Exploring the possibility of establishing both lucrative and reliable relationships, international and local investors, accelerators and incubators met through one-on-one meetings set up on Thursday for global innovative startups at InnoVEX 2019.
The event held at Taipei World Trade Center, Hall 1, saw startups demonstrating and illustrating their business goals and plans, while venture capitalists made use of the InnoVEX startup platform to listen to and evaluate the deals they would potentially strike.
Manjushree Technopack Limited is a company in India specializing in healthcare technology, Industry 4.0, and IoT products and devices. “I’m here to explore what is happening in the Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese markets in terms of healthcare, medical, and IoT products,” company director Rajat Kedia said. As an investor he hoped to understand the current state of technology, and whether anyone was willing to bring the technology to India, he said. “I’m wanting to see what kind of technologies would be worth bringing back to India.”
Kedia said he was impressed by how well the technology industry in Taiwan functions. “In fact, I have been at the COMPUTEX show for two days, it’s quite advanced especially for computer hardware, I’m not transacting any business immediately. I’m looking at long-term solutions and what we can do with all the startups, and all the software industry,” he said.
Manager of the CTBC Venture Capital, Karen Fan, talked to three startups during the 90 minutes session. She felt impressed by how entrepreneurs were increasingly moving into the cultural and creative industry, she said. “Like internet celebrities who combine new technologies with media. However, some of them are still at their early stages. We want something that is more mature and has great potential for the market.”
Karen is very interested in one startup that enabled all earphones, even low-end ones, to create surround sound effects simply by adding one device.
“First of all, the 15 minutes session [face-to-face communicating with startups] is informative. I found one very interesting company that we will stay in touch [with]. They are cooperating with Viber, I will try to help them to do some project connections both in Israel and in the South American markets,” Javier Shocron, associate from Maverick Ventures said.
Israeli company Maverick Ventures is keen on exploring the Fintech industry. Fintech is a very active and crowded field in Israel, he said. “Where will the banking industry be in the next 10 or 15 years, I think we will discover for ourselves and there is no need to wait for that long.” One problem is that e-payments are not globally accepted yet, and in come countries the infrastructure doesn’t support it, he said. Fintech startups need to solve such problems.
“We already have a couple of partners here, we‘re always looking for new investment opportunites and I think we found some interesting companies but we have to do much more due diligence to understand the technology and potential,” OurCrowd manging partner Denes Ban said.
Startups are focused more on the problem than on solutions, he said. “The major challenge for them will be — they have some cool gadgets but actually it’s not the major problem — is there a need, is it going to be a need? That’s where the future lies.”