QUT Creative Enterprise Australia startups hone their pitches at Techsauce Global Summit in Thailand

A BRISBANE incubator for creative-tech startups has flown the flag for Australia at South-East Asia’s biggest tech conference.

Australian display at the Techsauce Global Summit in Thailand.

A BRISBANE incubator for creative-tech startups has flown the flag for Australia at South-East Asia’s biggest tech conference.

Six southeast Queensland and four interstate startups - all part of the Collider accelerator program at QUT Creative Enterprise Australia, the nation’s only creative-tech-focused incubator - took out the entire Australian pavilion at the Techsauce Global Summit in Bangkok at the weekend.

It was the culmination of an “immersion week” in which the entrepreneurs met with members of the burgeoning Thai tech sector and honed their “pitches” to win over investors.

Recently appointed QUT CEA chief executive officer Mark Gustowski said Thailand was a tech hub physically as well as figuratively.

“Whether it’s Cambodia, Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Korea, even China, Hong Kong or Singapore, Thailand sits at the centre of all that,” he said.

“And it has fantastic IT infrastructure: incredibly fast 4G, great digital content, high e-commerce consumers, and some really big creative brands.

“It’s also from our perspective one of the centres of the creative industries.

“So couple all that with a 68 million population and access to about two billion people in the greater ASEAN region, Thailand is almost a perfect landing spot.”

Mr Gustowski said from a creative-tech perspective Thailand was still a well-kept secret in the region.

“I’m really glad that there aren’t more people here from Western countries because it means we can try to make an impact,” he said.

The startups in the current Collider program offer cutting-edge products such as wedding previsualisation, cloud-based music artist and venue matching, ticket scalping prevention, holographic advertising and facial recognition for retail, branded videogaming jerseys and automated marketing for small business.

And there were promising signs after the immersion week and exhibiting at Techsauce.

“We’ve had investors ask if there were term sheets available, which means they’re pretty serious - they’re wanting to see the details of what an investment would look like,” Mr Gustowski said.

He said QUT CEA was looking at making the Bangkok trip an annual event.

The writer travelled to Bangkok as a guest of the Royal Thai Embassy, Canberra