Over the past month, Shanghai has experienced a surge in the climate of entrepreneurship and innovation. The 2023 Startup in Shanghai International Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition was launched, with 76 competition points in the city. By this weekend, the over 6,500 participating firms concluded their roadshows. Top performers will then advance to the national competition.

Since its debut in 2012, Startup in Shanghai has seen ever more participants – exceeding 6,000 ones for seven years in a row, with 860 of them receiving Excellence Awards at the national level. The competition has nurtured a number of hard-core tech firms.

This year’s competition reintroduced the roadshow, which had been absent for the past three years. How have the tech startups in Shanghai been doing? What are the latest trends in entrepreneurship and innovation? What will the trending ChatGPT bring to start-ups? To answer these questions, our reporter visited several competition points and saw a growing maturity in Shanghai’s start-ups, as evidenced in their development models, chosen topics, and industry insights.

Small firms possess more patents than employees

During a roadshow at the Xinze Incubator in Zhangjiang, Shanghai Citybeats Information Technology Co., Ltd.successfully interested the judges as it proudly announced in its self-introduction, “We have more patents than our employees.”

Citybeats, which has been involved in intelligent transportation for seven years, utilizes spatio-temporal demographic data to offer optimized routing solutions for bus lines. In recent years, the demand for improving the quality and efficiency of urban bus lines has surged in many cities. Following the proposal of carbon peak and carbon neutrality goals, it becomes more imperative to optimize bus line layout and reduce carbon emissions while meeting the travel needs of citizens.

Surprisingly, Citybeats has fewer than ten employees even after seven years in business, yet its service footprint has been growing year by year. Its products are applied in over ten cities, including Shanghai, Zhuhai, Tianjin, and Ningbo. Despite its small workforce, the company boasts over 40 intellectual property rights, including 11 granted invention patents and 22 software copyrights.

According to Zhang Ying, founder of Citybeats, “We don’t have a marketing department; all our employees are technicians, and our customers come to us through word of mouth.” By leveraging AI algorithm optimization, Citybeats excels in transportation planning, scheduling, shift arrangement, and operations. Its core competitiveness lies in its unique set of algorithms rather thansize.

This year’s competition has attracted more “small and smart” firms like Citybeats, which is a growing trend in the entrepreneurial landscape. In fact, Citybeats is benchmarking Optibus, an Israeli unicorn company on the 2023 Hurun Global Unicorn List with a valuation of RMB 9 billion. Optibus specializes in developing intelligent optimization systems for public transport, which are adopted by transport organizations and operators in over 1,000 cities worldwide, including the largest public transport operator in the UK.

A judge highly commended such entrepreneurial model of small yet specialized companies. Instead of going for size or comprehensiveness, he said, companies are equally attractive to investors if they become the best in specific segments. 

From “specific innovations” to “systematic integration”

This year’s competition consists of both regular and special sessions. The regular session encompasses six industries: next-generation information technology, high-end equipment manufacturing, new materials, new energy, new energy vehicles, and energy conservation and environmental protection. The special session involves four themes: integrated circuit, biomedicine, artificial intelligence, and scientific research and technical service industry. In both sessions, numerous participating firms have transitioned from specific technological breakthroughs to overall, systematic integration, particularly in the field of information technology.

DICHI TECHNOLOGY, a tech firm founded in 2016 by teachers and students from Shanghai Jiao Tong University with the aim of industrializing major scientific and technological achievements, participated in the competition for the first time this year. “We bring an assembly process information cloud platform to this year’s competition,” said Project Reporter He Qichang. The platform originated from a major national scientific research project the team had participated in. With a cumulative investment surpassing RMB 1 billion, the project would be a missed opportunity if its journey ended with the completion and acceptance of the project. Hence, the team tried to apply its scientific research accomplishments to benefit more domestic manufacturers.

Through the transformation of scientific and technological achievements, DICHI TECHNOLOGY has upgraded this domestic software into a cloud platform with an interface that supports both low-code and code-free operations. This enables manufacturers of different sectors and products to program their product assembly processes through simple modular operations, all without the need for coding. As a result, it is much easier to informatize manufacturing assembly, greatly enhancing work efficiency.

The lack of uniform standards for sensor products and the difficulty in integration are common issues facing the IoT field, but that presents opportunities for entrepreneurial teams. Leveraging a modular control platform, Shuqian Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., a participant in the competition, has overcome the hurdle of communication and compatibility across sensors of different brands. Through integrated innovation, the company has tackled this industry-wide challenge, accelerating the development of the Internet of Everything (IoE). Despite being established for less than three years, it has turned profitable and recorded an annual sales growth of 15%, indicating a promising future.

Generative AI has become an unavoidable competitor

“How do you compete with ChatGPT on a job?” During their roadshow, Shanghai Yinxing Technology Co., Ltd. was posed this thought-provoking question by entrepreneurial instructors.

Yinxing Technology specializes in the design, development and performance optimization of mobile applications. While the company’s expertise and extensive market potential are aknowledged, the emergence of ChatGPT-like technologies and products has posed a challenge it cannot ignore. In this year’s competition, generative AI is an unavoidable “competitor” for firms specializing in web page generation and software development. According to Yinxing Technology, the team has noticed the impact of ChatGPT on the industry, yet human beings still stand at an advantage in asking questions, communication, and refining details.

While startups feel the pressure from ChatGPT, incubators nurturing innovative ventures see in it the potential for service improvements. The primary challenge of entrepreneurial services is navigating triviality – from equity allocation to selecting harmonious colors for conference room furnishings – as entrepreneurs have diverse needs, said Qi Haidi, general manager of Neowithub Science and Technology Industrial Park, a competition point. The industrial park has introduced an AI-based “secretary” to better serve entrepreneurs through one-to-one communication. As communication becomes more convenient and smooth thanks to AI, this one-on-one service mode is likely to be upgraded into a more efficient one-to-many mode.