Joi Ito wished these five Japanese startups good luck before their demo day

360 degree streaming platform Hug takes the Best Team Award at Open Network Lab’s demo day.

On Wednesday, Open Network Lab, one of Japan’s oldest acceleration programs, held its 12th demo day. This batch was the largest yet with 93 companies applying and only six getting into the program.

Open Network Lab is run by Digital Garage, which was co-founded by current MIT Media Lab director, Joi Ito. Joi still remains an active mentor to this day.

Some of Japan’s most well-known startups have come through the program such as employee rewards program AnyPerk and personal mobility startup Whill. Graduates have a total combined market capitalization of over US$400 million, according to internal reports.

Five of the six teams were ready to present this term. Check them out below.

Tupac Bio

Founder and CEO Eli Lyons pitches Tupac Bio.

Tupac Bio wants to speed up medicine development through DNA design software.

Founder and CEO Eli Lyons has both a computer science and biomedical background. The team is spun out of biomedical research at Japan’s top school, Tokyo University.

Eli pointed out in his pitch that companies spend up to $US1 billion developing new drugs, many of which ultimately fail. He says that only one out of 10,000 candidate drugs even make it to the market.

Tupac Bio’s software helps produce synthetic DNA for drug testing and also allows researchers to create their own custom drug libraries, shortening a process that used to take weeks or months into a matter of days. Eli wants to eventually expand into genetic engineering and other markets. Tupac Bio’s drug design technology is currently patent pending.

BabyMap

Founder and CEO Yusuke Hasegawa pitches BabyMap.

BabyMap is an app by Trim that helps users find baby-friendly facilities.

Withfluence

Hug

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