A former warehouse within an old Coca-Cola bottling factory has taken on new life in Paducah, Kentucky.
The 9,000-square-foot space is now home to Sprocket, a nonprofit organization with ambitious goals to advance the tech economy in the city home to just over 27,000 people. Its intent is to serve as a hub for innovation by connecting entrepreneurs to capital and resources, while also growing the local tech talent pool, said Monica Bilak, founder and executive director of Sprocket and regional director of GroWest.
"We want to put Paducah on the map as a top 10 micropolitan destination for tech companies to locate and grow their business," she said. "I know that sounds crazy — it's a big audacious goal — but we're going to try to do it and I believe we can in certain niche markets like cybersecurity."
Sprocket got its start while working on a prototype for the Paducah Innovation Hub, which is a vocational education program for high school students from Paducah, as well as McCracken County and Graves County. There, students get hands-on experience with virtual reality design, robotics, engineering and more.
But as that initiative developed, Bilak said more and more adults became interested in high-tech training.
"I started doing adult programs and the state took notice," she said. "They said, 'Can you take this up a notch or ten?' So we did, and that's when we got really serious about space and talent development for adults. That's also when we started focusing on entrepreneurs and startups."
Prior to the opening of Sprocket's physical location at 3121 Broadway St. earlier this month, there was no place for Paducah's entrepreneurs to come together and collaborate, Bilak continued. Now, the nonprofit offers coworking space and 20 offices, about half of which are filled, in addition to a multipurpose room that doubles as a classroom for the organization's adult code training.
"Talent is such a huge thing because you can't grow companies if you don't have anyone to work in them," Bilak said.
In addition to its tech workforce development efforts, Sprocket also hosts the West Kentucky Innovation Challenge, a pre-accelerator program, and 1ST50K, a pitch competition that brings startups to Paducah with the promise of $50,000 in non-dilutive funding.
Bilak said Sprocket teamed up with Codefi to launch 1ST50K, which received more than 200 applicants in its first year. The three winning companies just moved to Paducah in November. They include: Noninvasive Diagnostic Instruments (St. Louis), Seamly2D Systems (Huntsville, Alabama) and Qbrics (Bangalore, India).
Sprocket is also currently building an investor network so there's funds available to grow those early-stage companies Paducah is looking to cultivate.
"We have to do a little bit of everything in the ecosystem — from building talent to creating networks to attracting companies," Bilak said. "Our space is key because it offers a beacon to the community. It's a big win for us to have a home for our entrepreneurs."
