More than an incubator
Startboard is an expert on business formation in Taiwan for ASEAN and Indian entrepreneurs. Exceptionally diligent about guiding the teams it works with, it puts itself in their shoes from the moment it takes them on. It anticipates the problems its foreign-passported clients are likely to encounter in Taiwan and even helps them network and drum up business.
When it worked with Vietnamese startup team Innoviz, the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ Investment Commission deemed Innoviz’s funding, which came from Vietnam, to be foreign investment, and took five months to complete its funding audit. By the time the team finally received permission to form the company, its prospective clients had gone elsewhere. Lin wanted to help the venture succeed, so he accompanied them on sales calls until they finally landed a design project from the Taoyuan City Government.
“The project wasn’t worth much in financial terms, but it was of enormous value to Innoviz.” The following year, Innoviz’s revenues grew tenfold when it used the reputation acquired through the Taoyuan project to win business from PX Mart and the Taichung World Flora Expo. Now on a stable financial footing, Innoviz operates locations in both Taiwan and Vietnam.
Startboard client AImazing works in the financial technology space. Startboard not only helped the Singaporean‡Malaysian team establish the company and its intellectual property rights, but also took it to visit banking groups. “Taiwan’s regulatory sandbox for financial oversight was still a work in progress, so we took them to visit legislators and to meet with people from Microsoft. In the end, market considerations compelled them to develop their business in Singapore instead.”
Even though AImazing decamped for Singapore, it chose to maintain an R&D center in Taiwan, taking advantage of Taiwan’s information engineering and IT strength to continue to develop its point-of-sale (POS) device business here.
Startboard brand ambassadors speak with international students at YilanYES, a startup hub in Yilan.