Tampa-St. PetersburgClearwater, FL

Detroit may have its entrepreneur-benefactor Dan Gilbert, but Tampa Bay has Jeff Vinik. The owner of the NHL’s Tampa Bay Lightning is behind Embarc Collective, an innovation hub launching in March that will aggregate founders, accelerators, and VCs. It will live just north of the new mixed-use waterfront district that is another Vinik project— in conjunction with Bill Gates’s Cascade Investment. Vinik is also an investor in the national fund and accelerator Dreamit, which recently opened an outpost here. It joins Tampa’s largest homegrown accelerator and co-working space, the Tampa Bay Wave, which specializes in health, education, and marketing tech—three of the area’s dominant new industries. Among the Wave’s entrepreneurs-in-residence are the founders of Tribridge and MyMatrixx, two companies that made lucrative exits in 2017. The region’s other hot companies include Peerfit, which offers corporate fitness through local gyms and has raised more than $23 million. And the second Synapse innovation summit—Tampa’s answer to SxSW—was expected to attract 5,000 people in January.