The HICOOL 2026 Global Entrepreneurship Competition is set to kick off. This year's event has attracted a total of 10,209 startup projects by 13,472 contestants from across the globe. The competition will run from late May to August.

Overseas projects account for 56 percent of all entries this year, while foreign participants make up over 30 percent of the total, representing 141 countries and regions worldwide. The number of the projects in the artificial intelligence sector has increased by nearly 40 percent year on year, while most projects are for cutting-edge fields such as embodied intelligence and biomedicine.

Three new sub-events have been set up for this year.

The HICOOL Youth Entrepreneurship Dream Competition is open to current students at over 300 universities worldwide and young entrepreneurs-to-be who have graduated within the past two years.

The OPC Special Contest targets a new generation of AI-powered solo entrepreneurs-to-be, offering dedicated communities, computing power subsidies, free workspaces, and other tailored support.

The Enterprise Challenge is co-hosted by the hosting districts and leading enterprises. Partner companies open up real-world application scenarios, calling for solutions from small and medium-sized startup teams worldwide to promote collaborative innovation among enterprises of all sizes.

For this year's event, a mutual recommendation and recognition mechanism has also been developed, carrying out project referrals with entrepreneurship competitions including Singapore's SLINGSHOT and China's HK TECH 300 and Zhongguancun International Advanced Technology Competition, enabling more promising projects to gain access to HICOOL.

(Source: The Beijing News)