Top 5 Cities In The World To Launch Your Startup - Some May Surprise You

© Burger/Phanie/Rex Shutterstock An infographic showing the top 5 places to launch your startup holds a few surprises. Richard Madison of The Brighton School of Business and Management used various criteria for the infographic. It  recently published by Seedstars World, a Swiss-based company holding competitions in emerging markets to help grow ideas and businesses, identifying the most promising startups. I asked SeedStars founder Alisee de Tonnac for her take on what makes each city one of the best places launch a startup.


1. Kuala Lumpur
© Vincent Thian, File/AP Photo In this Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2015 photo, a worker is silhouetted against Malaysia's Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia is much cheaper in terms of cost of living than Singapore. So we’re seeing many startups living in Thailand or Malaysia, but incorporated in Singapore, where there are a lot of private & public institutions that are investing in startups & it is easier to incorporate there.
Startups tend to also prefer Malaysia because it is a good test market (larger than Singapore) and you have three different nationalities present. So if you make it in Malaysia, you have a good sense of potential markets like the Chinese, Malay/Indonesian and Indian.
*Seedstars Kuala Lumpur coming up on the 2 of December.

2. Beijing
© ChinaFotoPress/ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images A robot carries meals during the World Robot Exhibition 2015 at China National Convention Center on Nov 24, 2015 in Beijing, China. The culture in China does not foster entrepreneurship. Today’s youth have a life that is strictly controlled by their parents, and traditional jobs are still very highly valued. However the situation is changing very quickly and with the rising number of success stories, entrepreneurship is slowly becoming a desirable career path. China is also increasingly focusing on higher-end, higher-margin advanced manufacturing. “Made in China” no longer means cheap and low-quality.

China has a tax relief program for startups with annual tax deductions of up to RMB9,600 (US$1,500) to businesses established by previously unemployed workers and recent college graduates.
Early this year, China set up a USD 6.5B VC fund for startups. Focus is on seed stage startups. The country now runs at least 1,500 incubators under the Ministry of Science and Technology’s 27-year-old Torch Programme, a nationwide initiative that provides policy, financing and consulting services for hi-tech firms.
*Seedstars Shanghai winner of 2015 is Bitnexo, which is a Bitcoin-backed Cross Border Commerce Payments between China – Latam.

3. Warsaw
© Bartek Sadowski/Bloomberg City skyscrapers stand illuminated at evening on the city skyline in Warsaw, Poland, on Saturday, Feb. 8, 2014. Poland is considered stronger than Czech Republic and Slovakia because it has a bigger internal market & stronger entrepreneurial history. Warsaw has several success stories such as Allegro (final exit to Naspers worth around 2bn), Wirtualna Polska, Onet, LiveChat (IPO), Nasza Klasa. It is also attracting some of the top tech companies around the world such as Google, which will be opening a campus by the end of this year. The government is also getting involved. Warsaw is the main sponsor of Bitspiration (the biggest and the most westernized conference for startups in Poland). The major hubs across the country are: Warsaw, Krakow, Gdansk and Wroclaw.

. Moscow
© Pavel Golovkin/AP Photo The Evolution Tower, left, and the Imperia Tower, second right, are seen from the top of the Federation Tower in Moscow International Business Center, Russia, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2015. Entrepreneurship is really valued nowadays even though failure is still feared and condemned in the business world (however we have witnessed this in all ecosystems apart from Silicon Valley & Tel Aviv). Due to their Soviet heritage the pool of quality engineers is high and so is the number of hardware companies. There is a strong emphasis on IoT (Internet of Things) these days. Unfortunately, due to political tension & currency devaluation there has been clear brain drain where entrepreneurs tend to leave the country for Silicon Valley, SE Asia and Europe in order to build their ventures. The ecosystem, compared to its neighbors is the most mature both on the startup side as on the investor side (still not enough VCs) and you can easily find several events per day.
*Seedstars Moscow winner of 2015, Texel is the world’s first engaging 3D scanner.

5. Bangalore
© Sanjit Das/Bloomberg Infosys employees seen inside the 'eye' building at the Infosys campus in Bangalore, India on Monday, Feb 4, 2013. Entrepreneurship is booming, especially in Indian cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, New Delhi or Chennai. The market is huge and the number of engineers graduating per year in the country is impressive. Traditionally, Bangalore’s startup scene is very focused on engineering and tech development, so founders in the city struggle to find good business development or design counterparts. The corporate tax level is 30%, plus surcharges. There are no incentives for startups and it can take several months to set up a business, the cost is not prohibitively high.
In Bangalore there are at least 10 startup events happening every week, starting from DemoDays, targeted hackathons, startup meetups, conferences, and competitions, many organized by corporations.
*Seedstars Bangalore winner of 2015: Strike, which helps email power the users research of people inside their Gmail app on mobile (basically a rapportive for Mobile).

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