The final stop of SunBridge Global Venture’s Innovation Weekend pitch contest series took place in Osaka this evening. After four prior events – held in Singapore (May 9), London (July 4), Tokyo (June 20), and Boston (September 24) – the fifth startup was chosen to compete at the grand finale in Tokyo this December.
SunBridge Global Ventures co-founder and CEO Ikuo Hiraishi said that more than 100 startups have joined Innovation Weekend events since its inception in 2011 – with 25 percent of them receiving funding since presenting.
Without further ado, here were the night’s top pitches:
3rd: Kekkan Bijin
Kekkan Bijin (the Japanese word for “a person with beautiful blood cells”) is a medtech startup that produces video microscopes that can determine if a patient has normal or abnormal blood circulation – all without having to draw blood. It’s a safe, non-invasive way of determining health at a glance.
2nd: Up Performa
Up Performa is a team sports performance monitoring wearable that CEO Shuhei Yamada hopes will replace the need for physical note-taking and cameras at both practices and games. The device is worn on the user’s upper arm, similar to the armbands for holding smartphones while working out. It uses sensors to show individual player’s positions and heatmaps of where they spend the most time on the field. Yamada says that his prototype has shrunk significantly since the first iteration, to about half the size of a deck of cards. The consumer version – which he hopes to launch via a Kickstarter campaign next year – will be two to three times smaller.
1st: Gyazo
Sometimes simple is best, as evidenced by Gyazo’s win in Osaka. The screenshot app instantly uploads an image to Gyazo’s cloud servers, copying the image URL to the clipboard automatically. A new GIF feature allows users to capture up to seven seconds of video. Syncing with the Gyazo Shuriken app sends captured images to a user’s iOS device.
See: Japan is finally opening up to the rest of the tech world
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Editing by Steven Millward
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