idea that led to its creation and why they decided to participate in the EU Datathon.
How’s it going with the app? What’s the current status?
Hermix was launched into production on 1 October 2022. We already have a customer base for it, enrolled business users and are working on a pipeline of projects – it is now a minimum viable product! The interest in Hermix was amazing, in spite of us not really having even started to promote it; we just posted a message on LinkedIn and then people started calling.
We are now a dedicated team of 5, plus some part-time collaborators and have received incredible support from our friends. People were enthusiastic about our app, and everybody supported us with feedback, ideas, design and so on. We hope to pay them back one day. In the meantime, thank you guys – we really owe you!
How did you come up with the idea for this app?
We had been working for 20 years in public sector tendering, both in Europe and beyond. We had won a ton of tenders and had delivered a bunch of great IT projects, worth millions.
A few months before the EU Datathon, Stefan realised that everything in public procurement was still being done manually: monitoring, analysis and bids. Although the business-to-customer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) markets were already highly automated: (CRMs, BIs, Google Analytics, LinkedIn Insights), the B2G market was still in its infancy. There was no public sector analytics software and no B2G intelligence or segmentation. That’s when Bogdan said: ‘if you give me enough data, I will transform it into gold.’
A huge amount of big open data was already available to us through Tenders Electronic Daily, Cordis, Financial Transparency System, etc. and we knew how to use it. In fact, we had to design the B2G theoretical framework from scratch, with dedicated tools such as governmentgraphics segmentation and affinity mapping.
We are very proud of what we have achieved so far and super enthusiastic about the future.
Why did you decide to take part in the EU Datathon?
We had already been working on Hermix for a few months and when we saw this year’s Datathon topics, we became incredibly excited – the EU Datathon was the perfect challenge. Although we started out as a team of 2, after seeing that there was an interest, we scaled up to 5 and are still growing.
The key value of Hermix lies in its ability to make sense of public sector data. Hermix is much more than just processing contract notices and feeding them forward to end users – that’s already being done everywhere, including TED. We instead clean up and normalise data using our market know-how to design advanced, actionable insights and infographics, transforming public sector data into intelligence and knowledge.
To find out more about Hermix, watch this 1-minute video.
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