Waygo Wins Most Promising Startup At Echelon Singapore Conference

Waygo has just won Most Promising Startup at the Echelon conference 2013 in Singapore.

The judging panel of seven included Dave McClure, founding partner at 500 Startups, Edgar Hardless, CEO of SingTel Innov8 and John Scull, managing director at Southern Cross Venture Partners.

Waygo makes an optical character reader (OCR) translation app which so far has focused on translating the Chinese language into English. It works offline and in real time, and shows the English translation overlaid over Chinese printed text within the app.

It was part of the 500 Startups accelerator batch that graduated in February.

I just spoke to co-founder, Huan-Yu Wu, fresh from his win at the conference, and he said the two-year old company is on its way to close its seed round of an expected $750,000 soon.

Waygo has about 40,000 users now, and is in talks to develop a promotional deal with Lonely Planet and American Airlines now. Japanese and Korean versions are in the works, said Wu.

Come to the TechCrunch meetup today after the Echelon conference. Josh Constine and I will be there. It’s from 6pm-8pm today, Tuesday June 4th at MOA New Zealand Bar, 5 Changi Business Park Central 1, Singapore City.

See you there!