Sparkyard says its vision is to see Fort Worth become “nationally recognized as a place where people come for their ideas and companies to thrive.” And a new grant funding is helping it expand that vision.
The entrepreneurial-focused collaborative networking and support platform, formed by the UNT Health Science Center, the City of Fort Worth and TCU’s Neeley School of Business, has received a $450,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration that the HSC is matching with a $112,500 grant of its own to help boost is capabilities of connecting entrepreneurs to resources to help them grow their businesses.
“We believe that entrepreneurship is the great equalizer when it comes to job creation, innovation, poverty alleviation and economic development,” Cameron Cushman, director of innovation ecosystems at UNT’s HSC, told NTX Inno via email. “It is cheaper and easier now to start a company than it ever has been in the history of the world, and we think that increasing our diversity of startups, founders, entrepreneurs and industries will increase economic opportunity throughout our city.”
Full disclosure: NTX Inno is a media partner of Sparkyard.
Besides the free services, the organization offers, like business plan building and networking events, the combined $562,500 investment will allow Sparkyard to introduce several new initiatives. Among them are a dashboard that provides data on the ecosystem to local policymakers, a digital jobs board and a tool that will help connect first-time founders to seasoned veterans of the Fort Worth ecosystem. Sparkyard said it also plans to use the funds to translate its website into Spanish and Vietnamese, the second and third most spoken languages in the region, respectively.
Sparkyard also teased that the investment will help it set up a new entrepreneurial community in the Lone Star State. However, it said it is still working with the Better Business Bureau of Texas to finalize that location.
Since its formation, Sparkyard has been involved in helping bring Global Entrepreneur Week programming to Fort Worth and helped launch the Innovate Fort Worth podcast.
The company has also been working to help steer public policy to help bolster the regional startup ecosystem with several reports on areas where Fort Worth falls behind other cities and highlight the local impact of startups on job creation. Some of the most recent reports have focused on the lack of early-stage investments in the area and the lack of investment diversity.
“The resources that Sparkyard provides are critical to the recovery of DFW's entrepreneurial ecosystem in light of the pandemic,” said Robert Sturns, economic development director at the city of Fort Worth, in a statement. “We're… excited to see the additional impact they'll make on the region's small business and startup communities with this funding.”
