The First Coast is chock full of companies and nonprofits developing new products, growing their teams and supporting their communities.
To provide a window into that growth, we’ve singled out six outstanding innovators to honor with the 2023 Fire Awards, presented by First Coast Inno and the Jacksonville Business Journal. The honorees include startups and more established firms, and vary in industry and geography across the First Coast. Read more about each of the Inno on Fire Class of 2023 Honorees below:
Company Name: IQ Fiber
Industry: Telecommunications
CEO: Ted Schremp
Year Founded: 2021
Brief description of what the company does: IQ Fiber is a residential, high-speed internet provider based on the First Coast. The privately funded organization is currently installing the service for thousands of homes in the area.
2022 Funding: Nondisclosed (Fully funded Phase 1 for 60,000 customers)
As you reflect on 2022's successes and growth, what was the prime contributing factor?
I think it’s two things. Broadband is really a necessity at this point. Covid told us that. Whether it's education or working from home, broadband is absolutely critical. Fiber represents the highest most reliable speeds you could possibly have.
Our deployments last year in San Marco and Atlantic Beach were a success. We’re a local company, we’re not a monopoly like Comcast or Charter. Being local is critical to building a great service. We feel the community and partners have supported and helped us locally, we think that’s a key part of our success.
Now that VC funding and investments have begun to slow, what is your strategy for seeking outside capital?
We’ve gone from a startup founded in August of 2021 with two initial employees and we’re now in the mid-50s. We really consider ourselves a scale-up. We have proven success. We’ve been live for five months in San Marco and live two-to-three months in Atlantic Beach already ahead of our objectives. We’ve proven our ability to construct a network and keep and retain customers. The capital moving forward is really infrastructure. Fiber optics continues to receive attention. We feel confident to move forward past Phase 1. We’ve now proven those numbers and it's a lot easier to have those conversations with investors.
Taking a step back to the company’s founding, are you where you expected to be by now?
Like any business that has been through troubleshooting supply chain issues, some things you can control or not control. We’re trying to navigate it. We’re on our plan. The consumer adoption and response has blown away our most aggressive expectations.
Where does the company go from here? What is next for your company in the short to near-term?
We’re in scale-up mode right now. We've got the basics in place. Our Phase 1 is 60,000 homes in the Jacksonville metro area. We’ve identified 300,000 homes in a three-to-four county area that makes sense for us. It’s a careful balance, building a network and doing a good job for customers.
Northeast Florida is growing like crazy. It's a bit like walking up an escalator, you can stand still, but that’s not our way, we’re walking up. We see more and more opportunities for our services. We see offering higher speeds in our future.
What is your outlook for your industry and the role you play in it going into 2023?
Broadband as a utility is a must at this point. If broadband is down, it’s like the power being out. It’s about having a fast, reliable connection. Fiber is the future and you’ve already seen more federal dollars going to rural areas where they don’t have it. Ten years from now, we’ll look back on it, ‘Wow, we didn’t have fiber.’
It takes three, five, seven years of hard work to deploy fiber networks. There's nothing around the corner that beats fiber. There's plenty of capital flowing into the market. The big guys and the smaller guys like us expected this.
