Ties Mol (20) and Sam Andringa (20) are still studying, but are also entrepreneurs. With FloraSpark, they want to give ornamental horticulture companies something that until now was mostly reserved for large companies: making better decisions with their own data and artificial intelligence. Ornamental horticulture companies record enormous amounts of data every day, but it is rarely put to good use. “Entrepreneurs in this sector know exactly what they sell, but it takes them hours to get real insight from it,” says Ties. “We want to bring that down to a single question.”

FloraSpark retrieves business data automatically and organizes it. In the FloraSpark Suite, users ask the AI assistant Spark AI questions about their own business in plain language and get an immediate answer. The suite also offers dashboards, reports and current Royal FloraHolland auction prices. Through an API, companies can connect the organized data to their own software or analyses. Each company sees only its own data, and access can be set per employee.

The platform is built to scale: a new customer goes live one day after approving the quote. The founders build new modules based on feedback from the sector. Ties studies Econometrics and Data Science at the University of Amsterdam, Sam studies Business Administration at the Vrije Universiteit. Together, they run SparkBI, a data and AI agency for small and medium-sized businesses, where they got to know ornamental horticulture. “In practice, we saw how much time goes into looking up simple figures,” says Sam. “Then we thought: we can solve this for the entire sector.”