MEXT Represented Turkey in Silicon Valley

MESS Technology Center MEXT team took its place with a special invitation at the Silicon Valley Start-up event organized by Plug and Play.

Plug and Play, the world's largest open innovation and entrepreneurship platform, which brought 35 Unicorns to the industry such as PayPal and DropBox, held the Silicon Valley Expo, a start-up event, on June 14-16, 2022. MEXT team participating in the event as the only technology center from Turkey and the region; Plug and Play teamed up with Microsoft and Google. More than 250 start-ups made presentations at the event held in San Francisco's Silicon Valley. In the organization where Turkey was represented by MEXT, Plug and Play CEO and founder Saeed Amidi specially hosted the MEXT team.

Plug and Play runs more than 60 acceleration programs per year. Plug and Play, which enables companies such as Dropbox, PayPal, Hippo, Honey, Rappi, N26, which has millions of users around the world, to become unicorns, has a total investment fund of 7 billion dollars. There are more than 40 thousand startups in the global startup pool of the platform.

Plug and Play Istanbul Office is at the service of Turkish industry with MESS

Continuing to work to benefit all its stakeholders, especially its members, MESS expands its global business network day by day with the aim of contributing to the competitiveness of the Turkish economy. Plug and Play, the world's largest open innovation and entrepreneurship platform, headquartered in Silicon Valley, continues to guide entrepreneurs at MESS Technology Center MEXT in Turkey.

Expressing that they will continue to learn and support the technologies of the future and all innovations that benefit the country, by taking the motto "Our job is transformation, our route is the future" as their guide, Özgür Burak Akkol, Chairman of the Board of MESS, said: We are working hard to meet with you. One of our most important goals is to provide our local entrepreneurs with the opportunity to find new markets and investments, and to introduce foreign enterprises to our members. With this goal, thanks to the cooperation we started with the world giant Plug and Play, the entire ecosystem of Plug and Play, which has more than 20 corporate partners in 400 countries, serves the Turkish industry in our Istanbul office. Our members can access Plug and Play's advanced venture network free of charge and meet with start-ups from all over the world. Thousands of people attended the meetings organized by Plug and Play Istanbul Office, of which we are the founding partner, in Turkey. Hundreds of initiatives were evaluated by MEXT, taking into account the priority innovation needs of our members; selected ones were brought together with our members, projects were developed. We will continue to follow developments in the world in order to discover proposals and project opportunities that will benefit our country and our members. Our work on this issue will continue to grow.” says.

During their visit, the MEXT team met with the giants and pioneers of the global technology ecosystem hosted by Plug and Play CEO and founder Saeed Amidi. The MEXT team, which also visited the newly opened Technology Center and campus of Microsoft in Silicon Valley, was the first team from our country to visit this facility. During the visits in Silicon Valley, the first steps were taken with Google for project and cooperation opportunities for the application areas of artificial intelligence in the industry. In addition, investment opportunities for our country and collaborations that will serve the twin transformation of our industry were evaluated with the top management teams of important venture capital funds such as Breakthrough Energy and Iconiq.