Innovation can be hard to measure. One way to track it is through Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants from the US government. The number of SBIR grants awarded in Fort Worth is far below the level it needs to be for our community to foster an innovation-led economy. Recommendations on how to address this issue are included.
New research shows that newly established local companies create five times more jobs than companies that relocate to Fort Worth.
Early Stage Capital Slips Again Fort Worth-based startup companies raised $13 million in early stage capital in 2020. If that sounds low, it’s because it is, especially when compared to other large Texas cities and to the nation as a whole. In fact, while the United States set a 10 year high for most capital invested ($148B), Fort Worth actually slipped in its funding efforts, raising $4 million less than our previous five-year average of $17 million per year. In the past, we’ve looked at early-stage capital raised in Texas’s largest cities. This time we are taking a look at 2020’s updated...
As we have discussed previously on this blog, Fort Worth is now the 13th largest city in the country, but it ranks 40th in early stage funding when compared to other US cities. In this post we will explore how Fort Worth compares to these cities in a variety of other metrics, plus we will discuss some reasonable targets we could set to move up in the rankings. Our team analyzed early stage funding using Pitchbook, the proprietary research tool that focuses on early stage investment data, to see where Fort Worth ranked compared to the top 50 largest cities (by...
Each year, Inc. Magazine puts out its list of the 5,000 fastest growing companies in America. Think of it like the Forbes 500 (largest US companies) for startups. To be on this list is prestigious and it means your company is doing something right and growing at warp speed. In 2020, the #1 company on the list -- the fastest growing company in America (OneTrust) -- grew at an astonishing 48,377 percent over the last three years. Yeah, that’s hyper growth. But how did local companies do? Where did Fort Worth-based companies come out on this list? How did we do...
Early stage funding trends for Fort Worth-based companies over a 20 year period summed up in 6 charts.
New research, conducted by Sparkyard and HSC shows that new companies have created about 25,000 jobs a year in each of the last six years in Tarrant County.
In a previous blog post, we looked at early stage capital investment in Fort Worth, and where the city stood in comparison to other Texas and US cities. We established that Fort Worth doesn’t have a lot of early stage capital, but it turns out there’s plenty of private equity (PE) money here, which tends to invest in later stage, more established companies. Relatively speaking, that assumption is correct. We looked at data from Pitchbook to see just how much PE was being invested in Fort Worth and how that compares to other Texas cities. As seen in the chart below, companies...
In this blog we're going to take a look at all the early stage investment deals in Tarrant County since 2015, including a breakdown at the individual municipality (town or city) level. While most of our prior data-heavy blog posts have focused on Fort Worth as a city and how it compares to fellow Texas cities, this time around we wanted to look locally, at the greater Fort Worth area: Tarrant County. There are 41 Tarrant County municipalities stretching from Keller, to White Settlement, to Burleson, to Arlington, and everywhere in between. Tarrant County’s estimated 2020 population is 2,139,860, which ranks as...
Over the past few months, we have been compiling data from PitchBook, a proprietary research tool that focuses on early stage investment data, and turning that data into charts that help showcase Fort Worth’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here are seven thousand. These charts paint a rather solemn picture of Fort Worth’s current startup landscape, as Cowtown ranks last in all categories when compared to other large Texas cities. Just because Fort Worth is currently lagging behind doesn’t mean we have to stay behind. The real failure would be for the city to...
