A new partnership formed between the Student Entrepreneur Development (SED) team at UNSW Innovations and China based VC firm 23Seed is seeing the annual UNSW Startup China program be filmed as part of a new Chinese reality TV program called “The Next Unicorn”. Whilst there was already an international element to the UNSW program via relationships with key partners like government organisation SETO, accelerator network Innohub and others, the new partnership guarantees significant media exposure for the participating Australian startups and for three teams, flights to Shanghai to participate in the next stages of the TV series.

In early December, 23Seed will be filming the both the “China ready workshop” and “UNSW Startup China” pitching events, where they will select the most suitable UNSW led startups for their China markets. Investors involved in the competition include Fishburners Founder Peter Davison, Andrey Shirben of Follow the Seed, Steve Hoffman from Founder Space and Bob Xu from ZhenFund.

The participating teams in the UNSW Startup China program all have at least one UNSW student or alumni in their teams but the competition have become somewhat of a ‘battle of the accelerators’ with teams being in current or past cohorts of the muru-D, Startmate, Slingshot, Springboard, H2 and UNSW’s own SED programs.

These developments further support the findings of a recent report by Australia’s Chief Scientist Professor Ian Chubb, that UNSW Australia is leading the way locally in entrepreneur development.

Footage of the program will be broadcast on CBN, the largest financial broadcast media group in China in early 2016.

Joe Allen | UNSW Innovations, Student Entrepreneur Devleopment