These 5 startups came on top in the first Slingshot@Switch competition

Founder and CEO of Sophie’s Kitchen Eugene Wang (L) receives the grand prize from Singapore Minister for Trade and Industry, S Iswaran. Photo credit: Spring Singapore.

Entrepreneurship agency Spring Singapore today announced the winners of the Slingshot@Switch startup competition, taking place during the Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology.

This year’s competition attracted more than 900 applications from over 30 countries.

The top startup won a US$149,000 prize, while the other four winners got US$74,000 each. All the prizes are grants from the Startup SG program, Spring’s unified startup support scheme, and include 12 months of free working space at JTC Launchpad, plus potential additional funding from a judging panel of investors including B Capital Group, Golden Gate Ventures, KK Fund, Mistletoe, and more.

These are the startups that rose to the top out of 30 finalists:

Grand prize winner

Sophie’s Kitchen

Sophie’s Kitchen makes plant-based seafood alternatives using its own patent-pending technology. The US-based startup encourages healthier diets and targets the rising market of plant-based foods, which is worth US$5 billion in the US alone. Its products are currently available in the US, Canada, and France, but the company hopes to market them globally soon.

Runners-up

Blitab Technology

Austria-based Blitab has built a tablet aimed at blind and visually impaired people. The device allows Braille reading and writing, as well as document conversion. Smart dots the company calls “tixels” rise from its surface to simulate Braille writing.

LPixel

LPixel does image analysis for the medical, pharmaceutical, and agricultural sectors. A spin-off from the University of Tokyo, the company works with artificial intelligence to power products like medical diagnosis software for cancer, in collaboration with Japan’s National Cancer Center.

Lucence Diagnostics

Lucence also works on the field of cancer diagnostics. The Singapore-based startup says it combines material design and software analytics to enable proprietary blood testing at its own lab, specializing in forms of cancer that are more frequent in Asia.

Smart Animal Husbandry Care