About 1,000 participants, including more than 200 venture capitalists, joined the Taiwan Demo Day in Silicon Valley on Saturday, the largest iteration to date of the event held ahead of Nvidia Corp’s annual GPU Technology Conference which runs from today to Thursday.
Taiwan Demo Day, co-organized by the Taiwan Next Foundation and the Startup Island Taiwan Silicon Valley Hub, took place at the Computer History Museum in California, showcasing 12 teams focused on physical artificial intelligence (AI) and agentic AI technologies.
Katie Hsieh (謝凱婷), founder of the Taiwan Next Foundation, said the event highlighted the strength of the Taiwan-US start-up ecosystem, with six Taiwan-based teams selected by StarFab Accelerator joining others from the US to showcase their innovations.
Photo: CNA
StarFab, founded in 2016 and regarded as Taiwan’s largest industry accelerator, is dedicated to fostering collaboration between start-ups and enterprises to accelerate
innovation and growth, according to its official Web site.
Hsieh said that about half of attendees came from the international start-up community, expressing hope that the event would foster new connections for Taiwan-led companies.
Startup Island Taiwan Silicon Valley Hub deputy director Uly Su (蘇祐立) said there was strong interest from local and US corporate investment divisions in Taiwan’s hardware technology, with this year’s attendance about double last year’s.
Joe Tolzmann, founder of Canadian software start-up RocketPlan Technologies Inc, said that his company was seeking opportunities to integrate Taiwan’s leading hardware technologies into its operations.
StarFab chairwoman Amanda Liu (劉晏蓉) led the group of six Taiwanese start-ups, which were selected in partnership with Nvidia and focus on manufacturing, healthcare and robotics.
Liu said she believes collaboration between large corporations and start-ups drives the best innovation, adding that these areas play to Taiwan’s industrial strengths and could enhance the global AI start-up sector.
Among the participants, Red Pill Lab Ltd cofounder RH Shih (石千泓) said his team uses Nvidia’s Isaac Lab framework to advance AI motion capture technologies that could be applied to home factories, emergency rescue operations and remotely controlled lunar robotics missions.
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