Florida’s Global Tech Hub with eMerge America’s Melissa Medina

Hi everyone, I'm Bonnie Schneider on Lincoln Road in Miami with a special guest, Melissa Medina, who is the co-founder and CEO of Emer Americas. And it's been a wonderful conference. Uh, tell me about how this all got started.

Thank you. Oh, it's a long story, but essentially it stemmed from a place of passion for this community and nobody really believed that Miami had a thriving tech ecosystem. So really my father was a visionary behind it and said, is there anything we can do to help foster the tech ecosystem here in South Florida?

And again, once we opened our doors the first year and realized, no, we're gonna do this annually and it's gonna grow organically year after year. To give you an idea, we expect over 22,000 people over the next two days. When we first started, we had around four or 5,000 in our first event, and even that was double.

We had one anticipated for the first event. So it continues to grow. What Are some of the areas this year that you really focused on?

Yeah, every year we focus on emerging technologies where Emerge Americas, and this year we did have a focus on AI and quantum. We talk a lot about investment entrepreneurship across the board. I know that this year there's been this climate tech area Yeah.

Track and I report on sustainability for Techstrong tv. So I'd love to hear more about that. Yeah.

I think, um, you know, if you're aware of Miami is now a designated climate tech hub. President Biden selected 31 cities around the US to designate tech hubs for a certain vertical, and Miami was chosen as a climate tech resiliency hub. We wanted to make sure we were telling that story at emerge as well.

There are a lot of companies in the sustainability and climate tech space that are now integrating AI into their solutions, which I think is only gonna help us find solutions for these climate tech problems much faster. That's Great. It does seem like we're in the right place to do that, for sure.

Being so close to the water, Melissa Medina, CEO, and co-founder of em, emerge America's 10 year mark was hit and it's been a wonderful day. We're here on Lincoln Road in Miami. So Melissa, what is next for em?

Emerge America A lot more, but we're doing what you're seeing at the conference is a culmination of a year's worth of work. And our team works year round. We host startup pitch competitions.

We have an accelerator, we work with entrepreneurs and we wanna continue building that, fostering the ecosystem, and continue to build this conference as well year after year. We're not going anywhere. That's great.

Melissa Medina, thank you so much for joining me. Thank You so much, Ronnie. Thanks for joining me on Ecotech Insights here in Miami Beach.

I'm on Lincoln Road and we've been talking to thought leaders in ai, quantum computing and climate tech. com. I'm Bonnie Schneider.

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