A weekend long entrepreneurial event gets underway this evening with a focus on wellbeing.

Startup Weekend Tauranga will have roughly 40 participants and 20 mentors present starting from Friday, May 14, to Sunday, May 16, at the Basestation on Durham Street.

For the last nine years, Startup Weekend Tauranga has aimed to bring like-minded people together to learn what it takes to start or build an entrepreneurial journey.

In just 54 hours, participants meet, form a team, develop an idea, and showcase their startup concept to a panel of judges.

This year's judges are Natalie Bridges, founder of BlinkPR, Nada Piatek, founder of Again Again and Liam Dickinson, investor and chairman of Good Neighbour.

Startup Weekend aims to have participants from all walks of life including aspiring and experienced entrepreneurs, developers and other tech-related professionals, designers, students from universities and senior high schools as well as professionals looking to switch careers or build new skills.

The theme for this year's event is wellbeing.

Participants will be focusing on building solutions and creating opportunities to enhance, improve and strengthen the social, environmental, economic wellbeing of the community.

'As this year's Startup Weekend Tauranga theme is on wellbeing, we are asking participants to focus on building solutions that enhance the economic, social and environmental wellbeing of our communities,” says one of the event organisers Suki Xiao.

'We are likely to see teams tackling the issues that have been recently highlighted in the Quality of Life Survey, which shows that Tauranga can do better in traffic congestion and housing affordability.”