Miami, .- The forum eMerge Americas, which aims to be a “bridge” between the United States and Latin America for everything related to technology and innovation, will gather from Monday in Miami to “startups”, investors, business executives and government officials.
This is the sixth edition of this forum, which in 2018 brought together more than 15,000 visitors and more than 400 companies from 40 countries, organizers told Efe.
The president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, who will speak by teleconference, Paulo Passoni, the person in charge of managing an investment fund in innovation of 5,000 million dollars for Latin America recently announced by SoftBank, and Steve Murray, partner of the Revolution Growth fund, which it only invests in ecosystems outside the traditional hubs, are among the speakers.
The final intervention, on Tuesday 30, will be in charge of the singer of urban music, entrepreneur and investor “Pitbull”, as it is known in the artistic world to Armando Christián Pérez, who will talk about how to “design your future”.
The also Cuban-American as Pitbull Felice Gorordo, new CEO of eMerge Americas, tells Efe that the forum “more than an event is a platform” that is transforming South Florida into a technological “hub” with unique characteristics within EE .US., As its link with other American countries.
That tie will be reinforced in this edition with the signing of a memorandum of understanding between Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Giménez and the Association of Entrepreneurs of Latin America (ASELA), which will allow those interested in the South of Florida is incorporated into a network that has more than 90,000 members.
The signing will take place within the so-called eMerge Americas Government Summit (eGOV), organized by the SAP company, and will be preceded by the intervention of the president of Chile, a country that, according to Gorordo, is an “example” in entrepreneurship and innovation within Latin America.
The managing director of eMerge highlighted the framework created to promote “startups”, as well as the “digital transformation of the public sector” in Chile.
The Minister of Economy, Development and Tourism of Chile, José Ramón Valente, will attend the signing ceremony.
Gorordo also highlighted the Women, Innovation and Technology Summit (WIT) of the 2019 program, organized jointly with the Center for Female Entrepreneurial Leadership at Massachusetts Babson University.
According to the executive, the interest in helping to narrow the gender gap in technology and innovation is something that has been evident since the beginning of this annual forum, which has values such as diversity and inclusion.
Jean Case, president of the National Geographic Society of the USA and CEO of the Case Foundation, will be the main speaker of the WIT summit.
Gorordo said that after eMerge 2019 a document will be published with recommendations to reduce the gender gap and efforts will be made to try to apply them not only in South Florida but also in Latin America.
As in previous editions, eMerge Américas 2019 will have the competition called “Hackathon”, organized by Wyncode Academy, Ford, GE Digital and Ultimate Software, which this year has the theme “Connecting Miami with the world”.
The participating teams will have 12 hours to elaborate their projects and present their demos to a panel of judges.
But Gorordo stresses that “the heart and soul” of eMerge Americas continues to be the “startups” fair, for which there were 500 requests for participation and 100 were selected, one third of them from the United States, one third from Latin America and Another third of the rest of the world.
The founding partners of eMerge Americas are Medina Capital, A Rod Corporation, Greenberg Traurig, Knight Foundation, Miami-Dade County and The Miami Herald.
Following the example of the Art Basel Fair, which is celebrated in December in Miami and is surrounded by hundreds of events related to art, this year Miami will have a technological week in coincidence with eMerge Americas.
On the occasion of the 2019 forum, a report was published on how South Florida’s emerging companies were looking for capital in 2018, a year in which important records were achieved and that, according to Gorordo, can be beaten this year. .
In 2018, 128 operations were carried out, which meant a total of 1,380 million dollars of investment in startups in South Florida. Three quarters of the inverted figure correspond to Miami and its metropolitan area.
According to the report, the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area was the eleventh most important in the United States in 2018 in terms of volume of venture capital investments.
45% of the startups in South Florida that received investment in 2018 have some kind of software in their offer and the most active sector was health care, with 23% of operations. (EFEUSA)
