The Birmingham tech sector buzzed with growing momentum in 2023, even as the city and the global community faced challenges including the remote work debate, layoffs and more.
On the threshold of 2024, leaders and innovators in the Birmingham tech and entrepreneurship scene are sharing their insights on what lies ahead for the Magic City.
Matt Matt Jaeh, Techstars’ local managing director and co-founder of ProctorU, said there were no major surprises for the sector locally in 2023.
"I expected to see increased activity, growth and interest in the ecosystem and that is exactly what I observed," he said. "Quantitatively, you can see it in the startups that have decided to make Birmingham home."
Some of those startups included TaxxWiz, which got offers to stay in Los Angeles after participating in an accelerator there; Sequense; CModel, Backr, which got offers to stay in Minnesota after participating in an accelerator there, and Prep Intel, which got offers to stay in Tulsa.
"The community rallied around supporting our 12 (Techstars) companies just like and even more so than last year — not really a surprise," Jaeh said, also citing growing attendance at Innovation Depot and interest in events like accelerator demo days, Coffee and Collisions, Tech on Tap and Techs in the City.
"I think the one surprise was the rise in popularity of the Birmingham AI group that hosts monthly meetings at Innovation Depot," he said. "It went from a tiny group in the training room to filling almost every seat in the new event space. It's lead by a great group of entrepreneurs and leaders in the community."
Looking into 2024, Jaeh expects to see "tremendous" early stage startup growth, but cautioned there will be continued challenges in funding due to events like the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, economic instability, rising interest rates and the upcoming election.
"I think we will continue to see much more economic development growth as more people find out about all the opportunities provided by economic development organizations and funding that will be deployed by Innovate Alabama," he said. "I’m very excited to see the companies and projects that continue to be funded through this. I think we will see continued partnerships between Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Huntsville, Montgomery, Mobile and Dothan as pillars of the state for continued growth in technology."
Jaeh added that he is excited for the first phase of EDA TechHUB.
Elizabeth Anderson, CEO and co-founder of LunarLab Benefit LLC, said looking back, it seems that the general outlook for 2023 was fairly pessimistic, but overall economic performance was better than was anticipated for the year.
"My hope is that we'll continue that trend," she said. "On the startup front, the SVB failure in 2023 seemed to take a toll even in Birmingham. As a result, we've seen investors take more caution. Investments are going to startups that have a rock-solid strategy, real traction and a gold standard user experience. I anticipate that that trend will continue into early 2024, so I would definitely advise startups to get those areas ship shape in the competitive investment environment."
