Meet the 60 Diverse-Led Startups from Tech:NYC’s Third Founder House

This week, we kicked off the third Tech:NYC Founder House, our quarterly initiative to bring the most promising early-stage founders together with investors, industry experts, and – most importantly – each other all under one roof for a day of collaboration.

This was a special edition of the House: This time, we partnered with the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) to support its 2024 Founder Fellowship, a cohort of 60 diverse-led startups contributing to a more inclusive tech ecosystem in New York. Meet them all here.

“NYCEDC and Tech:NYC have a great collaborative relationship, so we're constantly finding areas of alignment," said Daria Siegel, NYCEDC Vice President. “I think supporting diverse entrepreneurship is a shared goal across this, and we see a huge opportunity in New York to be a leader in supporting underrepresented founders.”

Our Founder House keeps getting fuller and fuller: The first edition welcomed 25 founders, and with this latest edition, we expanded to make space for 100! This week we took over a full floor of work and meeting space thanks to our partners at WeWork, which has been providing space for the initiative since day one!

There’s plenty to be excited about in New York’s tech sector. We have the most AI jobs in the country, and that will likely only grow with the Empire AI program. The number of NYC tech jobs jumped at the end of 2023, with December seeing the largest monthly increase in the sector since April. And it may be harder to fundraise than the salad days of 2021, but that means the startups coming out on the other side are stronger and more innovative.

Some of those resilient startups joined us today, where sessions covered everything from climate tech to how to best structure your seed round. The energy and collaborative spirit we saw was proof of what we already know: Our network is doubling down on New York and tech remains committed to powering the fastest-growing segments of NYC’s economy.

“It's isolating to be a founder,” said Marissa Beatty, founder of Turnover Labs told us at the House. “You can't always get 100% of your adviser's time, but you can speak with other startups who are in similar places as you, just navigating it for the first time.”

Last year’s Founder Fellowship cohort raised $12 million and created 79 jobs during the program – and we can’t wait to see what this group of founders achieves in 2024.

WHAT THE FOUNDERS ARE SAYING:

"Connecting with other founders is always the best. It’s just a little motivation, and collaboration always helps. We just started the Newlab program here, so we definitely want to meet all the partners that are involved with the Newlab program and EDC. We've gotten a lot of traction in the private sector, but we're hoping to make some moves into municipal agencies as well.”
– Diallo Powell, Co-founder, Stak Mobility

“I see this as a networking event. Getting to meet with other high-power individuals who have ushered other startups through the process, their general calmness about the process is very comforting. That can be very stressful, so you're like, ‘Oh, thank goodness, somebody has done this before.’”
– Marissa Beatty, Founder, Turnover Labs

“I love the diversity and all great ideas that are tackling climate-related issues. I think everyone is just really excited about this transition to a more sustainable and environmentally just world. We get hung up too much sometimes on the sustainability side and we're not thinking about how we deploy it and make it equitable. And I think everybody here has that as a core mission. It definitely resonates and helps us connect further.”
– Santiago Rios, Co-founder, Stak Mobility

“I think a lot of founders and entrepreneurs can relate to the zero to one (funding) journey – the early, early stage of a company, when you don't have a large team. You don't have an institution around your company going yet. It's a very lonely journey. Just the ability to have a chance to have a conversation with someone right next to you that's also on that same lonely journey, that is definitively valuable.”
– Deepak Shrivastava, Co-founder, Sunrise AI