Startups joining Taiwan Incubator will also receive financial and legal services from international partners for oversea soft-landing and market access program across Asia Pacific region.
Taiwan Incubator — a partnership between Taiwan Accelerator, Feng Chia University, and Chaoyang University of Technology, which plays as a mentor for early stage startups in Taiwan — has announced that it will be investing NTD30 million (US$1 million) in startups through its incubator program starting from next year.
Among other benefits, startups selected to join the programme will receive up to NTD1 million (US$33,000) in seed funding from Taiwan Incubator, financial and legal services from KPMG and PWC, and cross-region market access supports from Entrepreneur’s Training Camp of Peking University, The DMZ and EBN.
The Taiwan Incubator program is supported by the combined resources of Taiwan Accelerator, Feng Chia University, Chaoyang University of Technology, Small and Medium Enterprise Administration of the Taiwan Ministry of Economic Affairs (SMEA), Chinese Business Incubation Association (CBIA) and Formosa Transnational Attorneys at Law.
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“Unlike other Incubator programs, the Taiwan Incubator not only provides free entrepreneurship classes but also supports startups with initial funding, international resources and guarantee of minimum 5% of weekly revenue growth through back-to-back business advisories,” said James Lin, Director of TI.
“The program is designed to enable applicants to effectively produce a minimum viable product, recruit other founding members, and be investor and market ready at the end of the program,” he shared.
These startups will also get access to Taiwan Incubator’s resources, he said, “which means they will have a huge network for the follow-on investment and market to test their products. We believe that through our incubation, startups will be capable of speeding up to gain three key resources – money, market and founding members.”
The Taiwan Incubator program will be conducted in two phases. The first phase is open to all startups and will have a month-long startup training phase, including some entrepreneurship courses to empower applicants to familiarise with their go-to industry and startup ecosystem.
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In this phase, Taiwan Incubator will scout out the startups with the most growth potential. “No equity exchange is required during this phase and founding teams are recommended but not requested to attend all the workshops and mentoring sessions with industry leaders as we’d like to give our startups the most customised and flexible approach to scale.” James emphasised.
At the end of the first month, Taiwan Incubator will organise an internal pitching competition and select up to 10 startups to be enrolled into the incubation phase.
In this stage, Taiwan Incubator will take up 6% of equity in each company. In return, each team will receive NTD1 million cash for seed funding, and financial and legal resources from the partners. They will also be introduced to investors (angels, accelerators, VCs) who will help them with follow-on funding if startups are meeting their milestones.
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During this time, the startups will be able to test their ideas with Taiwan Incubator’s network, access to the partnered co-working spaces across Taiwan and build up relationships with Singapore and Silicon Valley’s investors.
The Taiwan Incubator programme is open to Taiwanese and non-Taiwanese founders of tech or non-tech startups, even without a team, who are enthusiastic about starting up their own businesses.
Applications are open now till January 31, 2018.
To submit your proposal, click here.
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Disclosure: e27 is an official partner of Taiwan Accelerator #2 Demo Day in 2017
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