Meet 6 of Asia’s finest young startups, pitching to win at Tech in Asia Singapore 2016

Who are the up-and-comers in the startup world? That’s a billion-dollar question, and something we’ve been wondering for years. In our quest for answers, we’ve combed through 475 startups – who’ve received less than US$1.5 million from investors – to bring you six that deserve your attention.

We do this as part of our Arena competition at our Tech in Asia conferences, in which the best young startups pitch in front of a panel of judges and an anticipating audience. Many of our past participants, like Vibease, U-Hop, and YesBoss, have gone on to raise money from investors. Some have failed, of course, but that’s startup life.

Anyway, the winner of the Arena battle at Tech in Asia Singapore 2016 will win a US$10,000 cash prize. But in reality they’re all winners – the exposure and relationships they build with investors and potential customers can take their business up a notch.

Here, in no order of merit, are the deserving six:

Pouch

Pouch wristbands.

Pouch wants to make organizing and attending events more pleasant. It offers a cashless payment and event management system that uses near field communication (NFC) wristbands. These special wristbands simplify the process of registering attendance and managing crowd flow. In fact, just before attending the Tech in Asia conference, they were involved in Kanye West’s concert in Manila. The company has sold over 150,000 wristbands so far.

Read more: Pouch cashless wristbands make concerts a safer experience

Z-Works

Founder and CEO Makoto Ogawa shows off one of Z-Works’ smart locks.

Z-Works builds products to help caretakers better take care of the elderly. One cool tech they’re working on is a lightbulb that uses microwaves to detect heart rates of people in a room. They’re also building sensors that can detect motion and body temperature. The data from all these devices is compiled and can be accessed with mobile or desktop apps.

Read more: After losing his grandmother, this entrepreneur is using IoT to save lives

Docquity

Very simply, Docquity is a social network for doctors. Typically, young doctors would shadow two or three senior practitioners to learn all they can from them. Now, Docquity lets them build relationships with even more doctors from around the world. The shared knowledge, the founders hope, can save more lives.

Read more: After nearly losing his father, this founder built a medical network to help others

Merlin

Merlin is a cloud software for marketing agencies and freelance marketers to manage their workflow. Users can create and manage projects, proposals, contracts, invoices, and more. It is started by Melvin Yuan, who previously started and sold indoor positioning startup YFind. Later, he founded The Commissioned, a site that connects people with artists to collaborate on and buy bespoke art pieces. But he ‘s now focusing more on Merlin, which he believes is a bigger opportunity.

Read more: Merlin is a collaboration tool for today’s digital nomad marketers

GliaCloud

GliaCloud automatically transforms text articles into videos. It’ll even throw in voiceovers, photos, and cobble together video clips. The end products are not sophisticated, but the company bets they’ll do for quick and bite-sized news. Here’s what a video looks like:

Read more: This startup uses AI to automatically generate videos from text articles

BitMex

The BitMEX team. From L to R: Arthur, Samuel, and Ben

BitMex aspires to be a platform for anyone to bet on anything anywhere, even if you are an average Zhang in China who can only invest US$150 at any one time. Right now, the startup only lets you bet on digital currencies, but in the future it can be expanded to stocks or any kind of derivative.

Since we last spoke to co-founder and ex-bank trader Arthur Hayes in December 2015, it had accumulated 3,400 registered users and US$250 million in trading volume. That number has since ballooned to 5,300 registered users and US$650 million in volume today. It has made US$360,000 in revenue so far on a 0.05% trading fee, and has become profitable on less than US$200,000 in investor funding.

Now, it’s raising US$2 million from investors for aggressive expansion. The startup is available everywhere but the United States due to regulatory reasons.

The startup won the Fintech Pitch Battle powered by DBS Bank, which happened on day one of the conference.

Read more: He left a cushy finance job to build the Goldman Sachs of Bitcoin