Five CEOs of startups took the stage yesterday at GTC China in Beijing to see who could be the next Jack Ma.

They were ostensibly competing for an NVIDIA DGX Station. But the real prize was to be recognized as one of China’s most promising AI startups. The CEOs described their company and business model before a live audience and a panel of four judges, including prominent China VCs and NVIDIA execs. Then, the judges took a vote and a winner was declared.

The companies were focused on a diverse range of challenges,but they all agreed on four things:

• AI deep learning offers the best path to solve hard challenges

• China’s market opportunity is enormous

• China offers a rich pool of developer talent

• Their solution aims to assist, not replace, trained professionals

  
  

Everyone’s a winner: Each Inception participant walked away with an NVIDIA TITAN Xp GPU.

Participating companies were:

• Naturali – A conversational interface for mobile devices that makes it easy for users to perform tasks with speech commands.

• 12Sigma – Improved accuracy of patient diagnoses for cancer, heart disease and lung disease (clinically known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).

• Imperial Vision – Smart compression to reduce storage costs and improve efficiency of image and video delivery.

• Dr. Brain – Personal diagnosis of brain disorders and diseases like Alzheimer’s.

• Kavout – Stock investment analysis and recommendations to assist investment advisors.

All five are focused on solving a difficult challenge. Dr. Brain’s CEO, Lawrence Wang, said China has the largest population of aging people: approximately 240 million individuals. By 2030, it could cost China as much as $1 trillion to diagnose and treat those with Alzheimer’s. His company is working with nearly two dozen hospitals in China to build a database in the cloud to make it easy for trained medical staff to quickly diagnose the disease.

Alex Lu of Kavout said asset managers and buy-side analyst firms are challenged daily with three questions: when to buy a stock, when to sell and how much to invest? Its algorithms combine technical analysis with investor sentiment to help clients manage $10 billion in assets under their management.

And the Award Goes to …

After a brief vote by the panel of judges, NVIDIA Vice President of Business Development Jeff Herbst announced that 12Sigma founder Xin Zhong had won the day’s prize.

Imperial Vision was awarded Top 5 Best AI Startups out of more than 300 AI Startups in China. Imperial Vision Technology is an AI-based computer vision company which aims at development of leading machine learning techniques to solve various computer vision problems. The company was founded in November 2016 and headquartered in Fuzhou, China. Imperial Vision Technology uses machine learning techniques to perform deep compression of images and videos so that it can offer an efficient and low-cost solution for image and video delivery. In addition, the quality of images and videos can be enhanced using our products and high-quality images and videos are provided for users.