After many months of planning and countless flights to the other side of the world, our first ever international TechCrunch Disrupt event has come to a close. 15 companies have launched new products to the world for the very first time in our Startup Battlefield, an on-stage, high stress battle for riches (50 grand!), glory (press coverage!), the much coveted Disrupt Cup, and all the open doors you could ever desire.
Without further ado, the winner is… OrderWithMe!
OrderWithMe is a group buying system meant to help Western small business owners by drastically simplifying the process of acquiring Chinese-made goods in bulk. By splitting orders (and simultaneously removing a vast majority of the middle men involved), OrderWithMe allows shops to acquire any size shipment of these lower-priced goods, as opposed to the usual minimum order of 100+.
This is no Alibaba; OrderWithMe hand-picks each product that they offer through the site, going so far as to do video walkthroughs with each product to offer up insight as to why it was selected. They’ll begin with fashion and home furniture items (as those are the highest margin items made in China), expanding into other verticals as time goes on.
Disrupt Beijing is an event intended to connect two otherwise distant worlds, to bridge the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley with that of Beijing. OrderWithMe really encapsulates that idea. While deliberation on who would walk away victorious stretched across a full day, OrderWithMe was clearly a strong contender from the moment they stepped on stage. By the time they stepped off, Alexia and I were duking it out over which of us would claim it as a favorite in our Battlefield predictions video. You can find our full writeup of OrderWithMe Here.
With that said, the race was by no means clear cut. Coming in as a close runner-up is Anquanbao, a cloud-based security service for websites and the admins who run them. Not unlike CloudFlare, Anquanbao acts as a fast-caching middle layer to protect websites from hacks, denial of service attacks, and general outages. You can find our full writeup of Anquanbao here
Congratulations to all of the Disrupt Battlefield competitors for their incredible work. I’ve been to every last one of these events, and this was honestly the most remarkably sound batch of companies to date.