IT-Farm completes 4th Annual XTC – Japan
In April, at the iconic Shin-Marumouchi Building in Tokyo, we were thrilled to hold the Extreme Tech Challenge 2023 Japan Regionals, where Yuji Suzuki, President and CEO of bitBiome, Inc. was announced winner!
IT-Farm, seed and early stage venture capital firm and ecosystem based in Tokyo was one of the launch partners of the revised XTC in 2019 and has since then developed an active XTC chapter in Japan, strongly engaged throughout the pandemic.
Notable XTC Finalists from IT-Farm’s Japan program include:
- Axelspace, a commercial microsatellite developer and satellite imagery provider, that has raised nearly $70M through 3 rounds
- Unifa, a children’s mental health tracking solution, that has raised over $80M through 4 rounds
- Instalimb, providing a breakthrough in low-cost prosthetics via additive manufacturing, that raised a $3M Series A last summer, and
- BionicM, with high-performance robotic prosthetics that raised nearly $3M in a Series A just a few weeks ago.
IT-Farm just completed the 4th Annual XTC Japan with an afternoon program co-hosted by Gaiax Startup Studio and co-sponsored by Mitsubishi Estate at their Shin-Marunouchi Building Conference Square.
This first post-pandemic event drew dozens of entrepreneurs and investors to the conference hall for a program including an opening keynote by XTC Founder and Board Chair Young Sohn, and panel discussions on venture investment and de-carbonization including Carbide Ventures, Darwin Ventures, Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), Honda ex-R&D lead, and EARTHBRAIN (Komatsu Group).
XTC Partners NXP, Benhamou Global Ventures and Fujitsu were also in attendance.
Finals judges:
- Tomihisa Kamata (Representative of TomyK Ltd., co-founder of ACCESS Co., Ltd.),
- Nobuhiko Nishio (Professor, College of Information Science and Technology, Ritsumeikan Univ.)
- Takehiro Shirai (General Partner, IT-Farm),
- Ma Jingqian (Head of Ventures, Plug and Play Japan).
The Winners of XTC Japan 2023:
- bitBiome Co. Ltd. – Overall
- Aseel Technology – Runner-Up
- Elephantech – Runner-Up
bitBiome
bitBiome is a bio-manufacturing startup from Waseda University that discovers innovative enzymes leveraging its world’s largest proprietary genome database “bit-GEM”, currently containing 800M genes and rapidly increasing, and the world’s fastest enzyme search & modification technology “bit-QED”, which is 500x faster than Google AlphaFold2. The database is generated with a patented single-cell genome analysis technology “bit-MAP”, and the company pursues its ambition to productize home-run materials/microbes, such as plastic decomposition enzymes, while scaling joint R&D services ongoing with 150+ bio/pharma partners.
Aseel Technology
Aseel Technologies is a humanitarian platform that enabled the restart of international humanitarian assistance after the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Leveraging its handcraft e-commerce network that intermediates Afghan local artisans and developed-country consumers, Aseel established reliable and transparent aid-channels by flowing money & goods from UNHCR and USAID into the Aseel e-commerce network in the reverse direction. The CEO received Andrew E. Rice Award in 2022 for Aseel’s leadership to deliver assistance to 500K+ people in Afghanistan since launch, and the company is working to scale the service to Turkey and other disaster regions in the world.
Elephantec Co. Ltd.
Elephantech has developed a metal nanoparticle inkjet printing technology that significantly reduces environmental pollution and costs associated with printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing — reducing copper consumption by 70%, CO2 emissions by 75%, water consumption by 95%, water consumption by 95%, and at significantly lower costs.