STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- SparkHaus, a $16.4 million entrepreneurship hub, is slated to open in Covington in 2025.
- It will offer coworking spaces, private offices and event spaces.
- SparkHaus aims to attract startups, venture capitalists and support organizations.
The Greater Cincinnati region is set to usher in a third innovation district when SparkHaus in Covington opens next year. The more than $16 million effort will transform a vacant retail storefront on Madison Avenue into an entrepreneurship hub – a place where venture capitals and startup founders alike can better plant roots.
Project leaders gathered earlier this week to celebrate the construction kickoff. Work on the space officially starts Sept. 30 with a goal of opening by summer 2025. In leading up to that milestone, more details have emerged.
To see renderings of the space, click through the gallery above.
Kenton County Judge/Executive Kris Knochelmann said there’s a huge unmet need in the region, a sentiment also echoed by Dave Knox, executive director for Blue North, a Northern Kentucky-focused entrepreneurship support group. Blue North is partnering with Kenton County on the project and is among a running list of tenants slated to occupy the building, most recently a Sims Furniture store, and previously home to Montgomery Ward.
If opened tomorrow, every seat at SparkHaus would be full, Knox said.
“You see some of our best entrepreneurs (working) in Hotel Covington's lobby; that’s where they’re doing team meetings, because they have folks in different places, and they need that space to come together,” Knox told me. “There’s also a physical need. When you take Kentucky angel tax credits or investment through Keyhorse (a seed-stage venture capital firm), you have to be a Kentucky-based business. You can put down your home address, but that isn't great for growing jobs or growing your startup.”
Knochelmann said SparkHaus is the culmination of a yearslong effort. Sims Furniture exited the building in early 2022, and in 2023, the Kenton County Fiscal Court jumped in, approving a pool of its site development funds – an amount not to exceed $3 million – to purchase the property through the Northern Kentucky Port Authority.
“The bones are really, really good. It’s a big, wide-open space, not to mention it's in the heart of Covington,” Knochelmann said. “It's definitely catalytic.”
SparkHaus borrows learnings from Union Hall, Embarc
SparkHaus will join a pair of innovation hubs already up and running in the region – both on the north side of the Ohio River: Union Hall in Over-the-Rhine and the 1819 Innovation Hub Uptown.
Knox said Blue North studied those spaces – but the group also took inspiration from outside groups in plotting the layout for SparkHaus, namely Tampa’s Embarc Collective and 36 Degrees North in Tulsa. “We wanted to know who has built similar spaces in this pivot that’s existed since Covid,” he said.
Tampa's Embarc Collective
Locally, in using Union Hall and 1819 as examples, there aren’t enough private offices, he said. “There’s a waiting list for those spaces,” Knox added.
In its 49,000-square-foot footprint, SparkHaus will have offer 31 private offices, room for teams of two to 12, more than 170 individual desks and multiple shared meeting spaces.
Coworking memberships are flexible given the rise of remote and hybrid work: Instead of tying the number of desks to the exact number of memberships, those with a two-desk office, for example, would be allotted four memberships.
Knox hopes to bulk up to 75 to 150 coworking members.
Embarc intentionally designed its space in Tampa to separate the front and back of house. If you come to the building for an event, for example, you don’t first walk through all the entrepreneur workspaces. “We’ve found we've unintentionally created a fishbowl (at other hubs) that made our entrepreneurs feel like animals in a zoo,” Knox said.
SparkHaus will have a classroom, with capacity for 100 people, accessible right off the lobby.
The goal is to have between 200 and 300 people flow through the space on a daily basis.
“The lessons from Union Hall are close to a decade old," Knox said. "It's about what's worked well with that space and what could be improved. Also, what do we not need to duplicate? Too often there’s a tendency to (say), let's have our version of something. We don't need another beer hall. We have five amazing event spaces on Madison. Let's not replicate that just to replicate it. What's missing that we need to fill.”
In terms of tenants, SparkHaus will bring together funders, entrepreneurs and support organizations.
At least four capital providers will call SparkHaus home, Knox said, including eGateway Capital, which will occupy the largest footprint. The Covington-born venture firm, fresh off a $94 million Fund II raise, has been teased as an occupant from the start.
Knox said eGateway will have its own private space, accessible from the street but with full access to the facility. The goal is to provide support for its portfolio companies to hire in the region: “They’ll have flexible space in their office for those companies, and hopefully that one person hires two, three, four more people, and they move over to SparkHaus with their own office,” Knox said.
Other firms will be announced at a later date.
Company wise, Builder Backed, a tech startup that aims to simplify homeownership with a platform that offers a vetted network of service providers – a “curated Angie’s List” – is one.
Knox said the space is poised to attract similar high-growth, venture-backable startups, but also fast-growing companies that have bootstrapped to date. “They have a real interest in this community, and we want those folks in here,” Knox said.
There’s also a pull for high-ranking executives working at startups based outside the region. In eGateway’s portfolio alone, there are 25 employees based in the region who fit that mold.
“No one even knows they're here,” Knox said. “They’d love to hire more of their team around them, but the last thing they want to do is mess around with a five-year lease. We have a natural bias for that type of talent.”
Upstairs, the executive boardroom at SparkHaus, dubbed the Covington Industrial Club, will be intentionally designed to be the “best boardroom” for venture firms to host board meetings, Knox said.
The lower level will feature a media room for hybrid presentations.
A publicly accessible cafe – not a full coffee shop, Knox stressed, so as to not compete with existing businesses nearby – will be open for meetings.
Knox said the goal is to create a flywheel effect.
“We need a way to make people feel welcome,” he said. “Hopefully that leads to a lot of people saying, ‘So what is this SparkHaus thing?’ It becomes an inclusive community.”
SparkHaus funding includes state dollars, donor support
SparkHaus carries a price tag of roughly $16.4 million. The space is being built by Urban Sites, while CityStudios is serving as the architect/designer.
Knochelmann said the capital stack is set to cover the construction costs. The project received $6 million in state funding, $2.5 million in financing from the Catalytic Fund and up to $2.04 million in Kentucky Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credits. He also expects philanthropic support to top $2 million. Investors include the Carol Ann & Ralph V. Haile Jr. Foundation, Drees Homes Foundation, Ried Schott, Corporex Cos., St. Elizabeth Foundation, Milburn Family Foundation, Duke Energy Urban Revitalization Initiative, Fischer Homes and John Cain.
Both Knochelmann and Knox also heavily credited state Sen. Chris McDaniel, R-Ryland Heights, for his support.
“We want to give our residents the tools they need to forge Northern Kentucky’s next success story,” McDaniel said in a news release.
Knochelmann said SparkHaus – along with the $26 million OneNKY Center, a four-story, 43,000-square-foot, Class A office building, to be anchored by Covington Life Science Partners, a future shared research and development lab; and the $125 million Commonwealth Center for Biomedical Excellence, a joint Northern Kentucky University Chase College of Law and the University of Kentucky College of Medicine campus, set for a site in Covington – combine to form the first pieces of a new major innovation district in the region.
And for the businesses that incubate – and ultimately outgrow SparkHaus – the county has sites ready for that.
“This is a community asset, much like the (Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International) Airport,” Knochelmann said. “From it will come a lot of long-term success.”
