By Sonal Rupani

There's never been a better time to be a young entrepreneur in Asia. There are more venture capitalists than ever in the region, many of them recent arrivals from Silicon Valley attracted by the supercharged growth rates in countries such as China, India, and Vietnam. At the same time, multinationals like Intel (INTC), Microsoft (MSFT), and IBM (IBM) are busy funding entrepreneurs too, investing in new companies regionwide. And they're impressed with the creativity they're seeing from local entrepreneurs. Gone are the days when startups were based largely on lower costs than the West. "I've been in this [region] for 10 years, and when you look across these markets, it's fantastic," says John Hummelstad, Singapore-based regional director for emerging technology and venture capital at Microsoft. "It's not just labor arbitrage anymore. It's invention, it's intellectual-property creation."

With this blossoming of entrepreneurship, now is a good time to look at some of the top young entrepreneurs. BusinessWeek.com polled our readers to nominate their candidates for the best young entrepreneurs in the Asia-Pacific region. In this slide show, we've put together a list, based on those nominations as well as suggestions from our editors and reporters, of two dozen of the most impressive ones around. Read about them and vote for your favorite. We'll publish the results soon.