The results are in and the top three Grand Finalists for this year’s WIT Japan & North Asia Startup Pitch 2018 (powered by Amadeus) have been declared.
Competing for this year’s grand prize of a place at Phocuswright’s APAC Innovators of the Year programme at the Phocuswright Conference in Los Angeles (November 13-15), a ticket to WIT Singapore 2018 (October 15-17) and mentorship by Amadeus are:
- Airbuy – a third party platform that allows airlines and airports to optimise their duty free revenues.
- Shoot My Travel – a global online marketplace that pairs travellers with local photographers, to provide professional vacation photo-shoots.
- Travelsify – a ‘hotel DNA’ content platform that characterizes hotels based on a unique weighted sequence of experience-defining metadata.
Hot on their heels but just falling short of qualifying for the Grand Finals were semi-finalists, Tabica and Trabble. Both received honourable mention from lead judge Sebastien Gibergues in his closing remarks.
The three startup finalists were part of the nine representing seven countries competing at this year’s WIT Bootcamp, which saw a record attendance of close to 300 attendees.
The semi-finalists faced a firing squad of nine travel industry experts, who served as this year’s judges, including: Bobby Healy (Chief Technology Officer, CarTrawler); Kenichi Shibata (COO, Venture Republic Inc.); Kotaro Chiba (Founder, Drone Fund); Kuan Hsu (Co-founder & General Partner, KK Fund); Masaki Hata (Senior Manager, Regional Revitalization Solution); Mitsuki Matsuda (CEO, GX Incubate Inc.); Wayne Chu (Investment Partner, MindWorks Ventures); Yuko Saito (Vice President Strategic Market Development APAC, Criteo); and Sebastien Gibergues (Vice President Online Travel Asia Pacific, Amadeus Travel Channels).
Upon congratulating each of the startups on the professionalism of their pitches, lead judge Sebastien Gibergues also offered feedback to the finalists, granting them the opportunity to improve their pitches in time for the Grand Finals.
The judges wanted more clarity on how Airbuy planned to negotiate the supply side of the business and how it planned to convince organisations to work with them.
Shoot My Travel was asked to elaborate on how it planned to compete against similar businesses that are in-destination and how it will build a global aggregation platform quickly enough to take the market.
The judges also wanted a clearer understanding of the coverage Travelsify has amassed globally and to consider whether their monetisation strategy could be optimised better.
The three finalists will compete at the Main Stage of the WIT Japan & North Asia Conference that takes place at 5.10pm (GMT+8) at The Westin Tokyo’s Galaxy Ballroom.