Ten startups, free entry, one evening at Etko: Plug and Play's first Cyprus Expo lands in Limassol on 11 November

Plug and Play Cyprus will hold its first innovation expo on Wednesday 11 November 2026 at Etko in Limassol, closing out the accelerator's inaugural cohort on the island. The evening programme is open to anyone and free — the catch is capacity, not a deadline.

The public part runs from 17:00 to 20:00, with registration from 16:00 and networking afterwards until 22:30 (the Eventbrite header bills the night as finishing at 21:30, so plan for the earlier time). Tickets are free through Eventbrite on a first-come, first-served basis until the room fills; there is no published cut-off date.

On show are the ten startups of the first Plug and Play Cyprus cohort, named in August: Sprouty, ModelRoom, Cleedee, BLEND.app, Digital Fox, EleniAI, EMBIO Diagnostics, Fewton, Neura Energy and QubeHub. The accelerator took them through six intensive three-day bootcamps spread over six months, and the expo is the closing milestone rather than a judged competition — there is no prize pool and no challenge brief.

The half of the day that matters most to founders is the half you cannot walk into. A startup mentoring session runs 10:00–12:00, open to startups by application only, followed by one-to-one mentorship hours from 12:00 to 15:00. When the expo was first announced in early September, the afternoon block was described as VC matchmaking; the current agenda lists it as mentorship hours. Either way, applying does not guarantee a place, so ask the organisers which it is before you build a day around it.

The institutional backing is unusually heavy for a first edition: the expo is organised in cooperation with the Research and Innovation Foundation and the Deputy Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digital Policy, with corporate partners Tototheo Global, ASBIS, ECOMMBX and Mastercard.

Context worth keeping in view: Plug and Play launched its Cyprus platform in Limassol earlier this year and signed a strategic partnership with Reflect Festival in September to plug the local ecosystem into its global network. For the hackathon crowd, this is the other end of the same pipeline — the room where a weekend prototype has to turn into a corporate pilot or a cheque. It costs nothing to be in it.

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