Kyle
For years Nashville Tennessee has been known as Music City USA. Country music starts in Nashville. This year ABC is even running an hour long drama based on country music and life in Nashville, called “Nashville”. To people from the midsouth it’s no secret that Nashville also has a thriving entrepreneurial, startup and tech scene, but now they’ve been highlighted in a piece on cnn.com called “Cities Where Startups Are Thriving”.
In 2010 the Nashville Chamber of Commerce in conjunction with the Nashville Technology Council opened the Entrepreneur Center. A team of 75 people in an “entrepreneur task force” began researching and discussing the possibility of creating a resource for Nashville entrepreneurs back in 2007, a year after a similar effort was started in Memphis Tennessee by entrepreneur Eric Mathews and Launch Your City.
The center started as an online resource, and eventually became a brick and mortar centralized location that serves as the startup and technology hub in Music City.
In May of 2010 it was announced that successful healthcare entrepreneur Michael Burcham was picked to lead the Nashville Entrepreneur Center after a six month search.
Now the community is thriving. Nashville investors have put $72 million dollars into 21 companies so far in 2012, nearly double the $38 million dollars and 8 companies they invested in in 2009.
Startups like Edo Interactive that originated in Nashville and now has offices in Nashville and Chicago, has raised over $50 million dollars in venture capital. Another startup, RentStuff, which got it’s formidable start in the Jumpstart Foundry accelerator program, housed at the Entrepreneur Center, followed in Edo Interactive’s footsteps, relocating to Chicago and leading to an acquisition first reported here at nibletz.com late last week.
Nashville is just one of 9 entrepreneurial pockets that LaunchTN is supporting with startup accelerators. The nine high growth areas include four major hubs, Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville and Chattanooga and also have five shoulder markets as well. Tennessee was the second state to formalize a Startup America region. That much entrepreneurial and startup activity in the state of over 42,000 square miles means that no Tennessee resident is more than an hour and a half away from an entrepreneurial hub.
Linkage:
CNN’s “Cities Where Startups Thrive”
No one covers high growth tech news for the southeast like nibletz.com
Tennessee is home to the largest startup conference in the world
