Is Pittsburgh a startup?

NEWS

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• Humanities student turned tech startup founder fights human trafficking using AI
• Launching summer 2022: Pennsylvania’s first space museum in Pittsburgh 
• Pitt students score big at the NFL’s 2021 Big Data Bowl, taking home $25K

Pittsburgh joins Startup Genome global network

Pittsburgh is serious about startups … and all businesses looking for the best place to locate and grow. There has been $7.2 billion invested in nearly 600 companies over the past 10 years and $10 billion invested in university research. But what else makes it one of the country’s strongest innovation hubs? 

We’ve partnered with Startup Genome to tell you. Pittsburgh is now part of Startup Genome’s exclusive global network of ecosystem leaders. This network will drive the visibility of our startup community and quantify our strengths in the arena. It tells users why startups are thriving in Pittsburgh and provides an online tool that highlights the unique assets we offer in support of the growing breadth of innovative ventures within an ecosystem spanning a 100km radius around the City of Pittsburgh. 

Pittsburgh as a startup: what stage are we in?

You may have heard that Pittsburgh is a top city for startups, but have you ever thought about how Pittsburgh IS a startup? Innovation Work’s Jim Jen has. When he first came to Pittsburgh, he wrote how he viewed the city as a startup and how the analogy guided his thinking and strategies at IW.
 
Flash forward a few years, Pittsburgh continues growing its tech ecosystem and has received international recognition for leadership in robotics, AI, life sciences and manufacturing. We’ve also seen a surge in entrepreneurship at regional universities, nationally ranked accelerators, co-working spaces, increasing entrepreneurial events, and companies raising seed rounds and attracting capital from outside of Pittsburgh. As a startup, Pittsburgh has surpassed the discovery and validation stages.
 
Today, when Jen looks at Pittsburgh, he sees the city building repeatability to reach scale. Now the questions are: what does that mean, how do we define it and where do we go from here?