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TWSE Transforms Innovation Board into Asia’s Premier Startup Platform

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TAIPEI, Jan. 7, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — The Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) has unveiled its upgraded Innovation Board (Taiwan Innovation Board, TIB) on January 6, 2025, removing restrictions on qualified investors and opening the market to retail investors. This significant reform aims to boost market liquidity, increase accessibility, and position Taiwan as a regional leader in innovation and investment, establishing the TIB as Asia’s premier platform for startups and emerging industries.

Initially launched in July 2021, the Innovation Board was limited to qualified investors, such as institutional investors and entities with substantial trading experience and financial assets. The new framework removes these barriers, expanding access to Taiwan’s 13 million account holders, up from the original 300,000 qualified investors.

“The removal of the qualified investor restriction will not only boost liquidity but also enhance company valuations,” said Sherman Lin, Chairman and CEO of the TWSE.

Taiwan’s capital market reached a historic milestone in 2024, soaring by over 28%, making it the best-performing stock market in Asia and the second-best globally, trailing only the NASDAQ in the United States. Lin emphasized that the TWSE will focus on “technology” and “innovation” as the dual pillars driving its future growth, with the goal of transforming Taiwan into a smart technology island.

The introduction of the Innovation Board 2.0 is a pivotal move, positioning Taiwan as a premier destination for innovative enterprises across Asia. “This initiative is expected to attract cutting-edge companies and foster an environment conducive to technological advancements and economic growth,” said Lin.

Looking ahead, the TWSE plans to strengthen collaboration within domestic innovation ecosystems while targeting international markets such as Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam to attract startups and growth-stage companies to list in Taiwan.

“The Innovation Board 2.0 not only helps retain Taiwanese startups considering overseas listings but also aims to attract Asia’s new economy companies, solidifying Taiwan’s position as a regional leader in innovation and investment,” Lin added. 

Since its inception, the TIB has supported over 20 innovative companies with core technologies or unique business models in accessing capital markets for fundraising, underscoring its critical role in fostering innovation and growth.

Empowering Emerging Industries Across Asia

The inauguration event of the “TIB Innovation Spotlight” on January 6 attracted over 250 representatives from 200 companies, intermediaries, and venture capital firms. Lin emphasized the board’s significance: “The Innovation Board will drive the growth of emerging industries and provide exceptional opportunities for Asian startups to succeed in Taiwan.”

Dr. Yen-Liang Chen, Vice Chairman of Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC), echoed this sentiment: “This move will allow investors to better understand emerging and innovative companies, thereby contributing to Taiwan’s goal of becoming Asian Asset Management Center.”

The transformation of the TIB has garnered strong support from Taiwan’s venture capital community. Andy TC Chiu, Chairman of the Taiwan Venture Capital Association, noted: “These changes provide startups with better funding opportunities while stimulating growth and innovation across sectors. Taiwan is positioning itself as Asia’s leading hub for technological advancement.”

Julian Liu, Chairman of the Securities Investment Trust & Consulting Association (SITCA) in Taiwan, underscored the vital role of investment trust institutions in offering essential support. He expressed optimism that the expansion of mutual funds and ETFs would generate a virtuous cycle, promoting diverse collaborations within the capital market and driving success.

Event Highlights

The event commenced with a keynote address by Chin-Ho Hsieh, President of Wealth Magazine and Business Today Magazine. Hsieh praised the new Innovation Board, highlighting its four key features: high liquidity, friendly entry thresholds for emerging industries, a focus on innovation capability and growth potential, and full disclosure of operational information, hoping it will continue to excel and drive meaningful progress.

A notable highlight was the panel discussion titled “Showcasing Innovation Board Companies,” moderated by Cheng-Hua Lu, Secretary-General of the Chinese National Federation of Industries (CNFI). The panel featured Jackie Cheng, Co-Founder and Chairman of Gogolook Co., Ltd., and Dr. Yun-Li Li, CEO of PlayNitride Inc. The discussion delved into their entrepreneurial journeys, strategies for accessing capital markets, international expansion plans, and the impact of the Innovation Board’s new framework.

Advancing Taiwan’s Capital Market

A skit at the event showcased the significant upgrades to the Innovation Board and detailed TWSE’s initiatives to develop a robust, investor-friendly capital market in collaboration with the Taiwan Index Plus Corporation and the Taiwan Carbon Solution Exchange. To enhance liquidity and engage investors, TWSE introduced initiatives, including market-making rewards for proprietary traders, broker-led education campaigns, and a lottery program for retail investors.

As the TWSE expands its international outreach in 2025, the Innovation Board is set to become Asia’s premier platform for startups and emerging industries, fostering growth, investment, and innovation across the region.

 

About TWSE

The Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) commenced operations on February 9, 1962. The TWSE is tasked with operating and advancing Taiwan’s securities market. Its primary business operations encompass listing, trading, settlement, and surveillance. These activities include listing promotion and review, post-listing supervision, corporate governance, maintaining market order, providing services to securities firms, investor protection, clearing and settlement operations, safeguarding against market defaults, and monitoring illegal transactions. The Exchange offers comprehensive services to the stock market.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/twse-transforms-innovation-board-into-asias-premier-startup-platform-302344086.html

SOURCE Taiwan Stock Exchange

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Chef Robotics Physical AI Models Can Now Automate Baked Goods Packing

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SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Chef Robotics, a leader in physical AI for the food industry, today announced that Chef robots can now automate tray assembly for baked goods packing. The application places baked products, such as burger buns, chocolate chip cookies, biscotti, butter cookies, biscuits, fortune cookies, granola bars, rusks, and shortbreads into trays and packaging containers before sealing.

Watch Chef robots in action.

Baked goods packing has historically been difficult to automate for high-mix production. Each item behaves differently on the production line—a granola bar compresses under the wrong grip, while a biscotti or rusk can crack if placed at the wrong angle. Surface textures range from glazed and smooth to crumbly and irregular, and strict presentation requirements leave little room for error. This variability has made it challenging for automation systems to reliably handle baked goods at production speeds, leaving food manufacturers dependent on manual labor and traditional bakery equipment.

To address this, Chef built its baked goods packing application on its existing piece-picking capability, which uses Chef’s AI-powered computer vision and physical AI models trained across diverse real-world production environments. This allows Chef robots to assess each item’s position, shape, and orientation in real time and determine how to pick the items from the pan and place them quickly and precisely without damaging them.

The baked goods packing application supports four distinct placement capabilities.

First, Chef’s vision system detects the angle at which each item sits in the pan and reorients it after picking, placing it on the tray at the exact angle required, regardless of its original position, enabling retail-ready presentation for SKUs that require precise angular placement.

Second, Chef robots can place multiple baked goods into the same packaging container in a single automated pass, completing full tray assembly without manual intervention.

Third, for packaging containers with multiple small compartments, Chef robots can precisely place items into each designated section, including multiple items in the same compartment, using Chef’s AI vision model to detect compartment positions and orientations in real time.

Fourth, Chef’s vision system identifies the exact center of each tray and places every item at a predefined offset from that center, ensuring a uniform, consistent arrangement across every pack regardless of how trays arrive on the conveyor.

For food manufacturers evaluating bakery systems and baked goods packaging automation, the application offers higher throughput, reduced labor dependency, and consistent presentation across shifts. The capability runs on Chef’s existing robotic hardware and software, allowing manufacturers to deploy it without requiring any changes to their production lines.

Chef’s baked goods packing application is available in the U.S., Canada, Germany, and the UK and is included as part of Chef’s robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) pricing model.

About Chef Robotics
Chef is the first company to have commercialized a scalable AI-driven food robotics solution. With over 104 million servings made in production, Chef leverages ChefOS, an AI platform for food manipulation, to offer a Robotics-as-a-Service solution that helps industry-leading food companies increase production volume and meet demand. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Chef aims to empower humans to do what humans do best by accelerating the advent of intelligent machines. Visit https://chefrobotics.ai to learn more.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chef-robotics-physical-ai-models-can-now-automate-baked-goods-packing-302756923.html

SOURCE Chef Robotics

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Chef Robotics Physical AI Models Can Now Automate Baked Goods Packing

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SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Chef Robotics, a leader in physical AI for the food industry, today announced that Chef robots can now automate tray assembly for baked goods packing. The application places baked products, such as burger buns, chocolate chip cookies, biscotti, butter cookies, biscuits, fortune cookies, granola bars, rusks, and shortbreads into trays and packaging containers before sealing.

Watch Chef robots in action.

Baked goods packing has historically been difficult to automate for high-mix production. Each item behaves differently on the production line—a granola bar compresses under the wrong grip, while a biscotti or rusk can crack if placed at the wrong angle. Surface textures range from glazed and smooth to crumbly and irregular, and strict presentation requirements leave little room for error. This variability has made it challenging for automation systems to reliably handle baked goods at production speeds, leaving food manufacturers dependent on manual labor and traditional bakery equipment.

To address this, Chef built its baked goods packing application on its existing piece-picking capability, which uses Chef’s AI-powered computer vision and physical AI models trained across diverse real-world production environments. This allows Chef robots to assess each item’s position, shape, and orientation in real time and determine how to pick the items from the pan and place them quickly and precisely without damaging them.

The baked goods packing application supports four distinct placement capabilities.

First, Chef’s vision system detects the angle at which each item sits in the pan and reorients it after picking, placing it on the tray at the exact angle required, regardless of its original position, enabling retail-ready presentation for SKUs that require precise angular placement.

Second, Chef robots can place multiple baked goods into the same packaging container in a single automated pass, completing full tray assembly without manual intervention.

Third, for packaging containers with multiple small compartments, Chef robots can precisely place items into each designated section, including multiple items in the same compartment, using Chef’s AI vision model to detect compartment positions and orientations in real time.

Fourth, Chef’s vision system identifies the exact center of each tray and places every item at a predefined offset from that center, ensuring a uniform, consistent arrangement across every pack regardless of how trays arrive on the conveyor.

For food manufacturers evaluating bakery systems and baked goods packaging automation, the application offers higher throughput, reduced labor dependency, and consistent presentation across shifts. The capability runs on Chef’s existing robotic hardware and software, allowing manufacturers to deploy it without requiring any changes to their production lines.

Chef’s baked goods packing application is available in the U.S., Canada, Germany, and the UK and is included as part of Chef’s robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) pricing model.

About Chef Robotics
Chef is the first company to have commercialized a scalable AI-driven food robotics solution. With over 104 million servings made in production, Chef leverages ChefOS, an AI platform for food manipulation, to offer a Robotics-as-a-Service solution that helps industry-leading food companies increase production volume and meet demand. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Chef aims to empower humans to do what humans do best by accelerating the advent of intelligent machines. Visit https://chefrobotics.ai to learn more.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chef-robotics-physical-ai-models-can-now-automate-baked-goods-packing-302756923.html

SOURCE Chef Robotics

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Air Products to Expand Industrial Gas Supply for Samsung Electronics’ Next-Generation Semiconductor Fab in South Korea

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New investment underscores the company’s long-term commitment to Korea and its leading role in the global semiconductor industry 

LEHIGH VALLEY, Pa., April 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Air Products (NYSE:APD), a world-leading industrial gases company and serving Samsung globally, today announced it has been selected by Samsung to supply industrial gases for its new advanced semiconductor fab in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea.

Under the agreement, Air Products will build, own and operate multiple state-of-the-art production facilities and a bulk specialty gas supply system to supply nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and hydrogen for Samsung’s new semiconductor fab. The new facilities are expected to come onstream in multiple phases from 2028 through 2030.

Air Products has a long track record of executing multiple phase expansions in Pyeongtaek to support Samsung’s growing manufacturing needs. This latest project represents Air Products’ largest investment to date in the semiconductor industry and will establish Pyeongtaek as the company’s single largest operations site globally supporting the electronics industry. 

“Air Products is honored to be selected once again by Samsung and to have their continued confidence as a trusted partner supporting their strategic growth plans,” said SR Kim, President, Air Products Korea. “This significant investment reinforces Air Products’ role as a leading global supplier to the semiconductor industry and underscores our long-standing commitment to supporting our strategic customers with safety, reliability, efficiency and excellent service.”

Air Products has served the global electronics industry for more than 40 years, supplying industrial gases safely and reliably to many of the world’s leading technology companies. The company has operated in Korea for more than 50 years and has established a strong position in electronics and manufacturing sectors.

About Air Products

Air Products (NYSE: APD) is a world-leading industrial gases company in operation for over 85 years focused on serving energy, environmental, and emerging markets and generating a cleaner future. The Company supplies essential industrial gases, related equipment and applications expertise to customers in dozens of industries, including refining, chemicals, metals, electronics, manufacturing, medical and food. As the leading global supplier of hydrogen, Air Products also develops, engineers, builds, owns and operates some of the world’s largest clean hydrogen projects, supporting the transition to low- and zero-carbon energy in the industrial and heavy-duty transportation sectors. Through its sale of equipment businesses, the Company also provides turbomachinery, membrane systems and cryogenic containers globally.

Air Products had fiscal 2025 sales of $12 billion from operations in approximately 50 countries. For more information, visit airproducts.com or follow us on LinkedInXFacebook or Instagram.

This release contains “forward-looking statements” within the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on management’s expectations and assumptions as of the date of this release and are not guarantees of future performance. While forward-looking statements are made in good faith and based on assumptions, expectations and projections that management believes are reasonable based on currently available information, actual performance and financial results may differ materially from projections and estimates expressed in the forward-looking statements because of many factors, including the risk factors described in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2025 and other factors disclosed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, we disclaim any obligation or undertaking to update or revise any forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect any change in the assumptions, beliefs or expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances upon which any such forward-looking statements are based.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/air-products-to-expand-industrial-gas-supply-for-samsung-electronics-next-generation-semiconductor-fab-in-south-korea-302757497.html

SOURCE Air Products

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