Taiwan has a bustling startup ecosystem with many first-time entrepreneurs taking the plunge to start their own business. In fact, according to a PwC survey, over 73 per cent of the startup founders in Taiwan last year were first-time entrepreneurs. Interestingly, these founders had an average prior work experience of more than 11 years. This indicates that mature players who have been working as a part of key industries for decades are also motivated to build their own business in Taiwan and take the jump. As such, the country’s burgeoning startup ecosystem has emerged as one of the leaders in the APAC region in the past few years.

However, there is still a lot of scope for growth for the region’s startups and that can come with scalability. To attain new markets and reach new heights, local startups need to expand beyond borders, and Southeast Asia is just the right market. With a rising middle class, increased internet penetration and smartphone usage, as well as a peaking internet economy, Southeast Asia has a lot of untapped potential.

But while Taiwan’s startup ecosystem has been steadily gaining momentum, the startups are still struggling to enter the region and establish a base here. As per reports, in 2020, only 26 per cent of startups were able to enter Southeast Asia (and this is including India) — this was a significant drop from 46 per cent in 2019.

Also read: Scaling your startup: A closer look at building your local entity and remote teams

To help Taiwan-based startups expand their reach across Southeast Asia, the Science & Technology Policy Research and Information Center (STPI) launched its Vision Programme. With the main goal of giving high-potential tech startups a global boost, this initiative has been helping Taiwan-based startups make meaningful partnerships and collaborations to realise their full potential for four years now.

Organised by STPI and supported by MOST, the Vision Programme seeks to help Taiwan-based startups build global connections.

For the Southeast Asia track of the Program, STPI chose to partner with e27 to help empower Taiwan-based startups to boost their chances of success when it comes to entering and scaling in the region. For years, e27 has been one of APAC’s go-to platforms for news, community, events, talent, funding, and more. Its competence in designing and running successful accelerators, private partner deal flows, and matching programmes has established its track record of bridging access to markets and building many different partnerships in its vast network.

Fostering meaningful connections and collaborations through networking sessions and more

This year, in its fifth edition, STPI’s Vision Programme successfully facilitated ecosystem connections to support the business development goals of participating startups.

From one-on-one mentorship sessions to focused roundtable discussions and country insights — the programme entailed various activities with a keen focus on sharing insights on business growth and scalability across different markets in Southeast Asia.

e27 also facilitated connections between local startups and potential partners. The ecosystem connection exercise under the Vision Programme this year yielded notable positive results in terms of insights, revenue, and funding potential for the participating startups.

“The reason we applied for the Vision Programme is because we would like to do business development in the SEA market. Singapore is the heart of the SEA. Our goal is to build connections with potential strategy partners and do business together to provide values to our target audience, manufacturing SMEs,” shared Bruce King, Business Development at GoodLinker.

Also read: How Malaysia nurtured Slurp and why the company is ready to take on the region

King believes that joining the programme allowed them to meet their goal of establishing connections across the region. “First, a professional media coverage caught the eye of some business owners from Malaysia and Indonesia. Our local partners [also] had a site visit. We had more than 10 online meetings to pitch with different organisations, investors, and cooperates. Now, we are able to keep sharing our successful cases with them until we launch our series-A fundraising project in 2022.”

e27 secured experienced Taiwan-based entrepreneurs and investment professionals to coach the startups. To help foster scalability, selected country mentors offered assistance to support startups as and when they are ready to enter their respective markets.

Another winning element of the programme was the Founder’s drinks conducted on April 14th 2021. This casual networking session organised at the Taiwan Tech Arena successfully connected startups from the US and Southeast Asian markets to local mentors and VCs.

The Online Demo Day conducted virtually on April 28th 2021 was attended by over a hundred participants including investors, startup founders, government representatives, accelerators, and innovators.

Bou-Wen Lin, STPI Director, thanked all participants and supporters and shared that despite most of the events shifting online due to COVID-19, this year’s programme has been quite successful.

Finding a global audience

Through the programme’s partnership with e27, participating startups gained exposure that allowed them to establish important visibility on a worldwide platform. Jeff Hu, CEO and Co-founder of Turing Chain explained that through e27’s coverage, Turing Chain was introduced to a slew of opportunities across the region.

“e27’s great article has helped us to be reposted by UNESCO’s IIEP ETICO to address Turing Certs’ commitment to deal with education fraud. We became in touch with reputable organisations such as Accenture Ventures (Singapore), Invest Tokyo (Japan), Department of Trade and Industry of the Philippines, Asian Institute of Management, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (Malaysia), NIA (Thailand), Scape (Singapore), XS APAC (Singapore), and Dusit (Thailand),” shared Hu.

Also read: MaGIC kicks off Malaysia Startup Hub for regional expansion

Not only that, the company also earned active contacts from the Malaysian government and a popular university in the Philippines. Hu added, “more than 15 thousand Taiwanese students from the National Tsing Hua University and the National Taipei University of Business will be using Turing Certs for official diplomas since July. Thanks to e27’s promotion.”

These are only some of the benefits yielded through the e27 partnership, whose mission has always been about empowering startups to grow and succeed in Southeast Asia and beyond. Dustin Masancay of e27 shared, “We’ve forged a solid relationship with STPI through the years. We thank them for continually believing in us to plan and execute this programme with great success. To this end, I would like to acknowledge the generous support of our friends from the ecosystem — government agencies, corporates, association and entrepreneur support organisations — for mentoring and discussing partnership opportunities with the Vision Programme startups.”

Helping startups realise their full potential in the new normal

Created specifically as a support system for the Taiwan government’s technology-based policies, STPI exists to help Taiwan address the growing demands of globalisation and the emerging knowledge economy. STPI functions as the government’s think-tank for science and technology policy and the major platforms for incorporating Taiwan’s research communities whose primary mission is to empower Taiwan’s digital economy.

Their role becomes even more pertinent in the new normal where digital is becoming more of a necessity than a choice. With digitalisation, limitations of geographical boundaries are blurring, opening up new avenues for Taiwan-based tech startups to explore markets beyond borders and STPI’s Vision Programme seeks to help them do that.

To learn more about the Vision Programme and future updates, visit its Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/vision.most.

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