STARTUP SEEDING
Plan for downtown hub part of wider effort to spark innovation
Houston’s vision of creating an innovation corridor stretching from downtown to the Texas Medical Center took another step forward Thursday with the announcement of a new startup hub planned for downtown.
The Downtown Launch Pad will have 17,000 square feet at the Amegy Bank building at 1801 Main St., anchored by startup assistance organizations Mass Challenge and generator, based in Massachusetts and Wisconsin, respectively. The facility will include space for incubator programs, labs, co-working desks and corporate innovation areas. It’s slated to open in spring 2020, Mayor Sylvester Turner said Thursday.
The Launch Pad was conceived by Central Houston, a nonprofit involved in the planning and implementation of downtown’s redevelopment, and is funded by its partner organization, the Downtown Redevelopment Authority, which administers funds collected by the tax increment reinvestment zone, an area where property taxes are frozen and the additional increments are put back into that area for public improvements.
“This is, to me, one more step in our creation of an innovation corridor,” said Bob Eury, president of Central Houston and the Downtown Redevelopment Authority.
Innovation hubs are under construction across the city. But the so-called innovation corridor follows a four-mile stretch of Main Street, with the Texas Medical Center at the south creating a space for health care innovation and
Rice University in the middle spending $100 million to renovate the former Midtown Sears into the Ion innovation hub.
Downtown, on the north of the corridor, is already home to startup assistance programs, including accelerator program MassChallenge which recently graduated its first class of entrepreneurs. But Eury said Launch Pad could become an anchor for downtown’s innovation activities, focusing on early-stage startups.
The Downtown Redevelopment Authority provided grants to help attract both gener8tor’s gBETA program, which will focus on Houston’s early-stage startups, and MassChallenge, which helps startups that generate less than $1 million in revenue or have received less than $500,000 in investment within the previous year. The grants given to both organizations require them to remain downtown through 2024.
Jon Nordby, managing director of MassChallenge Texas in Houston, said the walkable downtown is attractive to entrepreneurs, investors, mentors and tech workers. “We want to put startups wherever they’re going to have the highest probability of succeeding,” he said.
Ion Executive Director Gaby Rowe said she doesn’t see the Launch Pad as competition, but
another asset to help the city build an innovation cluster. She worked with Eury on the plan, saying young companies need different services at different stages of growth and the Ion could focus on startups further along in their growth.
“We won’t be able to compete against those coasts if we don’t have that complete solution,” she said.
The Downtown Launch Pad, which will occupy the 10th floor of 1801 Main, will be managed by the Cannon startup hub, which recently completed renovating and expanding a former pipeline manufacturing warehouse into its 120,000 square-foot facility near the intersection of I-10 and Beltway 8. In a project separate from the Launch Pad, the Cannon is working with Amegy to open a co-working space this year on the 13th floor of 1801 Main.
“It was never just about the Cannon Campus location,” Cannon CEO Lawson Gow said in an email. “Houston is really sprawling, and it needs a network of interconnected innovation hubs throughout the city. That’s why we also opened a location in the Post Oak area and why we are opening The Cannon Tower in Downtown.”
The Cannon is also planning to open six to eight other locations throughout Houston.