Welcome to ‘The Startup State’ - a weekly bulletin from the GEN Policy and Research team highlighting key entrepreneurship announcements, reports, commentary and features from around the world.
News
- APEC has launched the APEC Startup Alliance to enhance cooperation among member countries' startup ecosystems. Around 400 organizations are participating, including entrepreneur associations, government agencies, accelerators, and venture capitalists (Chosun)
- Bermuda has launched its first national entrepreneurship strategy, with input from more than 150 stakeholders across business, education and industry. The strategy ensures that Bermudian entrepreneurs are seen as the primary backbone of national growth (Government of Bermuda)
- Nigeria has started work on designing a multi-agency regulatory sandbox framework, led by the National Information Technology Development Agency (MSME Africa Online)
- India is seeking to build a national startup database that will track founder details, funding status, growth stage, geographical presence, patents, and more. The platform, under development by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, will serve as a management system to handle applications, evaluations, grants, mentor programs, and more (MyIndMakers)
- Egypt has activated its 'Startup Charter', with the deputy prime minister and the minister of planning and economy convening 50 companies, agencies, investors and entrepreneurs as part of efforts to strengthen Egypt's startup ecosystem (BusinessToday)
- Australia is facing a fierce backlash over capital gains tax changes unveiled in the 2026 Budget that would translate to tax rates of up to 47% for business founders and investors. Memes by founders welcoming the Prime Minister as a 47% silent shareholder in their business, plus open letters have sought to highlight the risk to entrepreneurship and make the case for exemptions for founders, startup employees, and investors (Guardian)
Comment and analysis
- LaunchVic is dead. Long live Innovation Victoria (Eloise Keating and David Adams, Startup Daily)
- The exit cul-de-sac: Why Japan's unicorn dreams require a cultural pivot to M&A (Mark Bivens, founding partner, Great Wave Ventures)
- The long game behind Miami's tech boom (Rachel Curry, contributor, Refresh Miami)
- Can entrepreneurship save the American soul? (Christopher Wink, editor, technical.ly)
- India's AI ecosystem: Everything, everywhere, all at once (Anoushka Roy and Shweta Kushe, contributors, Tech Policy Press)
- Why Korean hardware startups fail after building working prototypes (Zee Cindy, writer, Korea Tech Desk)
- Beyond the €4.5bn boom: Can Serbia's tech ecosystem navigate its own success? (Felicia Olteanu, writer, The Recursive)
Features
- Nigerian fintechs march into banks' territory (African Business)
- Inside New Mexico's push to build a quantum startup hub (State Scoop)
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The opinions expressed in the articles above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Global Entrepreneurship Network.