Houston Exponential starts tech community database
Houston Exponential on Thursday unveiled a new database that brings together details about the city’s nascent technology ecosystem, making it easy to find out details about startups, venture funding and accelerators.
HTX TechList, available at htxtechlist.com, allows young companies, investors and startup development organizations to fill out detailed profiles for their organizations that are searchable based on more than 2,000 different tags.
It’s built on software developed in Israel that helped grow that country’s robust tech ecosystem, said Harvin Moore, Houston Exponential’s president. The growth so far in Houston’s startup community has increased demand for a way for investors and startups to find each other, he said.
“In the past three years, we’ve
gone from 11 startup development organizations to 34,” Moore said during an online launch event Thursday. “And we’ve gone from 400 startups to more than 1,100.”
The software being used comes from Start-Up Nation Central and is called GlobalFinder. During the launch presentation, Greater Houston Partnership’s president, Bob Harvey, said the Israeli site gets more than 70,000 searches each month from a global audience.
At launch, the database was prepopulated with 246 companies, 45 investors and 21 tech hubs. Now it is up to organizations in Houston to fill in their own profiles, said Serafina Lalany, chief of staff at Houston
Exponential, a nonprofit charged with supporting the city’s tech community.
Startups, investors and
hubs/accelerators must fill out 80 percent of the fields in the software’s profile and pass muster with Houston Exponential’s data team before the information goes live in the database, Lalany said. They are also expected to update the information regularly.
“Data hygiene is very important to us,” she said.
There is no charge for posting to or accessing the database. Moore said HTX TechList was funded by Houston Exponential’s general funds.