RESEARCH &
REPORTS

The 2026 Taiwan Startup Ecosystem Report continues its annual overview of Taiwan's dynamic startup landscape, featuring updated ecosystem data, emerging trends, and key policy developments. This year's edition places a special focus on the opportunities and challenges arising from the rapid surge of AI technologies, alongside highlights of Taiwan's startup M&A activity and the evolving investment landscape.

The "Taiwan's Startup Ecosystem and Investment Scene 2025" report highlights Taiwan's foundation for innovation and supportive startup ecosystem, provides an early-stage investment scene overview, and showcases some of Taiwan's most innovative startups. No matter where you are on your entrepreneurial journey, this report offers key insights essential to starting and growing a business in Taiwan.

The 2025 Taiwan Startup Ecosystem Report continues its annual overview of Taiwan’s startup landscape, highlighting updated ecosystem data, emerging trends, and policy developments. This year’s edition places a special focus on the opportunities and challenges brought by the surge of AI technologies. Organized into three sections—ecosystem highlights, AI trends, and policy momentum—the report provides a concise snapshot of Taiwan’s innovation trajectory in the global market.

Startup Island TAIWAN has hosted the inaugural and second Japan-Taiwan Innovation Summit consecutively in Tokyo in 2022 and 2023. This summit gathered over a hundred innovative startups from Taiwan, Japan, and beyond, along with participants from political, academic, industrial sectors, banks, investment institutions, trading companies, and media, totaling over a thousand attendees. The Japan-Taiwan Innovation Summit aims to build a bridge for cooperation in technology innovation and entrepreneurship between Japan and Taiwan. It connects ecosystems for innovation and entrepreneurship, facilitates finding partners for funding, technology, and market access, and lowers barriers for startups from both sides to enter international markets. In addition to focusing on the Japanese and Taiwanese markets, there has been a proactive demonstration of the cooperative advantages of "Japan + Taiwan," expanding business opportunities to ASEAN and Europe and America. In May 2024, Startup Island TAIWAN signed a memorandum of cooperation with the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. Both parties agreed to establish more meaningful exchanges between Japan and Taiwan. Therefore, in 2024, Startup Island TAIWAN plans to co-host the 2024 summit with the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. The event will feature diverse industry themes, including keynote speeches, forums, and presentations by Japanese and Taiwanese startups showcasing solutions in AI, big data, DX (Digital Transformation), GX (Green Transformation), ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), life sciences, smart cities, semiconductors, and chips. The summit will include media coverage, as well as combine an international media press conference and an invitation-only investor gala dinner.

2024 Discover Taiwan Startup Ecosystem" report provides an in-depth analysis of Taiwan's startup ecosystem, highlighting the growth potential of innovative companies, international collaboration opportunities, and their competitiveness and impact in the global market.

Take a peek into the benchmark startups emerging from Taiwan’s startup ecosystem. Selected for their trailblazing accomplishments and potential, we interview the nine NEXT BIG to see their origins and how they are disrupting their respective industries.

Government support is undoubtedly crucial in fostering innovation within the entrepreneurial landscape. However, achieving self-sustaining growth requires a shift towards a more open and cooperative approach. Consequently, Taiwan's path forward involves nurturing an internationally oriented and prominently visible entrepreneurial ecosystem. This raises the question: How can this path to growth be realized through a collaborative synergy between the government and the private sector? The answer to this question commences with a comprehensive understanding of the local environment.

In an era of rapid technological advancement, Taiwan has emerged as a formidable player in the global innovation ecosystem. This report offers an overview of Taiwan's recent journey towards becoming a thriving hub for entrepreneurship and innovation.

In efforts to support the recent trend and preference of Taiwanese startups’ expansion into the Japanese market; Startup Island TAIWAN conducted an analysis of the Japanese market across multiple verticals and published the finding in the “Jumpstart Your Japanese Journey” reports series.

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. We’ve also seen tremendous growth in the Health Tech, Energy Tech, and Electronics industries. 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 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 the world is closing out on the information age, Taiwan’s current technology industry is also facing an inevitable transformation. This report 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.

In Taiwan, special municipalities are administrative division units reporting directly to the central government. With the establishment of the six special municipalities, the municipal government in these metropolitan areas are all looking to upgrade its industrial strengths and consolidate their industrial resources by offering attractive business incentives to local entrepreneurs and pairing local companies with innovative solutions. This report documents the startup ecosystems in these six municipalities, diving into their economic backgrounds, key industries, and startup support organizations.

With various programs connecting the startup communities in Taiwan, enthusiasm and energy have been pouring into the startup ecosystem. Taiwan is seeing an increase in the number of startups entering the market and more interest from investors. With assistance from government resources and startup community builders, more talented and innovative startups have been nurtured, spurring investments within the market. This report shares the data and findings covering investment trends happening in Taiwan for the past few years.

This report showcases how Taiwan’s corporates are engaging in corporate venture capital (CVC) and corporate innovation. There is increasing corporate involvement in the startup scene, with more corporates now collaborating with startups through investments, mergers and acquisitions, or strategic cooperation models. With successful cases of corporate innovation like Audi Taiwan and Acer, the Taiwan startup ecosystem is growing its stakeholder base.