Three Large Pitch Events for IT Start-ups in Japan
Pitch events for IT start-ups also flourish in Japan. Most of these activities are conducted by venture capitalists and IT-related media. For example, events hosted by “TechCrunch” and “Y Combinator” in overseas are very famous. In this article, we will introduce three typical pitch events for IT start-ups in Japan.
TechCrunch Tokyo “Startup Battle”
This event called “Startup Battle” is organized by TechCrunch Japan. Since the event and the result will be announced on the TechCrunch Japan website, it may instantly raise the winner start-up’s recognition in the marketplace, and help start-ups for future financing and recruitment of engineers. The winner will get one million yen in prize money.
Infinity Ventures Summit 「Launch Pad」
This conference is held by Japan’s leading venture capital firm “Infinity Venture Partners” in Japan every six months, commonly known as IVS. In all parts of the IVS, “Launch pad” is currently the center of attraction. Each start-up representative gets serval minutes to introduce their company, team and investment opportunity, and then the judges goes off to deliberate and eventually comes back to announce one winner. As this is an invitation-only conference, not only the judges, but also the participants are from outstanding technology entrepreneurs and large Internet companies. The characteristics of this conference is a high level of participant involvement.
Samurai Venture Summit
Samurai Venture Summit (SVS) is part of an event organized by Samurai Incubate, a pioneer among independent incubators in Japan. In addition to the management of many start-ups, venture capitalists, the media, as well as foreign well-known IT companies gathered. Due to the diversity of participants, various collaborations among companies have also been born from SVS.
To conclude, it is difficult for start-ups to budget for a big expense on promotion, so these pitch events are a great opportunity for the firms to build their networks and increase product publicity. These events are open to all nationalities. If you want to start a business in Japan, why not try to challenge it?
If you do not have confidence in Japanese presentation, we can give you advice. Please feel free to contact us!
