Ten years after its inception, Expand North Star, the startup event organised by Gitex Global, has established itself as one of the main venues for gauging the temperature of global innovation. The 2025 edition, hosted at Dubai Harbour, brought together over 2,000 start-ups, 1,200 investors, 350 speakers and delegations from 180 countries, with more than 13,000 B2B meetings scheduled. These figures reflect not only the scale but also the ambition of an ecosystem that now extends far beyond traditional geographical boundaries.
“The Gitex portfolio continues its global expansion, from Dubai to Berlin, Belgrade, São Paulo and Istanbul, paving the way for a truly borderless innovation network,” explains Jacinta Liu, startup partnerships lead at Gitex. “With the North Star platform, we want to create concrete connections between founders, investors, large companies and governments. Our goal is not only to showcase new technologies, but to foster collaborations that accelerate impact and make innovation more accessible, inclusive and distributed on a global scale.”
Liu’s words sum up a profound transformation: major tech fairs are no longer mere showcases, but spaces for interaction between ecosystems where capital, research and industrial policies intertwine. In this scenario, Italy’s presence takes on a significance that goes beyond institutional representation.
Under the coordination of the Italian Trade Agency (ITA), the Italian Pavilion hosted 30 start-ups and scale-ups, an increase of 25% compared to 2024. The selected companies cover a wide range of sectors, from artificial intelligence to cybersecurity, digital health to smart manufacturing and sustainable technologies, demonstrating an ecosystem that is maturing and learning to engage with global markets.
“Italy is sending its largest ever delegation to Expand North Star 2025,” says Lorenzo Fanara, Italian Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. “This is proof of a cohesive system, where start-ups, universities and traditional businesses collaborate with an international vision.”
Dubai’s role as an innovation hub is consolidated precisely by its ability to attract different ecosystems and encourage cross-fertilisation. For Italy, this participation is not just a showcase, but an opportunity to position itself within a network that is growing at an unprecedented rate, where technology is also a diplomatic language.
“Expand North Star is now a strategic access point for Italian start-ups that want to connect with global partners,” says Valerio Soldani, director of the ICE Office in Dubai and Commissioner for the United Arab Emirates and Oman. . “Italy now has 15,900 innovative start-ups and SMEs and over 260 incubators and accelerators, supported by an industrial base worth €1.269 billion, the largest in Europe. The challenge is to transform this solidity into a driver of technological cooperation in the fields of artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and clean technologies.”
Among the Italian companies present were: Avacam, which uses artificial intelligence to improve infrastructure safety and monitoring; TrueSense, which integrates hardware and AI for connected manufacturing; Icarus Technology, active in personalised digital health; WuvDay (MLR), a platform for certifying the authenticity of journalistic content; MyMoney, a fintech company based on biometric systems; Latitudo 40, which processes satellite data for environmental analysis; Koala, which develops connected and accessible medical devices. During the four-day event, Italian startups also participated in the Supernova Challenge and Superconnectors, opportunities for discussion and networking that bring together startups, investors and international companies.
Italy’s participation in Dubai demonstrates its desire to open up, to overcome the traditional distinction between manufacturing and digital technology and to position itself in a new, more fluid and transnational dimension of innovation. In a global context where technology is also economic diplomacy, Expand North Star represents an increasingly multipolar geography of innovation. Italy is participating not to show off, but to connect: with the awareness that innovation today grows through relationships as much as through ideas.
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