6 top-notch startups strut their stuff at Startmeup Hong Kong

Trophy holders from left to right: Cesar Harada (ScoutBots), Jock Percy (Perseus), and Zvi Schreiber (Freightos)

Growth-stage startups from around the world faced off in a final pitch competition as part of Hong Kong’s annual StartmeupHK Venture Programme last night. 12 were selected out of 550 entries, and the finale saw the top six pitch to a panel of experts and investors.

Three winners were crowned, two of them homegrown startups from Hong Kong.

Freightos

This startup hailing from Hong Kong turns a very complex and slow process into a simple and instant task. The startup allows anyone to get a price quote for international shipping of just about anything. Aimed at companies that ship goods around the world in bulk, it bundles together sea transport, trucking, delivery, handling, and insurance. Because this market is so fragmented, founder Dr. Zvi Schreiber says the process usually takes up to a week to get a quote, but Freightos claims the best price can be found in seconds.

ScoutBots

ScoutBots, another Hong Kong native, makes autonomous sailboats with shape-shifting hulls. The entire boat’s structure actually bends so that it can catch wind from two different angles. The “proteis” range in size from one meter to a few meters long, and can be used for sea exploration, cleanup, and even transport. As a social enterprise, ScoutBots is completely open source. Founder Cesar Harada says the bendy drone boats are a far cheaper option than sending out full-sized manned boats for gathering data.

Perseus Telecom

Perseus is a private network provider for banks, exchanges, companies, and funds that participate in the stock market. The New York-based startup focuses on making high-speed trades and “shrink-wrapping” much of the trading process into a single platform, which companies can save money by using rather than building their own financial clouds. Perseus is already active in 68 markets around the world and has never raised funds, but is considering taking investment to accelerate into the remaining 27 stock markets.

The six startups presenting at the grand finale all looked promising and worth investing in, which is frankly rare for these types of pitch competitions. So it would be a shame not to at least mention the other three:

• ConnexionsAsia (Singapore) – an employee benefits and healthcare big data broker for employees to personalize their health insurance and wellness plans. (Check out the founder’s amazing story here.)
• Fast Forward Imaging (Germany) – a sort of advanced product photo booth that shoots products from dozens of angles and uses an advanced cropping algorithm to make perfect product images with transparent backgrounds for use in sales and marketing.
• n-Join (Israel) – a “plug-and-play box” that jacks directly into a factory’s production line and analyzes how to maximize output and work more efficiently using big data and machine learning.

See: 5 arguments for foreign startups in China to register in Hong Kong