COMEUP 2021, the ongoing startup festival at the Dongdaemun Digital Plaza (DDP) in Seoul, is witnessing record-breaking participation this year. This year’s event is organized to strengthen communication and exchanges between innovative startups, global investors, and global companies.
The event is a boiling cauldron of opportunities for innovative startups with conferences, IR presentations by COMEUP STARS, an open innovation showcase from global companies and biz matching. Participating startups get practical assistance to become global startups by interacting with industry leaders and international entrepreneurs running successful companies.
Startup showcase, an event exclusively for the COMEUP Stars, allows the startups to present their ideas before investors and seek funding. This brings startups closer to the investors. At the same time, investors can directly interact with the startup of their choice to understand the exact nature of the product in case they are interested in investing. This session was being judged by three different stalwarts of their respective fields.
The Judges
Dr. Sue Xu is a Managing Partner at Amino Capital, and her focus areas of investment include data-driven solutions. She was interim CEO of CandyHouse and CyteSi. Since 2012, she has been involved with more than 200 investments, mostly in seed and Series A, with 11 unicorns. Dr. Sue Xu began her early-stage entrepreneurship when she was the founding scientist of GlycoMira. She has three patents and over 20 journal publications and previously was a Postdoc fellow at Stanford University.
Richard Jun is the Co-founder and Managing Director of BAM Ventures, a top-performing early-stage consumer fund based in Los Angeles that he started with Brian S. Lee, a serial angel investor and the co-founder of Legalzoom, Shoedazzle, and The Honest Company. At BAM, Richard has used his full-stack company-building experience to invest in and help accelerate the growth of some of the most recognizable consumer brands that exist today. He was chosen by the Los Angeles Business Journal as one of the “Top 500 Most Influential People in Los Angeles” for 2020 and served as the regional co-lead judge for the prestigious EY Entrepreneur of the Year award.
Jeffrey Paine is a Co-founder and Managing Partner of Golden Gate Ventures, an early-stage technology venture capital fund based in Singapore investing in Southeast Asia with over US$175 million under management investing in over 45 companies since 2012. Jeff started and managed the Founder Institute in Singapore, where he oversees its expansion in Southeast Asia and Japan.
Fling (Michael Currie, CEO)
Fling is a Thai technology company for software development. Fling’s mission is to build a state-of-the-art technology platform to enhance business processes efficiency and improve people’s security and convenience. The company’s expertise lies in AI and Drone which it uses to conduct inspections for the supply chain and energy companies. Its drone software as a service data platform makes the inspection process for warehouses less labor-intensive and time-consuming. Based out of Bangkok, the three-year-old company has recorded 1445 year-on-year growth.
Moaah (Chu Yun Sil, CEO)
Moaah is a government data analytics platform that converts millions of data points into interactive visuals. Data mining and later sorting it to find out meaning is a very cumbersome process. However, Moaah can help visualize millions of data in seconds, saving its customers time, improving productivity, and saving a lot of their effort.
COXWAVE (Gi Jung Kim, CEO)
The startup is building a machine learning pipeline called Manta Engine. Currently, 85 percent of all Ai project fails to deploy successfully as the machine learning pipeline used to create the AI is not robust enough. Manta Engine is software that smoothens the machine learning pipeline by packing the latest innovations in AI into a single platform. It takes care of the rough work so that AI engineers and researchers can focus on the tasks that matter.
Filmplace (Lincoln Lin, CEO)
It’s an Airbnb for the film industry, the first global platform in Asia. In the film and media industry, there have been a lot of problems where producers, filmmakers, photographers face lots of issues trying to find the perfect house for filming, especially if it’s a last-minute project. For brands with a bigger budget, they will hire a Location Manager, but it usually costs about $300-$500/day and to secure a location usually takes 4-7 days. Filmplace solves all these problems by providing a platform to connect a venue in just a few clicks. Additionally, International brands can book overseas locations using or localized system.
Tictag (Kevin Quah Lian Shen, CEO)
Tictag is a data annotation service provider based in Singapore. By crowdsourcing the data annotation process, Tictag innovatively offloads businesses and makes datasets great again. Founded in 2019, the Singaporean startup aims to become the best way for people and companies to interact with data. It offers high-quality, labeled datasets for businesses through a crowdsourced mobile application. The startup has quality control processes in place to ensure that the data is accurately labeled. Plus, having a large community of taggers to label the data makes the whole process much faster while bringing costs down too.
