On 31 May, 12 teams from Hong Kong’s best and brightest FinTech start-ups came together at Cyberport to pitch their businesses to potential investors and win a unique competition.
Organised and supported by the Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund, Cyberport and Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks, the Jumpstarter 2017 FinTech semi-pitch event was the first of eight semi-final events to be held over the next few months.
Representatives from each of the 12 teams were given ten minutes to convince the four judges – Cyberport’s Marvin Lai, Ant Financial’s Kenny Man, Chibo Tang of Gobi Partners and Christopher Harvey of Accenture – that they deserved to go through to November’s final round, where each of the top three teams will receive up to US$1 million in investment from the Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund.
As the judges deliberated, members of the audience, who were given a pack of poker-like chips as they registered, voted for their favourite start-up by dropping the chips into slots in a voting device; the idea being that the start-up with the most chips would win the right to display their products in November’s final round.
After a brief Q&A session where the judges gave general feedback on the pitches and offered tips for improvement (“Don’t get lost in your own vision”; “Don’t build a solution in search of a problem”), the winners were announced in alphabetical order.
The first was Bambu, a B2B robo-advisory firm that offers “a bridge between banks and their clients”, according to Ned Phillips, the company’s founder and CEO.
Next was FundPark, a P2B trade finance platform which CEO Anson Suen said “makes financing easier for small companies” by providing working capital funding direct from investors.
The last winner, Lattice, was described by CEO and Co-founder Dr Wing Cheung as a “view-driven portfolio optimiser and a robo-advisor for high net worth people”.
The public vote was won handily by Stockflash, the leading social trading app on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Before the audience cheered and the winners stood for a photo call, Harvey summed up the event, remarking that “The future is in this room”.
The next Jumpstarter 2017 semi-pitch event, Robotics, will be held at Hong Kong Science Park on 6 June.
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Video of Jumpstarter 2017 FinTech Semi Pitch
Startup Pitch! (by the sequence of on-stage presentation)
- Unissoft Technology Co. Ltd
- KYC-Chain
- 10Life
- CryptoBLK Limited
- Lattice Limited (Finalist)
- Koios Fintech Limited
- Authpaper Limited
- Stockflash (Most Favorable Startup)
- eMALI.IO Limited
- Ironfly Technologies
- Bambu (Finalist)
- Fundpark (Finalist)
Panel Feedback : Jumpstart & Beyond
Award Presentation : FinTech Semi Pitch
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