These 10 startups were chosen to stop Japan from falling behind

The Japan Association of New Economy (JANE) held its annual global business conference, the New Economy Summit (NEST), on last Thursday and Friday. This year, the conference added “T” to its acronym to put a focus on “Tokyo” and “Technology.”

JANE is headed by the founder of Rakuten, Hiroshi Mikitani. Hiroshi said in his opening speech that JANE was created so “Japan will not be left behind.” JANE boasts over 500 companies in its membership and hopes to incubate more Japanese companies as well as be a bridge for international companies entering the country.

For the second year in a row, NEST held a startup pitch battle featuring some of Japan’s top startups. Check out the ten participants below, starting with the top three and including a special prize from Tech in Asia!

First place – AgriBus-Navi

AgriBus-Navi is an Android application that uses a smartphone’s GPS to help farmers move in straight lines in the field.

Founder and CEO Yasuyuki Hamada used to be a researcher at Japan’s National Agricultural Research Organization where he worked on GPS guidance software.

Yasuyuki stressed in his pitch that operators of farm equipment need to make precise U-turns and go straight to apply pesticide in equal intervals. Unfortunately, most farmers are not really sure where they are spraying, he explained.

With AgriBus-Navi, farmers can track their movement in the field to help in straight-line tasks like spraying pesticide. Yasuyuki says GPS guidance solutions have been around for about ten years but are expensive. Farmers can expect to pay from US$5,000 to US$10,000 for similar features that can now be done with AgriBus-Navi’s app.

Since February, the application has been downloaded 27,000 times, 90 percent of which have been from outside Japan. Yasuyuki wants to eventually use the technology to let one person operate multiple machines remotely.

AgriBus-Navi received US$9,250 for first place as well as a special prize from Tech in Asia: free entrance and a booth at any of Tech in Asia’s conferences.

Second place – Cross Helmet

Third place – Gatebox

VisasQ

Ozon

Yamap

Payming

Allstocker

Wovn.io

Travel Pay