Here’s our Tech in Asia Tour winner, straight from the Japanese capital

After stops in Osaka and Fukuoka, Tech in Asia Tour: Road to Tokyo 2015 returned to the Japanese capital last night for a final pitch event a bit closer to home. Tokyo is the epicenter of the country’s burgeoning startup ecosystem, and the early-stage startups selected to battle it out did not disappoint!

Each of the four startups that pitched fielded questions – in English – and received constructive criticism from our panel of four esteemed judges: Takeshi Ebihara, founding general partner of Rebright Partners; Yuya Takegawa, vice president of CyberAgent Ventures; Allison Baum, managing director of Fresco Capital; and Saemin Ahn, managing partner of Rakuten Ventures.

The winning startup will receive a booth at Tech in Asia Tokyo 2015 on September 8 and 9, as well as event passes and accommodation near the venue.

Here are short summaries of each startup in the order they pitched. Can you guess the winner?

Sorabito

Want to buy a used bulldozer, crane, or dumptruck? The standard method of procurement involves spending a day or two at a large-scale auction, paying membership fees, and handing a sizable commission to the venue at the end of the deal.

Sorabito’s product, Allstocker, wants to bypass the auction block and become the Amazon for heavy machinery and large farming equipment. The startup not only lists machines, but also provides remote quality inspections, payment services, transportation, and language localization.

Since launching in March this year, Allstocker has already become the largest online marketplace for Japan-made machines. It’s attracted more than 15,000 listings with users in 130 different countries. The startup charges sellers a 5 to 15 percent commission based on the price of the equipment (the higher the price, the lower the commission), whereas physical auction sites take cuts from both parties.

Aedi Works

Have a strong opinion about something you purchased recently? Aedi Works’ Sqore app allows users to write instant reviews by scanning a product’s barcode.

The startup claims that its service is more responsive than traditional reviews found at the bottom of ecommerce site listings, which makes sense since it can be done on the fly with a simple scan. It also wants to become a kind of social network for reviews, allowing users to connect to people with similar tastes to get an idea if they’d like a certain product based on an existing review. Like Tinder, users can swipe reviews left or right to agree or disagree with them.

Sqore hopes to monetize by selling big data to brands, who could use it to find out what products are trending or what demographic to target (or avoid).

Yaguchi Electronics

Amblyopia, commonly known as “lazy eye,” affects between 3 and 6 percent of all children under the age of six. In addition to impairing a child’s vision, the condition can lead to teasing and a lack of self confidence if left untreated. The good news, however, is that amblyopia is mostly curable if treated before a child turns six.

Yaguchi Electronics’ Occlu-Pad combines a tablet, a screen filter, glasses, and specially-designed games to treat amblyopia in a fun and less costly way than traditional visual training. The startup claims that clinical trials with Occlu-Pad resulted in significant improvement of a user’s condition.

Yaguchi Electronics has already shipped 100 Occlu-Pads to Japanese hospitals and has received approval from the domestic FDA. It’s now working on similar approval for the US and EU. The startup also wants to offer the device direct to consumers via ecommerce websites.

Mist Technologies

No one wants to sit around all day waiting for a video to buffer. For streaming sites like YouTube and Netflix, maintaining server speed is of utmost importance to keep that issue at bay.

Mist Technologies’ MistCDN service wants to be a game changer for content providers by sharing the server load with individual users. If 1,000 people are streaming the same episode of Game of Thrones on HBO GO, for example, each of them are pulling data from the server and slowing down traffic. MistCDN optimizes the flow so only a handful of those users are actually drawing directly from the server, while the remaining data is shared between peers. Technically speaking, it uses WebRTC to link users who are downloading the same data packets at the same time as you.

MistCDN has been able to increase server efficiency by 80 to 90 percent, and the startup already has a deal with Japan’s largest television network, Fuji TV. Unfortunately, it’s not something that can simply be adopted by viewers – the TV networks and streaming services still have to opt in before users can take advantage of MistCDN’s tech.

And the winner is…

The judges unanimously decided to crown Sorabito as the Tokyo Tour champion. Congratulations!

“Simply put, they know their market very well,” Ahn said. “They know their customers very well and they recognize that privatism wins over all.”

If you’d like to mingle with Sorabito and other top-notch startups from across Japan and Asia as a whole, tickets for Tech in Asia Tokyo 2015 are still available here.

A big thank you to those who helped make our Tokyo event a success:

Sponsor: PR Times

Partner: Microsoft Japan