More than 6,000 participants expected at START Global Summit x Hack

More than 6,000 participants from the European ecosystem, in addition to stakeholders from Silicon Valley and Southeast Asia, are expected to attend the START Global Summit x Hack 2024. In excess of 800 start-ups, 900 investors and 2,500 young talents are set to take part in the business and tech conference. According to a press statement it is led by students and focuses on early-stage entrepreneurship.

They participants will come together on March 21 and 22 under the motto “Dare to Evolve”. The event is being held at the newly built St.Galler Kantonalbank hall, with the aim of encouraging intergenerational dialog. This melting pot of big tech executives and the next generation of Swiss and European talents is “genuinely unique”, the press release explains. The partners of the summit include Google, Forbes, the University of St.Gallen, DKSH and Nasdaq, the latter of which has been prominently promoting the event on LinkedIn and in public spaces in New York.

In terms of the event’s agenda, participants will examine what meaningful innovation really is and how the ecosystem can promote this, among other activities. More than 170 top-class speakers have been secured for the event, including Max Hodak, co-founder of Neuralink (a company headed up by Elon Musk), Sepp Hochreiter, one of the fathers of Artificial Intelligence, and Péter Frankhauser, CEO and co-founder of the Zurich-based robotics firm ANYbotics. More than 30 unicorns will also be in attendance, including DeepL, On and wefox.

A hackathon with more than 500 European students is additionally set to take place in parallel with the summit. Across a 36-hour innovation sprint, the participants will be tasked with solving real problems formulated by partners such as the SIX Swiss Exchange, the Bell Food Group, and the UN, among others. At the final Pitching Competition, the teams will battle it out for the top prize of 10,000 Swiss francs, which will be decided by a jury. ce/mm