The owner of a large commercial building in Elk Grove is offering technology startup companies office space in what has become the Elk Grove Tech Hub.
Jim Hensley, president of Abbey Flooring, bought the 26,000-square-foot building in 2020 with plans to use part of it as a showroom, warehouse and offices for Abbey Flooring Design Center.
“When I bought the building, everyone was asking me ‘what are you going to do with it?’” Hensley said.
He had some work done on the building to be able to put the design center in it over two years, and now he’s interested in supporting local startups with space in the remaining 19,000 square feet of the building at 3233 Dwight Road.
The building now has a handful of finished rooms and small offices, and it has some large unfinished spaces. Hensley is considering building out some additional spaces.
The offices are already home to EyeRate, a homegrown Elk Grove retail engagement platform company that has grown to 37 employees, and is part of the current cohort of the Rocklin-based Growth Factory funded accelerator program. A new tenant is VestLife Inc., a startup company with five employees whose app supports families with disabilities with cloud-based record keeping. A third Elk Grove tech company is eyeing space now.
“It’s been an organic development. We’ve been bringing companies to him, and he finds space,” said Luis Aguilar, economic development specialist with the city of Elk Grove.
Hensley said he’s also considering putting in a wet lab space to attract science and medical startups that need access to laboratory bench space. That kind of space is in short supply in the region, and the existing shared wet-lab spaces are consistently full.
Wet labs — equipped for testing and analysis of chemicals or biological matter — are necessary for life sciences, medical, pharmaceutical and agricultural research and experiments. Wet labs are in critical demand in the region, but most startups don’t have the resources or the creditworthiness to build out a lab themselves.
AgStart operates a startup wet lab space in Woodland, which filled up soon after it opened last year and now has a waiting list of companies that want to get into it.
"It really is true. If you build it, they will come," said John Selep, president of the AgTech Innovation Alliance, which operates AgStart.
The city of Elk Grove has a grant program to support development of startup spaces, and the city would like to see a wet lab but nothing is official yet, Aguilar said.
“I’m going to do it on my own or with the city,” Hensley said.
Elk Grove’s coworking space InnoGrove got a city grant three years ago to make improvements to the space that opened in 2015.
EyeRate, which started in a garage, eventually moved into InnoGrove, and then outgrew InnoGrove and made the move to Hensley’s building.
