Pittsburgh Regional Alliance is going international to make connections and sell the region

After years of admiration from a distance, the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance is going international — first to Toronto for Collision, and then to Germany for the Automatica trade fair for smart automation and robotics.

According to Mike Harding, the economic development org’s VP of business investment, participating in these late-June conferences presents a prime opportunity to showcase the Pittsburgh tech sector’s accomplishments. Although the region has grown in the past decade, Harding noted that there’s still much more potential to be realized. (See: its fallen rank in the 2023 Startup Genome list of emerging startup ecosystems.)

With that in mind, Harding told Technical.ly that while he and representatives from 10 local startups are in the Great North, rather than selling a particular product, they’ll be selling Pittsburgh and establishing the city’s brand abroad.

“We have a long-standing and really reputable brand in things like advanced manufacturing and energy, and even some in life sciences. But when we think about sort of the tech sectors, whether that’s fintech, or medtech, or certainly robotics and AI, we’re really looking to take bolder steps in putting ourselves out there,” Harding said. “So for Collision, we thought, here’s the largest tech summit in North America [with] 40,000 attendees from all over the globe, why not put Pittsburgh in there and have ourselves be at the table?”

In 2022, the org sent two representatives. This year, however, in attendance with Harding will be representatives from Meter Feeder, Kloopify, The Flip Side, iraLogix, Gridwise, Skillbuilder.io, Ekto VR, ESTAT Actuation, Orita.ai and Whistle. While there are no plans to present at Automatica, during Collision, the Pittsburgh reps will get the chance to pitch fellow attendees that the Steel City is a place worthy of investment, while giving the companies a chance to make meaningful connections.

“I’m really excited to see how our companies do and the connections they can forge, and maybe develop more to bring home back to Pittsburgh and grow their business here,” Harding said. “So we’re excited.”

Harding added that some other areas of interest include learning about the future of autonomous vehicles and gaining more insight into how the tech region is perceived outside of the region. Not only that, but to learn how non-Pittsburghers are feeling about developing technologies — “it’s an interesting opportunity to crowdsource people’s perception, not just of Pittsburgh, but of this discipline that we’re kind of going after, which is the robotics and AI sector,” he said.

Plus, after two years where such conferences were off the table during the pandemic, all parties involved are looking forward to the chance to do some in-person networking.

“With the world reopening, we really view this as a strategic opportunity to get a lot of folks that we want to talk to in one place,” Harding said. “I would say [it took] at least two years to get here in terms of taking out this real estate, but we’ve been scouting it for over a year.”

Atiya Irvin-Mitchell is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Heinz Endowments.