Cisco and Infocomm Investments Launch Innovation Program for Singapore Focused Start-Ups

SINGAPORE and BARCELONA, SPAIN--(Marketwired - Nov 18, 2015) - Infocomm Investments Pte Ltd (IIPL), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), and Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today signed a memorandum of intent to identify and nurture Singapore-focused start-ups to participate in the Cisco-Technopreneur Action Group, Platform Accelerated Start-ups (TAG.PASS) Smart Innovation Programme.

The programme will help start-ups create innovative applications using sensors, big data, analytics and Internet of Things (IoT) across industry verticals like healthcare, the public sector, education, manufacturing and financial services, to enable the country's Smart Nation vision.

TAG.PASS is a pre-acceleration programme of IIPL that helps aspiring entrepreneurs develop their minimum viable product, and prepare them for other acceleration programmes or work with corporate innovation teams. An extension of that is TAG.PASS Corporate Innovations which this Cisco-TAG.PASS Smart Innovation Programme is modelled after.

Over the last ten years, Singapore has invested more than US$22 billion in research and development to help companies develop, test and commercialise new products and solutions. Public sector investments have supported about 400 tech start-ups and generated 800 licenses over the last four years. Singapore boasts the world's densest start-up ecosystem at JTC LaunchPad@one-north, which houses 500 start-ups and a community of accelerators, incubators and venture capitalists.

Dr. Alex Lin, Head of IIPL, says, "I'm excited about this partnership with Cisco, as it provides a beneficial platform for Singapore start-ups to gain access to Cisco's global wealth of resources and access in smart city tech, such as IOT. Through initiatives in the MOI, such as the exchange programme with Cisco Barcelona, we are helping to create a collaborative ecosystem throughout the world, nurturing innovation regardless of geography. Cisco is a great example of corporate co-innovation with start-ups that delivers strong value. I look forward to start-ups with innovative IoT solutions making use of this opportunity to develop their product that in turn, enables and drives our smart nation mandate."