UKTI selects three Japanese startups, will bring them to London’s tech hub in March

SHARE:

Twitter Banner_High res

See the original story in Japanese.

UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) announced on Thursday the winners of the Japan-UK Tech Awards competition, bringing promising Japanese startups to the UK. The winning teams are:

  • Anydoor
    Founded in 2009. Anydoor provides crowdsourced translation service Conyac for affordable rates, helping people exchange e-mails or business documents in unfamiliar languages with the global community.
  • iRidge
    Founded in 2008. iRidge has developed location-based push notification service for smartphones, called Popinfo, helping real retailers distribute updates to their customers.
  • Oh My Glasses
    Founded in 2011, Oh My Glasses has been running an e-commerce site focused on glasses, recently launched a new brand called Type that offers glasses styled after fonts such as helvetica or garamond.

UKTI had initially said that it will announce winners in late December, but the quality of submitted business ideas were so high that the judging process took a longer time than expected, the UK embassy to Japan explained. NTT Docomo Ventures and Deloitte’s Tohmatsu Venture Support helped UKTI select qualified Japanese startups.

These winning startups will receive a complimentary visit to startups in London’s TechCity as well as a complimentary one-month residency at The Bakery incubator in London, following an invitation to an afternoon tea party with the UK ambassador to Japan, Tim Hitchens.