The winners of Startup Arena Pitch Battle

Add 10 innovative startups, three renowned investors, and over 600 tech enthusiasts, and what do you get? The grand finals of Tech in Asia’s Startup Arena Pitch Battle 2020, which was held from October 21 to 22.

Audiences from around the world tuned in to watch this competition live, including viewers from Sequoia Capital, Skystar Capital, Alpha JWC Ventures, Huawei, Traveloka, Shopee, and many more.

If you haven’t been keeping up, here’s a quick recap.

This year’s Startup Arena Pitch Battle is our biggest one yet, and Tech in Asia partnered with Surge, Sequoia Capital India’s rapid scale-up program, to shine a spotlight on Southeast Asia’s innovative startups in Southeast Asia. The competition had four semifinal rounds that concluded in a finale that was held during the Tech in Asia Conference Virtual 2020 in October.

Bring on the finalists

Each seminfinal round focused on a particular market: Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the rest of Southeast Asia. After four grueling days, 10 startups passed our judges’ scrutiny:

• Assemblr
• PropertiLord
• Ezay
• Papaya Insurtech
• Job2Go
• ZumVet
• Bot Ban Hang
• OctiFi
• Curlec
• Dropezy

The chosen 10 then advanced to the final round, where they pitched to our three investor-judges: Rajan Anandan (managing director, Sequoia Capital and Surge), Willson Cuaca (co-founder and managing partner, East Ventures), and Kelvin Teo (co-founder and group CEO, Funding Societies/Modalku Group).

During the two-night finale, we asked the audience to vote for their favorite startup. Assemblr was their first choice, followed closely by ZumVet.

But did the judges feel the same way? Let’s find out.

Congratulations, winners!

First place: Papaya Insurtech from Vietnam

Judges’ thoughts: They agreed that the digital health insurance platform was trying to address a major, longstanding problem. As one of the judges put it, “The more friction there is in an industry, the more technology can be brought in to solve it.” Papaya also has a viable approach and generates good revenue – two good indicators of its ability to provide solutions. For more information about this winning startup, you can read our recent profile piece.

Second place: ZumVet from Singapore

Judges’ thoughts: The pet healthcare platform has a clear value proposition and is tackling a real problem in the market. ZumVet faces a lower executive risk because it has fewer regulations to deal with, but its challenge is the scalability of the business.

Third place: Assemblr from Indonesia

Judges’ thoughts: The augmented reality platform has good traction on the consumer side and built a strong community. Apart from that, it’s also a technical and interesting product that has generated a good revenue. But some hurdles lie ahead: If Android or Apple changes any of its policies, the whole ecosystem may break.

Congratulations to the three winners as well as to the regional finalists who made it to the last round. As one of the audience members said, everyone’s a winner after giving such great pitches!

If you want to catch the highlights from the finale, you can check out the video below.

Which participants from the Startup Arena were you the most excited about? Share your thoughts with us!

Join us next time

Once again, we’d like to extend our thanks to everyone who helped and contributed to making this Startup Arena a huge success! We’ll be back next year, for sure.

This competition may be over, but we’re going to be working on a bunch of other cool events. So if you want to enjoy unlimited access to Tech in Asia’s live sessions, workshops, and conferences all year long, sign up for our Live subscription. Get it now while it’s on a limited-time introductory offer at US$59/year(unit price US$99/year).