BEIJING, Sept. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Technology startup founders, professionals and investors from around the world descended in Beijing for She Loves Tech 2018, the world's largest women and technology startup competition.
With the theme this year as "AI and Emerging Technologies", the conference was opened with the launch of Teja Ventures, the first gender-lens vc fund for Asia, by Virginia Tan, Co-Founder and CEO of She Loves Tech. She remarked, "Teja Ventures is committed to investing in women-led and women-impact businesses, in particular incubating technology which can impact women positively. We see significant opportunities in the verticals of financial services, online-to-offline consumption, education and healthcare."
Lesly Goh, the first ever CTO of the World Bank Group, gave a keynote speech on leveraging technology for the empowerment of women and girls. Her personal mission is to use technology as an equalizer, empowering women in the developing world to achieve their highest potential. She also encouraged women in the audience to "embrace change with courage and keep looking for new opportunities".
China has made the development of AI and other advanced technologies a core pillar of its efforts to become a global leader in the fourth industrial revolution. Lynn Dai, Sensetime Product Executive Director and Tracy Zhang, Financial Times China Publisher, discussed the building of Sensetime, the world's most valuable AI company. A panel themed "Investing for the Future" consisting of leading female investors from Sequoia, Fosun, HarborVest and JRR Crypto, discussed their thoughts on growth opportunities in the Chinese market, the possibility of an incoming "capital winter" and the advantages/challenges they faced being women in the investment industry. Further sessions on AI and blockchain explored how women entrepreneurs in China are shaping the ecosystem.
The climax of the conference came with the much-awaited finals of the She Loves Tech 2018 Global Startup Competition. With startups pitching from 12 countries, Canada's water-quality analysis startup, FREDsense, took home first place, while China's health monitoring device, Mira, came in second, and Israel's robotic wheelchair, ReSymmetry and Singapore's 4D AI imaging technology d'Optron came in third. She Loves Tech is committed to leveraging global resources to incubate and fund technology for women and technology by women. We look forward to expanding to more global locations in 2019 and showcasing the achievements and innovation of women in entrepreneurship, science and technology.
