Check Out The Latest Trends of The Early-Stage Startup Investment Scene in Taiwan!

With the pandemic hitting the market, how is Taiwan’s startup investment scene going to be shaped? How has Taiwan’s track record been for the past five years? What are the trending startup industries? Taiwan is seeing an increase in the number of startups entering the market and more capital pouring in as well. This report shares the data and findings covering investment trends happening in Taiwan for the past few years, along with comparisons with our global counterparts.

In this report, we collaborated with the FINDIT team of the Taiwan Institute of Economics (TIER) and Crunchbase to give you a better picture of the latest trends in the Taiwan startup investment scene and market comparisons across the world. We also dive deep into the Health Tech, Energy Tech, and Electronics industries, which have all seen tremendous growth in the past few years.

We hope that through writing this report, we can shed light on happenings in Taiwan and showcase to the world Taiwan’s strengths and opportunities.

2021 Taiwan Industrial Transformation Report is Here!

In the past couple of decades, Taiwan has successfully shifted its core economic strength from labor-intensive industries to advanced technology industries. The island has established itself as a worldwide technology powerhouse, most notably for the production of hardware electronics. However, as we’re closing out on the information age and preparing ourselves for the next technological era, Taiwan’s current technology industry is also facing an inevitable transformation where many large corporations have to think about how to move away from the low-margin contract manufacturing businesses currently.

In this report, we used the “5 Brothers of Electronics”, a term to describe the 5 major Taiwan-based consumer electronics contract manufacturers in the world, to dissect how Taiwan’s major technology industries will be shifting. We conducted a case study on each one of the “5 Brothers of Electronics” to take a sneak peek at how Taiwan’s world-leading organizations will look like in the next decade. The report also covers a quick introduction on Taiwan’s unique technology scene, as well as its ongoing corporate innovation trends.

After reading this report, we hope that you’d gain a better understanding of Taiwan’s next phase of economic transformation and the possibilities it offers.

Diving Into The Six Municipalities’ Startup Ecosystems in Taiwan

In Taiwan, special municipalities are administrative division units reporting directly to the central government. A special municipality city is the highest rank of division and is equivalent to a province under the administrative structure of the government.

With the establishment of the six special municipalities, each municipal government in these metropolitan areas is eager to upgrade its industrial strengths and consolidate its industrial resources by offering attractive business incentives to local entrepreneurs and pairing local companies with innovative solutions. Many traditional manufacturers in Taiwan who have been playing a significant role in the global supply chain are aware of an inevitable transformation in order to keep up with the change happening around the world. As a result, these metropolitan city governments have been carving out their own startup ecosystems in order to accelerate innovation in relevant industries.

In this report, we will be documenting the startup ecosystems in these six municipalities, diving into their economic backgrounds, industry verticals, and startup support organizations. We hope after reading this report you will understand more about how diverse the startup ecosystems of these six municipalities actually are, and furthermore be inspired to learn more about Taiwan.

Latest Trends of Early Stage Startup Investments in Taiwan

Recently, with more programs connecting the startup communities in Taiwan, enthusiasm and energy have been pouring into the startup ecosystem. We are seeing an increase in the number of startups entering the market and more interest from investors. With the help from government resources and startup community builders, more talented and innovative startups have been nurtured, spurring investments within the market. But what exactly is happening in the Taiwan startup investment scene? what does the market look like? What are the hot industries? Who are the main investors?

The purpose of this report is to share the data and findings, covering investment trends happening in Taiwan for the past few years along with some analysis and comments. After you read this report, we hope to spark your interest and want to learn more about the Taiwan startup ecosystem.

You can find the original FINDIT report here.

Breaking down the New Taipei City Startup Ecosystem

Taipei City and New Taipei City have almost identical names, as they both are part of the Taipei Basin. As a result many people mistake New Taipei City as part of Taipei City or another name for the Taipei region. We want to take this great opportunity to introduce to you New Taipei City, the most populated city in Taiwan, and the number one spot in Taiwan for most businesses set up and capital of businesses.

This report will be split into two sections. First part discussing startup supporters like startup hubs, accelerators, incubators, co-working spaces, and government resources. The second part will be focusing on startup activity and introducing some examples that got early stage funding, followed up with some analysis on the startup growth in recent years, a short summary, and what we think lies ahead for the New Taipei City startup ecosystem. The purpose of this report is to share the data and findings on the New Taipei City startup ecosystem, and furthermore inspire readers to gain interest in this beautiful city.

A Deep Dive into the Taiwan Corporate Innovation Scene

We present this report to showcase how Taiwan’s corporates are actually noticing the global corporate venture capital (CVC) and corporate innovation trend and how they collaborate with startups through external forces such as investment, mergers, and acquisitions of new ventures, or strategic cooperation models. We hope that through reading this report, you can gain deeper insights into the Taiwan corporate innovation and investment scene.

Within this report, we gathered insights from partners, reports from reputable sources in Taiwan, corporates, institutes, partners, and some of our startup members. One thing we have noticed is that there is more and more corporate involvement in the startup ecosystem beyond just investments, they are gradually becoming more aggressive in working with startups, and have become more open-minded towards innovation. With successful cases of corporate innovation like Audi Taiwan and Acer, we can see that the Taiwan startup ecosystem is on the right track and becoming complete; not tilted towards any side of the spectrum, nor missing key pieces or players, both corporates and startups have the same innovative mindset and support each other.

Taiwan's Startup Investment Scene Uncovered!

This report was originally released by Ping-Hang (Eric) Fan and the FINDIT team of the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research on August 28th, 2019. FINDIT’s mission is to integrate and provide valuable information related to innovative entrepreneurship and market, such as early-stage investment market dynamics, perspectives on the startup ecosystem, and latest ideas of technologies and media. 

The purpose of this report is to share the data and findings on Taiwan’s startup investment space. In this edition of the report, we have translated the original document from Chinese to English and have also included some commentary on some of the data from a TSS perspective. You can find the original report here.