By purchasing additional space, the founders of venture capital fund Twin Ignition have put into gear their plan to advance the local startup ecosystem.
The fund that invests in local tech startups recently confirmed its purchase of the Grain Belt complex’s Keg House Arts Building, located close to its existing Startup Garage, a coworking and incubator space in the Sheridan neighborhood of Northeast Minneapolis. Part of Twin Ignition's intent with the new building is to provide space for the startups that have outgrown the Startup Garage, allowing them to grow without needing to move elsewhere, according to the fund's founders, Scott Aubitz, Ben Rasmussen and Seth Peter.
“We have an ultimate goal to build on top of the success we've had here with startups,” Aubitz said. “We were … talking about, how do we make spaces that are more turnkey, flexible and so forth, for that next phase of their growth?”
So far, TurnSignl, a platform that provides on-demand legal help during traffic stops, and Carbon Origins, a company making delivery robots operated by a person wearing a virtual reality headset, have moved into the new building, the founders said.
Peter acquired the space that would become the Startup Garage in 2017. Two years later, he, Aubitz and Rasmussen founded Twin Ignition, opening its first coworking space, the Startup Garage, in 2020.
The Startup Garage space has seven offices where companies can set up a home base, three conference rooms and more than a dozen reservable desks. In addition to hosting startups, the space is also home to startup support organizations, like pre-seed investment firm Groove Capital and the nonprofit Beta.
Hitting capacity at the Startup Garage prompted the founders to look for additional space, which needed to be close by to maintain Twin Ignition's sense of community, Aubitz said.
Connecting the space’s startups and support organizations helps boost the wider ecosystem, Rasmussen said. Twin Ignition itself has invested in a number of startups based in its spaces. Its founders meet with the companies regularly, Aubitz said.
“We're a piece of a much larger puzzle that is building a strong ecosystem so that startups can thrive,” Rasmussen said. “It takes mentoring, it takes capital, it takes distribution, it takes connections, it takes a lot of things to happen for a startup to be successful.”
Moving companies that are seeing more headcount growth to a larger space in the nearly 45,000-square-foot Keg House means others can enter the smaller space. Docsi, a workflow management platform for surgeons, has moved into one of those exited spaces at the 6,000-square-foot Startup Garage. Twin Ignition is in the process of filling the other, Peter said.
The founders are still deciding how to use the space in the Keg House left vacant by Bunny's Bar & Grill after the restaurant closed earlier this year. One consideration is leasing out part of the space to another startup incubator or related organization, Rasmussen said.
