Visit of Daegu City by Plug and Play delegation including General Chairman Saeed Amidi
* Accelerator: A person whose main job is to select and invest in early-stage start-up companies and provide professional childcare is also called a start-up planner.
Daegu Metropolitan City announced on April 4 (Thursday) that a PNP delegation (East Asia representative Philip Vincent (Japan representative), Cho Yong-joon (Korea representative)), including general chairman Saeed Amidi, will visit Daegu.
The PNP delegation, scheduled to visit Daegu in the afternoon of the 13th (Thu), started with a meeting with Daegu Metropolitan City Mayor Hong Joon-pyo, visited Daegu Samsung Creative Campus, established Daegu branch in Daegu Scale-up Hub, and held local venture start-up related events such as PNP open innovation event. Visits and business negotiations will be held.
Daegu Metropolitan City and PNP signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to foster global venture startups in Las Vegas, USA on January 2023, when CES 1 was held. After the event, the Daegu Metropolitan City finalized the establishment of the Daegu branch in the first half of the year and the operation of the joint venture startup incubation program after several business discussions with the PNP Korea branch to materialize the contents of the agreement.
PNP is a leading accelerator in Silicon Valley, USA, which has discovered and invested in more than 35 start-ups, including 1,600 unicorn companies* such as PayPal, Dropbox, and Lending Club. Recently, it is operating more than 60 Open Innovation programs around the world with global conglomerates such as Mercedes-Benz and Facebook.
* Unicorn company: Unlisted venture startup company with a corporate value of more than 10 billion dollars (approximately 1 trillion won)
The PNP delegation will first visit the Daegu Metropolitan City Sangyeok Government Complex to meet with Daegu Metropolitan City Mayor Hong Joon-pyo to discuss future cooperative relations, and tour the Samsung Chamber of Commerce, Cheil Industries Memorial Hall, and Samsung C-Lab venture startups at the Daegu Samsung Creative Campus.
Afterwards, they will visit the Daegu Scale-up Hub (Dash) in Dongdaegu Venture Valley, where the PNP Daegu branch office will be located, and attend an open innovation event. At the open innovation event, Cho Yong-joon, the representative of Korea, announced plans to operate the PNP Daegu branch in the future, followed by a special lecture on venture startups by Saeed Amidi, general chairman, for local venture entrepreneurs.
In the future, based on the Daegu branch, PNP plans to jointly discover local companies with global expansion capabilities with Daegu Metropolitan City, and provide mentoring and workshop programs by Silicon Valley experts in the US to selected companies.
The main accelerating targets will go beyond the existing start-up companies to include free-star and star companies in Daegu Metropolitan City, and ABB companies.
In addition, local mid-sized companies interested in innovation programs are planning to continuously expand the scope of cooperation with Daegu Metropolitan City by enabling local mid-sized companies to establish overseas investment strategies and utilize PNP's global networking to participate as PNP global cooperation partners. We are negotiating with 2-3 companies.
Lastly, if the Korean branch of PNP acquires the status to conduct investment activities in Korea, the scope of cooperation will be expanded, including the creation of funds for global expansion.
Daegu Metropolitan City plans to announce within the first half of the year after the organizational reorganization in May, the 'Plan for Revitalizing Powerful Venture Startups for the 8th Civil Election', including the recently held local VC meeting and PNP global cooperation plan.
Hong Joon-pyo, Mayor of Daegu Metropolitan City, said, “I sincerely welcome the establishment of the PNP Daegu branch,” and added, “We will promote cooperation projects as soon as possible to support unicorn companies in the region.”