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

Technical.ly and XchangePgh share a mission of convening and informing technologists, entrepreneurs and other startup stakeholders. Technical.ly is a media partner for the XchangePgh 2023 event series. Pittsburgh has been abuzz with entrepreneurial energy all week, but that energy was perhaps most concentrated in East Liberty on Thursday evening. At the inaugural RustBuilt Startup Showdown, held during Pittsburgh’s first XchangeInnovation Week, 10 companies hailing from the Steel City and like cities from the region and beyond made their case for why their companies deserved funding while fielding questions from a panel of seasoned investors