Greater New Orleans, Inc., the regional economic development agency, has launched a new online portal to aggregate news and information about area startups and entrepreneurial activity.
The new hub, StartupNOLA.com, is a “response to the region’s transformation into a hub for entrepreneurial activity over the past 15 years,” GNO Inc. said in a statement announcing the new website.
The entrepreneurial ecosystem has been boosted in the past few months by news that several of the technology-based companies founded about a decade ago had been sold at high valuations, including construction industry tech outfit Levelset, which sold for $500 million, and advertising data company Lucid, which sold soon after for $1 billion.
Those and other fundraising successes by local startups are being touted by GNO Inc. and others as vindication of efforts that began mostly in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to support budding entrepreneurs. GNO Inc. said in its announcement of its new portal it was supported by organizations including Idea Village, Tulane University’s Albert Lepage Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and Propeller.
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“We felt that a ‘single point of entry’ to this community would help make it more accessible and impactful for founders, investors and even people who want to work at new companies. That is the vision for StartupNOLA,” said Michael Hecht, CEO and President of GNO Inc.
The portal will link to a database of startup companies in the region, and GNO Inc. urged local companies that may not already be represented in the database to sign up.
The website will highlight organizations that offer various types of support for new businesses and other avenues of assistance. It includes a jobs database and information for employers and jobseekers and ways to put them together.
GNO Inc. said they will also have a blog with updates about all aspects of the local startup ecosystem.
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