Technology accelerators receive injection of federal funds – vtdigger.org
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Technology accelerators in Springfield, Randolph and Rutland are getting $2.2 million in federal funds to support technology entrepreneurship.
The money is coming from the Build to Scale program, run by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration.
The Hartland-based Center on Rural Innovation, which supports entrepreneurship that creates technology jobs in rural communities, helped secure the grants.
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The center performs assessments of communities’ potential for success as rural hubs for technology, said founder and executive director Matt Dunne, who previously served in the Legislature and ran as a Democrat for governor.
“And the Randolph assessment really indicated that it was an awesome location,” said Erica Hoffman-Kiess, executive director of the Randolph-based Green Mountain Economic Development Corporation, which expects to get about $300,000 to $400,000 in funding.
Hoffman-Kiess cited the town’s access to broadband, the presence of Vermont Technical College, community investments in revitalizing its downtown, and its location about halfway between Boston and Montreal off Interstate 89, which she said is a developing technology corridor.
The Black River Innovation Campus, in Springfield, and the Chamber and Economic Development of the Rutland Region will also receive funds.
The federal grants require a one-to-one match, said Dunne, and Gov. Phil Scott and the Legislature budgeted $500,000 in matching funds contingent on the grants coming through.
“What it speaks to is the collaborative spirit in Vermont across public and private entities to get something like this done and to be able to create jobs of the future in rural Vermont,” Dunne said.
Together, the organizations in Springfield and Randolph were jointly awarded $1.5 million in federal funds, said Hoffman-Kiess.
The state provided $333,000 in matching funds for those two projects, with the remaining $1.2 million in matching funds coming from individual donors, higher education partners, corporations, and foundations, including the Siegel Family Endowment, a national foundation with a focus on technology, Dunne and Black River Innovation Campus deputy executive director Chris Maggiolo said.
The new grant money will be used to expand the program in Springfield and start a technology accelerator and incubator in Randolph, Dunne said. (An incubator is a physical space for startups, he explained, while an accelerator is a program that helps them grow.)
The Economic Development Administration is granting the Chamber and Economic Development of the Rutland Region $734,000, Jepson said. He said his organization was able to raise another $759,000. Of that, $400,00 came from Rutland City, $166,000 from the state and $45,000 from the Rutland Regional Medical Center, among others.
Dunne said Springfield has been working on developing a tech accelerator for years, and received its first Build to Scale grant in 2018, when it started what later became the innovation campus in the Park Street School building. He said Springfield has since been successful in attracting technology startups and founders of new companies.
After that first grant, Springfield’s Black River Innovation Campus started renovating the former school building and started some programming in 2019. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the launch of the incubator and accelerator programs was delayed until 2021, said Maggiolo.
Since that launch, the Black River Innovation Campus has worked with 16 startups, Maggiolo said. In addition, he said, the organization helps dozens of businesses in the community with digital outreach and hardware issues and connects digital and technology professionals with those who need their services.
The Black River Innovation Campus received a $3 million earmark secured by U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) as well as nearly another $2 million from the state earlier this year. That money was not for programming but for continuing renovations of the campus and downtown buildings, Dunne said.
The Black River Innovation Campus will use the latest grant to rotate four cohorts of entrepreneurs through its program each year, said Marguerite Dibble, the program’s interim executive director and the founder of her own company, Burlington-based GameTheory.
Dibble grew up in Landgrove, where her parents were painting contractors.
“Growing up, I was sort of raised with this acknowledged truth that it’s incredibly hard for anyone in rural Vermont to have a business that doesn’t somehow support or feed off of the local economy of second-homeowners or tourism,” Dibble said.
Times have changed. Dibble cited Springfield’s “blazing-fast internet” as one asset that makes it ideal for a technology incubator.
In Randolph, Hoffman-Kiess envisions partnering with Vermont Technical College’s advanced manufacturing collaborative and Northfield-based Norwich University in cybersecurity. She said the idea is to start working at the Vermont Technical College campus with a possible second meeting space for outreach and virtual classes in the village center.
“It’s sort of like melding those two things that look like they don’t go together, this bucolic rural scenery with some pretty high-tech stuff that’s going on that is part of the international market,” Hoffman-Kiess said. “And it’s happening right there in a little river valley in central Vermont.”
Rutland, too, now has a chance to start a high-tech incubator.
“We need a flow of income coming into the region that may be a little higher than some of our population currently has,” said Lyle Jepson, executive director of Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development of the Rutland Region.
Rutland’s business incubator will be housed at the Opera House, in Merchants Row, and nearby buildings, Jepson said.
“We have wonderful availability of fiber-optic internet,” Jepson said. “We have a downtown that is ready for something like this. We want the entire downtown to be the hub.”
Beyond Rutland, Springfield and Randolph, the Center on Rural Innovation also supports projects in Windham County and the Northeast Kingdom.
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Fred Thys covers business and the economy for VTDigger. He is originally from Bethesda, Maryland, and graduated from Williams College with a degree in political science. He is the recipient of the Radio, Television, and Digital News Association’s Edward R. Murrow Award for Investigative Reporting and for Enterprise Reporting. Fred has worked at The Journal of Commerce, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, NBC News, and WBUR, and has written for Le Matin, The Dallas Morning News, and The American Homefront Project.
Email: fthys@vtdigger.org
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