HKSTP’s First-Ever Virtual Elevator Pitch Competition 2020 Opens New Investment and Partnership Opportunities for Global Startups
6.11.2020 15:49:00 EET | Business Wire | Press release
Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP) held its annual Elevator Pitch Competition 2020 (EPiC) virtually for the first time to unveil new and exciting pitching, investment and partnership opportunities as global startups face a challenging business landscape. US-based biotechnology startup, Mi Terro, topped other finalists to be crowned champion and claimed the top prize at the competition today.
HKSTP’s annual flagship event this year expanded to a week-long virtual programme. It garnered a great response with over 77,000 live views at today’s pitching competition. This year, EPiC attracted 476 entries from 37 countries and cities across five continents. A total of 170 contestants from 31 different markets entered the semi-final round, with nearly 70% of them coming from overseas.
Mi Terro, champion and winner of the Smart City category, is a company that upcycles and re-engineers protein food waste into plastic and cotton alternative fibres for the fashion, medical and packaging industries. The three Tech Category Winners, including UK-based AI & Robotics startup Arctoris, Philippines-based fintech startup PearlPay, and Portugal-based health technology startup RUBYnanomed, showcased their full potential as innovators in the competition.
Albert Wong, CEO of HKSTP, said: “This year’s successful staging of the 5th EPiC is a clear sign of our determination to provide a platform of unmatched opportunities to startups around the world to showcase their innovations and demonstrate their entrepreneurial spirit. The week-long programme is also a show of strength and resilience for Hong Kong’s rapidly-growing innovation and technology ecosystem which propels startups and their ideas to success in Hong Kong, Asia and beyond.”
Since inception in 2016, EPiC has drawn a huge number of international startups to make a live one-minute elevator pitch to leading investors and judges at the International Commerce Centre (ICC), the tallest skyscraper in Hong Kong. This year, our contestants switched modes to present their innovative business ideas, with a one-minute video pitch submitted to simulate the signature 60-second elevator ride.
The top ten finalists were given another opportunity to face the judges in a three-minute live pitch and two-minute Q&A, before announcing the overall champion, who took away a cash prize of US$100,000 while each of the category winners received a cash prize of US$10,000 and all ten finalists won US$6,000 each.
The competition marks a major progression for startups who gained valuable exposure among investors and industry leaders in their ongoing entrepreneurship journey. To further bolster the growth and development of local and overseas startups, this year’s EPiC provides a wider array of business opportunities to explore and acquire better understanding of the investment landscape in the region with the upcoming “Global Matching” programme from 9 to 12 November and the “Investment x Corporate Innovation Conference” on 13 November.
List of Winners
|
Award |
Company Name |
Market |
||
|
Champion and Tech Category Winner – Smart City |
United States |
|||
|
Tech Category Winner – Artificial Intelligence & Robotics |
United Kingdom |
|||
|
Tech Category Winner – FinTech |
Philippines |
|||
|
Tech Category Winner – Health Technology |
Portugal |
|||
|
Other Top 10 Finalists |
Australia |
|||
|
|
Hong Kong |
|||
|
|
United States |
|||
|
|
Hong Kong |
|||
|
|
Denmark |
|||
|
|
Hong Kong |
About Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation
Comprising Science Park, InnoCentre and Industrial Estates, Hong Kong Science & Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP) is a statutory body dedicated to building a vibrant innovation and technology ecosystem to connect stakeholders, nurture technology talents, facilitate collaboration, and catalyse innovations to deliver social and economic benefits to Hong Kong and the region.
Established in May 2001, HKSTP has been driving the development of Hong Kong into a regional hub for innovation and growth in several focused clusters including Electronics, Information & Communications Technology, Green Technology, Biomedical Technology, Materials and Precision Engineering. We enable science and technology companies to nurture ideas, innovate and grow, supported by our R&D facilities, infrastructure, and market-led laboratories and technical centres with professional support services. We also offer value added services and comprehensive incubation programmes for technology start-ups to accelerate their growth.
Technology businesses benefit from our specialised services and infrastructure at Science Park for applied research and product development; enterprises can find creative design support at InnoCentre; while skill-intensive businesses are served by our three industrial estates at Tai Po, Tseung Kwan O and Yuen Long. More information about HKSTP is available at www.hkstp.org.
To view this piece of content from cts.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201106005290/en/
Contact information
Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation
Sarah Poon
Tel: +852 2629 7015
Email: sarah.poon@hkstp.org
Edelman
Janice Wong
Tel: +852 2837 4775
Email: Janice.Wong@edelman.com / Edelmanhkstppr@edelman.com
About Business Wire
For more than 50 years, Business Wire has been the global leader in press release distribution and regulatory disclosure.
Subscribe to releases from Business Wire
Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Latest releases from Business Wire
Perpetuals Reports $ 4.5 Billion in UpsideOnly Volume and Signs Exchange Agreement With Datavault AI for Tokenized Commodities2.6.2026 15:00:00 EEST | Press release
Perpetuals.com Ltd (Nasdaq: PDC) today reported strong early results for its breakout UpsideOnly trading and market prediction platform and announced an agreement with Datavault AI Inc. (Nasdaq: DVLT) to list tokenized real-world commodity assets on the Perpetuals platform. In its first two weeks, traders flocked to the UpsideOnly platform, attracting more than 30,000 active users, generating $4.5 billion in cumulative platform volume across 186,000 fills and 25 instruments. Reflecting the widespread demand for a risk-free product, users came from 185 different countries. Surprisingly, gold was the top instrument with $1.4 billion in volume, outpacing bitcoin at $1.2 billion with precious metals accounting for roughly 35 percent of total platform activity. UpsideOnly is the first trading and market prediction platform where users can't lose. Traders make predictions across global markets and share in profits when those predictions are validated by Perpetuals's proprietary AI, without e
Phenom Positioned as Strategic Leader in Fosway 9-Grid™ for Talent Acquisition Sixth Consecutive Year2.6.2026 15:00:00 EEST | Press release
Phenom, the leader in applied AI with an infrastructure built specifically to redesign work operations, has been positioned as a Strategic Leader in the 2026 Fosway 9-Grid™ for Talent Acquisition for the sixth year in a row. The positioning reinforces Phenom’s focus on sustained execution and customer impact at a moment when most enterprises remain stuck between AI ambition and AI that works. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260602897994/en/ Phenom has been positioned as a Strategic Leader in the 2026 Fosway 9-Grid™ for Talent Acquisition for the sixth year in a row. The positioning reinforces Phenom’s focus on sustained execution and customer impact at a moment when most enterprises remain stuck between AI ambition and AI that works. The execution gap is well documented. Fosway’s recent AI Market Assessment for Talent Acquisition found that only 27% of AI features claimed by talent acquisition vendors are actu
How Fit Analytics Innovation Reclaimed its Independence to Build the Future of AI Commerce2.6.2026 14:47:00 EEST | Press release
With today’s launch of the AI Shopping Assistant, Fit Analytics Innovation moves beyond the AI-hype-cycle to deliver the conversational guidance modern apparel shoppers crave. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260602315868/en/ AI Shopping Assistant - Fit Analytics Innovation Two years ago, Fit Analytics Innovation did the unthinkable: they bought themselves back. Following a high-profile acquisition by Snap Inc., the management team recovered the award-winning Fit Finder and secured sixteen years of expertise and data insights. That bet on independence has culminated in the launch of the AI Shopping Assistant, the latest module available as part of their expanded product suite. Delivering Performance Over P.R. Unlike "overnight" AI startups rushing for market share, Fit Analytics has utilized its independence to prioritize depth over hype. The resulting AI Shopping Assistant is a native evolution of the company’
Kinaxis Introduces Forward Deployed Engineering to Help Enterprises Turn Decisions into Outcomes2.6.2026 14:01:00 EEST | Press release
Kinaxis® Inc. (TSX:KXS), a global leader in supply chain planning and orchestration, today introduced Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE), a new engagement model designed to help enterprises operationalize AI and translate decisions into measurable business outcomes. FDE reflects the broader Kinaxis vision for operational orchestration, an approach that coordinates signals, decisions, actions and learnings across the business fast enough to change outcomes. The opening keynote at Kinexions, the company’s global customer conference, delivered by CEO Razat Gaurav will be livestreamed globally on June 2 @ 11:30 am EST via LinkedIn Live. This approach combines a unified data foundation with semantic intelligence that understands the relationships, dependencies, and trade-offs that shape enterprise operations. Together, these capabilities help organizations move beyond isolated decision-making to coordinated execution, connecting data, systems, teams, and actions across the enterprise. Tradi
NIQ Launches Product Intelligence to Power AI-Driven Commerce2.6.2026 14:00:00 EEST | Press release
NielsenIQ (NYSE: NIQ) today announced the launch of NIQ Product Intelligence, a new solution designed to help retailers and brands transform fragmented product data into structured, interoperable intelligence that fuels AI-driven commerce. As AI increasingly shapes how consumers discover, evaluate, and purchase products, the quality and completeness of product data have become a defining competitive advantage. In AI-mediated commerce environments, products that lack structured, enriched, and machine-readable data risk becoming invisible to recommendation engines, AI assistants, and autonomous purchasing agents. NIQ Product Intelligence addresses this challenge by creating a unified product intelligence layer that standardizes attributes, resolves product identity across systems, and enriches product data at scale, enabling AI systems to better understand, match, recommend, and surface products across digital and physical commerce channels. For example, a traditional keyword search may
In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.
Visit our pressroom