Over the previous 5 years, the Southeastern area, led by Atlanta, has gone from being “one of the best kept secrets” in tech, to a vibrant ecosystem teeming with a herd of the billion greenback tech companies which might be referred to within the funding world as “unicorns” (due to their supposed rarity).
In these 5 years enterprise capital investments surged to $2.1 billion within the area, with $1 billion invested within the final yr alone, in response to Lisa Calhoun, a companion with the Atlanta based mostly funding agency, Valor Ventures.
It’s indicative of the entrepreneurial expertise coming from the community of personal and public faculties throughout the area like Georgia Tech, the University of Alabama, Auburn, the University of Georgia, Vanderbilt, Emory, and the traditionally black faculties and universities like Morehouse, Spelman, and Xavier. And it’s additionally an indication of a reinvestment in native entrepreneurship — a decades-long marketing campaign to show Atlanta into the middle of a hub-and-spoke community of startup cities that spans Miami to Atlanta, with stops in Birmingham, Nashville, New Orleans,
“Atlanta is what a next generation, global, post-Silicon Valley tech hub looks like. Our demographics are ten years ahead of the U.S.’s transformation into a majority minority society,” wrote Calhoun in an e mail. “With over 40% of the U.S. population in the Southeast, the greatest density of founders and executives of color, rafts of tech companies like AirBnB locating here, and our own legacy of top tech and talent, Atlanta sets the tone for what’s next. We have the growing, diverse population base all strong founders need to scale.”
There’s nonetheless lots of work to be achieved for the area to ascertain itself as one of many subsequent engines of financial return for the enterprise capital and funding enterprise, although.
“The Southeast is 24% of the US GDP, but only accounts for 7% of the venture investment,” famous Blake Patton, the founder and normal companion of the Atlanta-based funding agency, Tech Square Ventures. “With the recent momentum in the region, that is changing and investors are taking notice and backing local managers who in turn are investing the region’s best and brightest entrepreneurs.”
The Internet increase and bust in Atlanta
In the years after the 1996 Olympics, Atlanta was a high-flying contender for the title of one of many subsequent large startup hubs within the United States.
The Olympics had put the town on the world’s stage, and seeing the wave of exercise, pleasure, and funding that got here with the appearance of web firms like Virginia’s America Online, Atlanta’s metropolis council and mayor had been making a push for the town to develop into a telecom and startup hub within the early days of the primary Internet increase.
“Something happened in the mid-90s driven by the Olympics where Atlanta hit the map worldwide. It wasn’t just that we were a supply and logistics hub. In the late 90s as the dot-com boom really evolved, things happened underground that aren’t as transparent as they should be. Atlanta Gas Light had the largest dark fiber ring in the country surrounding Atlanta. That was built solely with the olympics in mind. We had Georgia Tech working on the next generation of aerospace, and they added computer engineering,” stated Christy Brown, the founding father of the Atlanta based mostly non-profit Launchpad2X and a serial entrepreneur and govt with deep ties to the Atlanta ecosystem.
Atlanta additionally had its justifiable share of early successes — excessive flying telecom and networking firms that had been crucial to the evolution of the primary dot com period whose later years had been both mired in scandal or who had been acquired by a lot bigger entities. These are firms like MCI Worldcom and Airtouch Cellular, which was wolfed up by Singular Wireless and would ultimately develop into a part of a restructured AT&T.
“There had been all types of tech issues taking place within the metropolis. Lots of these founders had been getting enterprise on paper which developed…
