Slush, one of the world’s most prestigious startup events from Finland, has just closed its first-ever summit in Shanghai yesterday, featuring a stellar lineup of speakers, entrepreneurs and investors. Along with the exciting talks on the main stage, fifty amazing startups from the fields of e-commerce, VR/AR, big data, education, healthcare and enterprise services appeared before a great set of judges and audiences from the local and global startup community. They pitched, answered questions, but in the end, only one company could win the battle.
The top honor of the pitch-off went to Marvelmind Robotics, who walked away with a 5 million RMB fund, free space at ZJ Ventures Studio as well as invitation and travel tickets to Slush 100 pitching Competition in Helsinki at the end of this month. In addition to the winner, Slush’s pitching competition rounds up a wide host of promising titles. Here’s the full breakdown of the show’s top-five winners:
The Russian startup is a developer of indoor navigation technologies that can be used by autonomous robots, copters or in virtual reality with a precision of around two centimeters. It uses ultrasound waves for the precise determination of distances, and the transducers use a 433 MHz frequency to synchronize their data.
“Of course, there are plenty of other indoor navigation systems available on the market, such as UWB, Bluetooth beacons, magnitometers, WiFi RSSi, etc. but they have their limitations, usually either in precision, or price or size”, said Maxim Tretyakov, head of Marvelmind Robotics. “We are trying to develop the best solution that can balance all these factors.”
The price of the product starts at 59$ for one beacon and now it is sold in more than 30 countries across the world. After receiving the honor, the startup sets about to improve the design of the transducers, obtaining certification and searching for major clients and investors.
Laiye is a WeChat-based butler service that tries to emancipate users from downloading never ending numbers of apps. By following Laiye’s WeChat account, AI robots and real-life people are waiting on your beck and call, offering more than thirty services, such as smart calendar, ride-hailing, coffee delivery, errant running and cleaning.
As you get to use the product more, the service gets know you better, which means Laiye could make recommendations and offer solutions based on your likes, dislikes, habits and budgets.
The revenue comes three channels in the form of commissions from partnering service providers, paid programs from customers and licensing fees, the firm introduced.
Since the launch in July last year, the Y-combinator and Microsoft Accelerator alumnus has amassed over 1.5 million users as of present. The top-3 services on the platform are smart calendar, ride hailing, coffee delivery, which account for 75 to 80 percent of the total orders.
NextVPU
NextVPU is a startup in artificial intelligence and computer vision domain with the aim to bring vision capability to all robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned ground vehicles and other smart devices.
Its first product AngelEye is a smart glass for visually impaired people. The glasses will tell the wearers their location, heading direction, name of the next cross, distance to the next cross and POIs around. The device will recognizing daily objects like cash, color, traffic light, cross walk, stairs, doors, exits, text and face, and getting the users informed with voice message.
AngelEye is currently in internal testing phase and plans to ship 20K glasses globally in the next year.
Sunnatech
With the vision of “Nano for Health”, Sunnatech is nano-fiber material startup from China. The company has developed a nano-fiber small caliber vascular graft to tap China’s hundred billion RMB cardio surgery market. As combination of nano-fiber technology and biomaterial, the product claimed better performance with self-healing and anti-clotting features, allowing the artificial graft to stay in human’s body for a longer period of time. The vascular graft is still waiting for the medical approval in China and will be ready to hit the market in four to five years.
The same technology is applied into a 3D mask for Chinese people who are facing aggravating air pollutions. “To achieve the same filtration performance, Sunnatech’s mask has the least pressure loss comparing with other products on the market, which means wears can breath more freely,” said the company founder.
LAKKA Technologies
LAKKA Technologies is a thin-film sensor manufacturer. By detecting the small vibrations in the radial vein of the wrist, its modules can be used to detect heart rate from the wrist. With a high accuracy, the product can detect the systolic and diastolic pulses of the heart, allowing users to collect valuable data on how the heart performs during exercise and rest.