Taiwanese entrepreneurs in Kaohsiung highlight new possibilities for 5G and smart technology.

The August sun shines bright in Taiwan’s south, but the future looked even brighter inside the Kaohsiung Exhibition Center, where more than 250 startups, enterprises, investors, and government accelerators gathered at the 2022 Meet Greater South 5G AIoT Expo.   

Launched by Business Next Media in 2011, Meet is a startup community platform that provides news, venture capital funding, and industry events. This year’s Meet Greater South, held on August 26-27, featured seven themes: 5G and AIoT, blockchain, digital content and experience technology, food-related technology, marketing technology and new commerce, green technology, and new businesses. The idea is to facilitate meetings between startups and investors, government actors, and digital giants to find new opportunities for collaboration.  

“Seeing these people’s dreams, ideas, triumphs, and setbacks up close really inspires me to want to help them succeed,” says Kyle Chen, director of Business Next Media and Meet. Working with Meet since 2014 has enabled him to follow success stories like iChef’s from the very beginning. The software company is now the most awarded point-of-sale system, serving over 5,000 restaurants in Asia. But Chen still recalls when Meet gave the three co-founders six minutes on stage after naming iChef one of the top 30 startups in Taiwan in 2014.  

“I remember seeing these boys walk onto the stage, wearing suits and aprons,” he says. “They had practiced for over six hours the day before to make sure their presentation was perfect. I was impressed by how seriously they took their business and the opportunity, and I think that’s partly what’s made them so successful.” But regardless of whether entrepreneurs succeed or fail with their ventures, he says, Meet’s most important assignment is giving them the best possible chance. 

Although many startups gravitate toward Silicon Valley, some see significant advantages in building their business locally. TMYTEK Founder and President Su-Wei Chang says he chose Taiwan as the base for his mmWave total solution business because the island’s robust supply chains make it possible to create a one-stop-shop solution that can easily be integrated with the global ecosystem. This approach has helped him serve international clients better. 

“For 5G, the ecosystem is very important, which means we need to work closely with system integrators,” says Chang. “Next year, the U.S. government will focus on building infrastructure to prepare for autonomous cars, which means that right now, there’s a very good opportunity to increase investments.” 

Events like Meet’s also allow digital giants to showcase services that could benefit entrepreneurs. In a bright pavilion, Cisco (mainly known for the video meeting software Webex) displays its Meraki Go, a cloud-based IT solution for startups and small businesses. 

“The idea is to make the infrastructure as simple as possible so that entrepreneurs can focus on doing their jobs,” says Yvonne Wang, a Cisco collaboration sales specialist. “We integrate a lot of different applications to make work more convenient for our customers.” Among other offered solutions, Cisco’s new devices enable employees to connect their phones to any desk to see their calendars or join meetings.  

Samson Huang, co-founder of Bean Friends Forever (bff), says the future of the food industry is also all about customization. bff is a flexible coffee subscription service for businesses and private consumers who, after answering six questions, will be offered the most suitable beans for their tastebuds. The company works with ten roasteries across Taiwan, offering over 60 different types of beans. But this is only the beginning for the startup, says Huang. 

“We’d like to group customers according to their flavor profile preferences,” he says. “Say, for example, that Starbucks wants to develop a nutty-flavored cold brew. Then we will be able to very precisely pinpoint what customer segment they can target. So our services will range from product development to customer targeting. The moonshot will be to provide predictive analytics for all major food and beverage companies.” 

Huang guides me through the questionnaire, and the results suggest that Miaoli-based Pergram Coffee’s Black Forest blend is my perfect match. After trying a cup, I can confirm that the algorithm works flawlessly. Neither sour nor bitter, the beans provide a perfectly balanced flavor that I didn’t know was missing from my life.  

At the other side of the exhibition hall stands Foodland Ventures, which invests and assists startups in the food industry, from agriculture to restaurants and the logistics in between. Or as Leo Lin, Foodland marketing and community manager, puts it: “anything that’s related to technology and pushes the value chain forward.” Lin says the agriculture and food industries are growing with countless creative solutions, and he hopes to find the latest one at Meet’s expo. 

“This year we’re looking more upstream to small agriculture,” he says. “So now at this event in Kaohsiung, we’re looking to connect with upstream startups that are solving challenges in the agriculture business today.”  

Putting the Ps in PPP 

“We should regard problems as opportunities and challenges,” said Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai during Meet Greater South’s opening ceremony. The mayor added that Kaohsiung City’s heavy and traditional industries have been developing for half a century. While these sectors have brought prosperity and jobs to the city, they have also presented the city with two massive challenges: digital transformation and zero-carbon transformation. Now, the local government turns to startups to find common solutions. 

The Kaohsiung City Government recently launched a variety of 5G and AIoT initiatives in its newly built Taiwan Startup Terrace. The park integrates resources of central and local governments, industries, and cloud services to enable new teams to verify their concepts and business models. These types of efforts have not gone unnoticed by entrepreneurs and investors. 

“Although this Meet Greater South event is run by Business Next, the government definitely put a lot of support into these events and initiatives like the setup of TTA (Taiwan Tech Arena),” says Foodland Ventures’ Lin. “You see a lot of initiatives putting resources into the startup space and getting global brands and accelerators coming in and bringing the connections needed by Taiwanese startups.” 

Atayalan is one of the exhibiting startups born out of government-funded projects. Originally a public 5G project, the company now builds private 5G enterprise networks spanning wireless communications, data networking, and cloud-native services.  

“We focus on smart factories, especially warehouses, and deploy whole systems in a connected cloud platform,” says Winson Yang, senior engineering manager of Atayalan. “Typically when enterprises think of wireless solutions, they first think of Wi-Fi. But Wi-Fi has some drawbacks, like shared spectrums, and cannot accommodate that many devices at once, which means customers encounter problems with interference.” 

These issues can be solved with 5G solutions, Yang notes, adding that another advantage of Atayalan’s products is their light weight and mobility. Currently, the company focuses on markets with a high degree of government support for 5G, which Yang notes will only increase in numbers.  

“The U.S., Germany, and Japan have enterprise-dedicated spectrums, which means that’s where most of our clients are,” he says. “But many countries plan to implement dedicated spectrums to help enterprises transform into Industry 4.0, so the opportunities will only increase.”  

Meet’s Chen says that the startup environment in Taiwan has changed drastically in the last decade, much thanks to government initiatives and grants.  

“It’s possible now to start a company with no resources other than passion and a great idea,” he says. Perhaps equally important, Chen notes, is that the general attitude toward entrepreneurship has improved. “People feel that it’s okay to try now because it’s okay to fail – and daring to fail is the only way you can succeed.”