21 December, 2019
As a partner with SparkLabs Fintech Hong Kong, in its collaboration with the Ping An Cloud Accelerator based in Shenzhen, our OC Hong Kong team attended the "Demo Day" in strength. It was the opportunity for the 16 early-stage companies in the third "cohort", or grouping, to go through this Accelerator's intensive support programme to present their business propositions to a significant audience of institutional and corporate VCs, entrepreneur investors and others – and it did not disappoint.
The Ping An Cloud Accelerator is a substantially resourced and carefully structured operation, with a deep pool of expertise and talent on hand to develop and guide these companies towards expansion (particularly international expansion, not least into the China market). It enjoys a significantly supportive relationship with the local government in Shenzhen.
The 16 companies were a truly international group – not only from China, but also from the UK, Singapore, Germany, Sweden, Austria and the US. Their presentations covered an array of technology applications and innovation – from the medical and digital health fields to transport mobility and financial services.
The combination of increasingly sophisticated AI and robotics with data analytics was the main theme in most of these businesses, not least in Heliocor (from the UK) and SureXing (from China) – the former having developed "Robolitics" in a real-time transaction monitoring system to detect market abuse in FX and related transactions; and the latter a financial risk detection AI robot that reads company balance sheets and other data, detecting fraud and business risks. All were very impressive!
