Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Vietnam win AKC pitching contest

Participants and ASEAN-Korea Center officials pose at the center's headquarters in Jung-gu, Seoul, Friday. (Lee Jung-youn/The Korea Herald)

An offline pitching contest for Southeast Asian startups, organized by the ASEAN-Korea Center to bolster early-stage startups in the region, came to an end Friday. Startups from Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and Vietnam were recognized as winners.

Thirty startups from a variety of sectors including artificial intelligence, e-commerce platforms, fintech, education and tourism were nominated by the 10 embassies from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Korea and the ASEAN Coordinating Committee on Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises. Each startup introduced business ideas to venture capitalists from Korea.

The winner of the contest, which was awarded $30,000 and will be invited by the ASEAN-Korea Center to attend NextRise -- Korea’s largest startup exhibition -- in 2024, was Malaysia's Food Market Hub, which provides multifaceted business-to-business solutions for procurement, payment and inventory management within food and beverage industry.

In second place was teaching service platform Teachmeguru of Brunei, followed by telemedicine platform ZumVet of Singapore and AI-based health technology platform Genetica of Vietnam in third place.

"We hope that this contest will create a growth foothold for promising ASEAN startup companies and serve as an opportunity to promote cooperation between regions,” said Kim Hae-yong, secretary-general of the ASEAN-Korea Center, in his closing remarks.

The pitch contest was part of the annual ASEAN-Korea Startup Week launched in 2018 to recruit promising ASEAN startups for networking and to engage in capacity-building with counterparts in Korea.

Ahead of the contest, the ASEAN-Korea Center also completed a two-week Acceleration Program from Sept. 11 to 22, to introduce the participating startups to potential business partners. The Acceleration Program was implemented in cooperation with SolBridge International School of Business and Stony Brook University, State University of New York.

The ASEAN bloc is home to about 670 million people, and the average age of the population is relatively young, at 31. As the spread of the internet in the region has increased, and business-friendly policies have been implemented, Southeast Asia has become a promising region for upcoming startups.

By Lee Jung-youn(jy@heraldcorp.com)