St. Louis: Tech and Economic News

[Arch City]

International AgTech startups building in St. Louis.

St. Louis Attracts Third Israeli Agtech Company in Seven Months
Techli team
June 9, 2015
By Techli team



BioSTL, the St. Louis organization advancing regional prosperity by cultivating the bioscience and innovation ecosystem, announced that Israeli agtech company Forrest Innovations has selected St. Louis as the location of its U.S. headquarters. The company’s decision represents the third success in seven months for BioSTL’s initiative targeting Israeli companies for recruitment.

Forrest Innovations is an agtech company working at the forefront of technology to address two major challenges in the outdoor environment: reducing mosquito-carried disease and overcoming a bacteria that is threatening the citrus industry’s existence.

“St. Louis is renowned for its leadership in plant science and top notch scientific personnel, offering us a wonderful opportunity for recruiting highly qualified employees. St. Louis also provides a great platform for promoting innovation and collaboration. We are very happy to become the latest members of this promising community,” said Nitzan Paldi, CEO of Forrest Innovations.

Israel, frequently referred to as the “Startup Nation,” is one of the largest sources of commercially-promising innovation in the world, particularly in agritech, medical technologies, and cyber-security – areas that match nicely with St. Louis’ strengths. BioSTL’s St. Louis-Israel Innovation Connection (SLIIC) initiative capitalizes on the fundamental business need of many Israeli ventures to establish a U.S. presence to access markets, capital, networks and corporate partnerships.

“Although we anticipated the strengths of our St. Louis ecosystem would resonate with Israeli companies, the pace of success has exceeded all expectations,” said Donn Rubin, president and CEO of BioSTL. “It’s not surprising that our early momentum has been in agtech, an area where St. Louis shines, with remarkable corporate and research partners, talent and specialized facilities.”

Prior to Forrest Innovations’ decision, Kaiima Bio-Agritech (November) and Evogene (February) each announced establishment of their U.S. base in St. Louis.

Source

[Arch City]

Another international AgTech firm to call St. Louis home.

TECHFLASH
Argentinian startup establishes North American HQ in St. Louis
Jun 18, 2015, 10:49am CDT
Brian Feldt
St. Louis Business Journal

Solapa4, an agtech startup from Argentina that was initially brought to St. Louis thanks to a $100,000 investment from The Yield Lab, is now establishing its North American headquarters at the Helix Center, located in St. Louis County.

Led by CEO Rodrigo Ramirez Crouchett and CFO Tomas Pena, Solapa4 is a data gathering and analytics company that can predict the agricultural performance of land.

Audrey MacKenzie, a Washington University M.B.A. graduate, has been hired by Solapa4 as its director of U.S. operations and business development.

Previously, MacKenzie was director of strategic operations at Verge Ventures, a St. Louis-area venture capital firm specializing in software and IT companies. She also worked for more than six years at Intel in various roles.

Solapa4, founded in 2010, was one of five companies accepted into The Yield Lab’s first class in January.

Source

[Arch City]

Square, Inc. is making St. Louis its fourth U.S. bricks-and-mortar office with 200 workers in CORTEX - St. Louis' innovation district.

The other offices are in San Francisco, New York and Atlanta. International offices including Melbourne, Tokyo, Kitchener-Waterloo & Toronto.

Square says some of the functions being given a home in St. Louis is Compliance Operations, Customer Support, IT Tech, Recruiting and Office Experience.

Below are some members of the diverse St. Louis office.


Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Square, center.

[Arch City]

St. Louis’ Latest Tech ‘Gets’ – Pandora, Uber
Michael Calhoun (@michaelcalhoun)
October 5, 2015 2:38 PM
CBS St. Louis



ST. LOUIS (KMOX) — Pandora, the music streaming service, is opening its Midwest regional sales office in the Cortex Innovation District, and we’ve learned that Uber, the ride-share service, isn’t far behind in opening a physical presence.

This news comes a couple of weeks after Square, the mobile payments company, announced it’ll open its fourth U.S. office in St. Louis, and will eventually hire 200-plus people.

“I think it’s a really big deal,” said Dougan Sherwood, managing director of CIC St. Louis, in a phone interview Monday. “It’s very validating.”

CIC — short for Cambridge Innovation Center — is a spin-off of an incubator outside Boston. It’s the facility within the Cortex district these companies are locating in, in the Central West End neighborhood.

Sherwood says Pandora told him the feel there is similar to what they’re used to in Silicon Valley.

Like Square, Sherwood says these two are not coming because of the ‘cheap’ cost-of-living.

“The real expense for a company like Pandora is entering the wrong market at the wrong time,” he said. “That dwarfs anything like prices of real estate or heads of lettuce and gallons of gasoline.”

Their building has a big, spinning ‘@’ symbol on the roof, visible from Interstate 64/40, like a billboard for the city’s tech progress. Sherwood said the fact that name-brand consumer companies like Pandora and Uber are taking notice is confirmation.

“Everything we’re doing here is a day-to-day grind and, so, it’s great to see what we seem to be headed in the right direction,” he said.

Read More

[Arch City]

Music streaming service Pandora opens office in St. Louis' Cortex
By MARIA ALTMAN • 17 HOURS AGO

A little more West Coast is moving into St. Louis.

The music streaming company Pandora opened an office inside Cortex, St. Louis’ innovation district, on Monday.

"Pandora came looking for us," said Dougan Sherwood, co-founder and managing director of CIC St. Louis, which is housed in the @4240 building.

Sherwood said officials with Pandora, which is based in Oakland, Calif., wanted to replicate the culture they have at their headquarters.

"So when you come to a place like CIC, which has intentionally developed a culture of entrepreneurship, and startup activity and technology, I think the folks there felt like they were at home," he said.

Pandora provides a fee-based subscription service, as well as a free ad-based service with locally-targeted ads. The St. Louis office will have a sales team of five to seven employees within CIC St. Louis.

Read More

[Arch City]

St. Louis keeps growing as a tech and financial services hub.

KPMG taps St. Louis as tech hub, adding 175 jobs downtown
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
2 hours ago • By Lisa Brown


Karen Vangyia, KPMG managing partner in charge of the St. Louis, announced Tuesday morning that the tax, audit and advisory firm will add 175 jobs here over the next 3 years. KPMG already employs 270 at its office at 10 South Broadway.

After a nationwide search, KPMG picked downtown St. Louis to become one of the accounting firm's largest U.S. tech hubs, with plans to add 175 jobs over the next three years.

KPMG executives said the firm will begin hiring next month to grow its information technology staff at 10 S. Broadway, which will become one of the company's largest IT hubs along with offices in Texas and California. Its U.S. and global tech operations are based in Montvale, N.J.

KPMG currently leases two-and-a-half floors in the 21-story office tower near the Gateway Arch and will expand within the building as it adds jobs, said Karen Vangyia, KPMG's managing partner in St. Louis. The firm plans to hire 100 of the 175 jobs over the next two years, she said.

The tax, audit and advisory firm, which has its global offices in Amsterdam, has 90 U.S. offices. Its St. Louis office opened in 1911 and has 270 employees.

St. Louis is one of KPMG's fastest growing offices, with revenue more than doubling over the past four years, Vangyia said. "These new hires will be part of our national IT team, and they'll be the technology backbone of our firm," she said.

The firm’s recruiting efforts will include local college graduates, veterans and experienced professionals.

KPMG conducted a nationwide search to locate the tech hub. "It became clear that St. Louis was one of the fastest growing markets for technology jobs, and plenty of higher education institutions are focused on computer science programs," Vangyia said of the company's decision to add jobs in St. Louis. "We also have a strong talent base of experienced veterans to draw upon and that's very important to us."

Harry Moseley, KPMG’s chief information officer, said St. Louis' central location also played a role. "The addition of these jobs reflects the cadence of change in the technology sector, which is profound," Moseley said. "When you consider the trends such as the consumerization of technology within business organizations, the digital economy and the growing use of mobile devices, it's more clear than ever before that the success of every company is dependent on the quality of their technology."

Read More

[Arch City]

Why Riot Games loves St. Louis
21 Oct 2015/Sam Weigley
Silicon Prairie News



St. Louis engineers play a key role in producing the online battle arena game League of Legends.

Headquartered in Santa Monica, Calif., Riot Games, a subsidiary of Chinese investment behemoth Tencent Holdings, has offices in far-flung cities such as Berlin, Seoul, Istanbul and Sydney. Compared to those cities, it would seem peculiar that St. Louis would have such a large presence for a multinational video game company. Why not just move all these people back out to the Los Angeles area, the video game capital of the world? Or what about New York or San Francisco with their technology prowess?

The choice to continue investing in St. Louis is an obvious one, said Mike Seavers, Riot Games’ director of engineering and also head of the office.

“There are really awesome software engineers here in St. Louis,” said Seavers. He sees Washington University and St. Louis University, among other nearby schools, as great sources of top talent.

Part of the growing STL tech scene

Seavers noted the St. Louis office has actually been around since the early stages of the company, which was founded in 2006. The VP of Technology was based there and tapped into his network to get the office going. That “office” actually started as a few guys working in a basement.

“We eventually were told that wasn’t going to work anymore,” Seavers said laughing, and that began the offices in the St. Louis area.

Today, the office comprises about 50 people, primarily with an engineering focus. The St. Louis team includes people dedicated to improving features, as well as conducting research and development.

It helps that St. Louis has made a considerable push recently to become a tech hub for the Midwest. Just in the last few weeks alone, companies such as Square, Pandora and Uber have all announced the opening of offices in the region.

Read More

[Arch City]

• Video Link

[Arch City]

• Video Link

[Arch City]

• Video Link

[Arch City]

• Video Link

[Arch City]

The Top 10 Real Estate Markets to Watch in 2016
By
Cicely Wedgeworth
12:01 am ET
December 2, 2015
Realtor.com



Month after month here at realtor.com®, we use our data to determine the hottest markets in the U.S.—where home buyers and sellers are the most motivated and active. And as 2015 winds down, we started to wonder: Where are the next red-hot places for real estate?

In spite of the picture above, we don’t actually have a crystal ball here (sadly), but we do have our chief economist, Jonathan Smoke. As part of the realtor.com 2016 Housing Forecast released on Wednesday, he homed in on the top 10 up-and-coming metropolitan markets in the country.

Smoke and his team took past trends and seasonal variations of housing and economic data for the 100 largest markets in the country and stuck them into a time machine—oops, we mean a statistical model that predicts future values for home sales and prices. Then they identified the markets whose forecasted growth was equal to or better than the U.S. average. The resulting top 10 list is of the real estate markets that look the most bullish for the coming year. Get ready for a few surprises!

Read More

[Moorlands]

I just love this quote:

Prior to moving Taptl to St. Louis, Wolff spent the majority of her time talking about her product to a wide variety of people in a multitude of cities around the world. “Really, before Prosper and Arch Grants, I was having a hard time finding distributors and customers. However, when I moved here, I had so many companies reach out to me in terms of sales and distribution. I can’t tell you how instrumental St. Louis has been, more than any other city, in helping me knock down hurdles.”
Wolff’s passion for transparent LCD technology is matched by her passion for building a business in St. Louis. “Prosper is one of the best things that could have happened to my company,” she says. “And receiving an Arch Grant is the perfect transition for our next growth phase. Being in St. Louis and having the support of Prosper and Arch Grants has allowed my company to reach key milestones in six months. Without being in St. Louis, it would have taken us 10 months or longer to get where we are now. St. Louis is the best location for my growing business. I tell every entrepreneur I meet to move to St. Louis.”

http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/b...L&t=1449610563

[Arch City]

The Right Way To Build A Tech City
DEC 8, 2015 @ 10:32 AM 1,736 VIEWS
Forbes.com


St. Louis’ Biogenerator Labs and accelerator. Courtesy: Biogenerator.

Startups should know what differentiates their product from others. Building around an unique strength, a facet that’s difficult to emulate, offers small companies a chance to gain critical mass. New companies should focus on a strength and own one particular piece of their market. Startups that fail to do this can quickly become commodities.

The same can be said for cities and regions looking to make themselves into destinations for tech. Simply trying to emulate the Bay Area and its vast net of tech-related disciplines makes for an impossible task. As I wrote about Chicago and its tech ecosystem recently, there’s more to getting true traction than simply giving startups places to work. Just as a startup needs to do one thing exceedingly well before it tackles other missions, cities should take the same tack and concentrate on one sector of tech to make their own.

I recently was in St. Louis and, while there, I talked to some of its VCs, startups and people who run its incubator and accelerator spaces. Just like anywhere, there exist startups doing all sorts of things in the St. Louis area, but many of the most interesting companies have coalesced around the bioscience space. This isn’t by chance. The city’s tech players have seized on some of the area’s inherent strengths in healthcare and biotech. Washington University, which has one of the top medical schools in the country, is constantly throwing off ideas and graduates who have new ideas in the space. DuPont’s bioscience arm is based here, as is Monsanto, the king of engineered macro-crops. And perhaps most important in all of this, St. Louis was the site of a major set of layoffs by Pfizer in 2010.

While the prospect of one of the leading pharma companies in the world cutting 600 well-paying jobs—those belonging to Ph.D.s and researchers—might seem dismal, it proved to be a fire-starter for St. Louis. It’s rare that so much ready talent gets dumped into a single job market at once. Eric Gulve, the president of Biogenerator, a unique incubator focused on biotech in St. Louis, saw opportunity and hazard in Pfizer’s layoffs.

The hazard: If the St. Louis community couldn’t find jobs for these people, they would be forced to leave the area, depriving the metro of elite brains that Midwestern cities like St. Louis can sometimes struggle to attract. The opportunity, as Gulve saw it: “These people had been in biotech for years and had great ideas, far better than first-time entrepreneurs coming from outside the industry.”

Read More

[Arch City]

Growing so rapidly, Boston's Cambridge Innovation Center in St. Louis now operates out of two buildings in St. Louis' CORTEX Innovation District.

And CIC now has more than 100,000 square feet of space in the Cortex district.

• Video Link

Scenes from an earlier CIC grand-opening at building @4240 in CORTEX.

• Video Link

[Arch City]

2015's Best Cities to Found a Startup Outside Silicon Valley and New York (and How They Did It)
by Anisha Sekar on December 14, 2015
datafox.co

The best cities to found a company outside Silicon Valley and New York

1. Cambridge, MA
2. Santa Monica, CA
3. Fayetteville, AR
4. Boulder, CO
5. Wilmington, DE
6. Pittsburgh, PA
7. Atlanta, GA
8. Scottsdale, AZ
9. St. Louis, MO
10. Durham, NC
11. Cleveland, OH
12. Salt Lake City, UT
13. Austin, TX
14. Seattle, WA
15. Providence, RI

Our metrics:

Availability of capital. Access to capital and the ability to keep the lights on are important for any startup, particularly in its early days. Using funding information from the DataFox company database, we compared the average amount of funding pre-Series A companies raised to determine whether the city has a strong network of seed and venture investors. This information comes from DataFox's company database, which draws from Crunchbase and other sources.

Affordability. Since a city's cost of living can significantly lengthen or shorten the time a company has to prove itself, we used the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis' real purchasing power metric to rank cities' affordability. This data is published by the Bureau of Economic Activity, which measures how much a dollar spent goes in each area. We sourced it from the Tax Foundation.

Success of early-stage companies. A good startup may not have revenue in its early days, but it often has the markers of future success: high-quality investors, capable hires and a strong marketing presence. We used our proprietary Growth Score, a predictor of future revenue growth, to measure how successful a city's early-stage companies are. DataFox's growth score is the output of a machine-learning algorithm that predicts revenue and factors in headcount growth, investor quality and other metrics.

A community of entrepreneurs. Newly founded startups also benefit from a network of other companies in similar stages, so that they can learn from and be motivated by other entrepreneurs. We considered the "startup density" of pre-Series A companies. For each city, we divided the number of pre-Series A startups in our database by the U.S. Census 2014 population estimate.

Because growth and community have a disproportionate impact on a company's future success, we weighted those metrics twice as heavily. We also only considered cities with at least 35 pre-Series A startups in our database.

[Arch City]

Three positive announcements in 24 hours.

-Indian agtech company to open U.S. headquarters in St. Louis
-LockerDome adding 300 jobs in move to larger downtown HQ
-World Wide Technology begins headquarters project

[Arch City]

SFK, Swedish maker of industrial lubrication systems, recently opened its high-tech plant on 24-acres in NorthPark, suburban St. Louis.

The nearly 311,000-square-foot plant was completed December 2015.

SKF's approximately $55 million project preserves 388 jobs and will generate 73 additional jobs over the next six years.

SKF looked at numerous potential factory locations — including some outside the region — before picking the NorthPark site.

[Busy Bee]

^did they ever consider expanding at their Goodfellow location or was that never a possibility?

[Arch City]

Macy’s to close St. Louis call center, affecting 750 employees
Jan 6, 2016, 4:39pm CST

Macy’s said Wednesday it would close its St. Louis call center, which employs 750 people.

Work done at the facility, located at 111 Boulder Industrial Drive in Bridgeton, will be moved to Tempe, Arizona; Clearwater, Florida; and Mason, Ohio, where the company said 640 positions will be added.

The Cincinnati-based company, which owns the $15.6 million Bridgeton property, also announced the closure of 40 Macy’s stores, including one in Columbia, Missouri.

Four of the stores were closed in the final three quarters of 2015. Thirty-six of the stores will close in early 2016. The Columbia store is slated to close in early 2016.

Read More