Last Saturday, TechNode hosted it’s XDEMO event, a serial demo event showcasing nine booming startups in the area on September 12th at the XNODE Bay Valley office near Fudan University in Shanghai.
Over the next three months, XDEMO event will be hosted in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Hangzhou. Every city event presents 10 to 15 teams, each with an elevator pitch in front of investors from XFounder club, an invitation only community consisting of startups, industry experts, venture capitalists. Any startups with an innovative product or prototype that has not yet raised A round funding can apply to pitch on the stage. In December, the selected startups from XDEMO will gather in Shanghai International Innovation Competition to select best startups from different categories.
“It was interesting to see such a diverse group of startups working in different categories like infrastructure, consumer application, hardware, and more. I think it shows a lot of progress in the community in Shanghai. I see a lot of exciting opportunities for the ecosystem, as you see more and more high quality companies working hard and moving ahead,” said Calvin Chin, CEO of Transist Shanghai who was one of the judges on the demo day.
So here come our nine startups!
Smart Device / MiChi
According to World Health Organization (WHO), one-third of people in the world suffer insomnia or sleep difficulty. MyChi analyzes the user’s sleep patterns and delivers customized suggestions for eating, exercise and acupuncture points to improve the user’s sleep and overall health. A user can place MyChi under the pillow and a palm sized-device records sleep data to determine the state of the user’s health conditions. The company tested the prototype of the services, and the hardware will go crowdfunding on Indiegogo with price discounted from retail price of $129 USD.
Energy / WeSmart
WeSmart adopts cloud platform to manage user’s energy consumption, air quality in realtime for hotels and offices. First, the service measures the energy consumption, monitors the usage compared to previous data, provides customized data management, and gives advice on saving energy. Customers receive service through yearlong subscriptions based on the number of metering points. The clients include Novotel, Carrefour, Michelin, Mann+Hummel, Decathlon Group.
Health / CareVoice
CareVoice is a social application for health care, combining consumer’s feedback and open source data. The users can find hospitals, doctors and treatments that suit him/her, record and review the hospitals, doctors and treatments. It integrates user feedback data on health care centers, guides users make better health decisions. The company has raised pre-A round two months ago, and possesses 20,000 registered users.
Content / Seed
Seed provides discovery, language translation and access to authentic overseas content on mobile app. The editors pick out articles and post from top international sources and users can browse content and get instant translations, collect new words, and share with friends. Editors curate relevant and high quality content for Chinese users on daily basis. According to Helloseed co-founder Guan Wang, users will be able to add sources and get updates automatically in the next version.
Security / ScanTrust
A lot of counterfeit products result in loss of trust by customers. ScanTrust is an Internet of Packaging software platform, focused on ensuring every person is able to know the products they use are genuine or not. ScanTrust offers QR code with secure graphic inside, where usually company logo is placed. The sophisticated graphic bars others to copy the original QR code. The company has internal application that tracks where the user scanned the QR code and monitors distributors. Based in Switzerland and Shanghai, current partners are from Europe. The business model is B2B and charges the QR code per unit.
Finance / Acebanker
Wealth management is a huge market globally. Aiming to become everyone’s private banker, the application helps you keep track of user’s financial products, gives you recommendation on how to rebalance your portfolio, and sends you important alerts customized to the user’s needs. Acebanker provider Koolla was recently selected by one of the ten startups to join Fusion, Switzerland’s first fintech accelerator.
Cloud / BootDev
There are more than 700 million internet users in China and it’s often a problem for websites in China to deal with the huge move of those users. Auto-scaling helps to maintain application availability and allows the user to scale the capacity up or down automatically according to conditions the user define. BootDev is a cloud product that provides auto-scaling implementation faster, cheaper, and available for high traffic websites. The service was proved by more than 10 million PV websites as customers. Founded Yubis IT, the company was part of Chinaccelerator batch 6.
Travel / KEYS
Leveraging a lot of vacant rooms in hostels, KEYS adopts Uber concept for the hostel industry. The company provides value-added butler services like laundry, food delivery pick up, luggage pick up, city guide, car pick up from the airport as well as home goods like beddings, linens, towel, bathrobe on demand. KEYS provide selected hostels located in the city center for the users and monetize from hostel owners when they choose the to offer the service. With local team based in Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, there are 500 hostels in the platform and 9,800 users has placed the order, according to the company.
Travel / Player Bang
Using sharing economy concept on service providers, Player Bang connects travellers to local providers. Leveraging WeChat platform to match traveler’s requirement and travel service providers, the company hires professional freelancers, providing accomodation, tour, guide, driving, photographing service. The revenue comes from 10% commision to service providers. With 20 countries in South East Asia, and most part of Europe registered, 200 service providers are helping travelers to enjoy their stay.
Image Credit: XNODE