The entrepreneurial ecosystem in Rhode Island just got a big boost.
Venture Café, a global nonprofit whose mission is to broaden, connect and support the innovation community through a public network of spaces and programs, has officially launched in Providence. The organization held its first formal event last week.
Venture Cafe is part of a cohort of companies opening in the new Wexford Innovation Center located in Providence’s Jewelry District. The 196,000-square-foot building will also house the Cambridge Innovation Center, Johnson & Johnson and Brown University.
Venture Cafe’s goal is to help connect entrepreneurs and innovators to people and resources; provide social events and curated, early stage pitch programming to support investor and funder deal flow; and provide organizations with insight and access to startups and emerging technologies to fuel their corporate innovation strategies.
“We are coming to Providence because we think we can help drive economic development with small business and startup activity not just in Providence, but in the whole greater Rhode Island area."
“We are coming to Providence because we think we can help drive economic development with small business and startup activity not just in Providence, but in the whole greater Rhode Island area,” Kevin Wiant, executive director of Venture Cafe, told Rhode Island Inno. “We started getting interested in the Providence area based on interest from the government to help really drive additional activity, and they had this concept of an innovation district and putting together the players to create that environment.”
Venture Cafe’s kick off event, dubbed First Night, was abuzz with more than 150 people clamoring to get a look at the new space and get an idea of the type of programming the organization would offer going forward.
The event highlighted several startups in the area and also featured a panel on B2B application development and the state of entrepreneurship in Rhode Island, as well as a fireside chat with Rich Miner, the co-founder of Android.
In addition to programming, Venture Cafe has also opened its new District Hall work space, which is free to anyone and has a variety of meeting space options from open space to small conference rooms to a big 200-person event hall.
Venture Cafe chose to set up a new location in Providence based on a few different merits, according to Wiant.
The city already had a good community of entrepreneurs; it has a great university network for talent and different levels of government have been focused on promoting innovation.
Although Venture Cafe does have a presence in numerous U.S. and international cities and has been operating out of Boston and Cambridge for many years, Wiant hopes Providence is the first of a growing network of locations in New England.
“We want to help connect entrepreneurs with resources in Boston that might not be regularly found in Providence such as investment capital or mentoring or contacts,” he said. “We also want to bring people going back and forth more easily between the two cities and access to resources. That means bringing people to Boston to introduce them to our contacts up there and bringing contacts out of Boston down to Providence to work with companies. So we see that as regional activity, which will help all of Rhode Island to have more businesses start up and grow faster than they have in the past.”
