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Grand Central Tech inaugurates new space for urban-focused startups

The Hub @ GCT

Grand Central Tech inaugurates new space for urban-focused startups

With the Cornell Tech campus (which features buildings by Weiss-Manfredi and Morphosis) and the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute rising on Roosevelt Island, and the New Lab humming away in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, New York suddenly doesn’t seem to have a shortage of venues catering to tech start-ups. Today marked the inauguration of one more addition to “Silicon Alley.”

City officials and corporate executives gathered to kick-off The Hub @ GCT, a 50,000-square-foot business incubator located at 335 Madison Ave. Tech entrepreneurs and startups apply to use the space, which is run by the business accelerator Grand Central Tech (GCT). Unlike many accelerators, GCT offers its resources—office space, in-house recruiting team, access and mentoring from corporate sponsors—free of charge for one year. (Corporate sponsors include the likes of Google, Microsoft, G.E., Goldman Sachs, and IBM.)

In exchange, GCT hopes to induce startups that “graduate” to rent offices in their other 40,000 square feet of coworking-style space at 335 Madison Ave. The New York Business Journal reports that last year 18 applicants were accepted from a pool of over 1,000 hopefuls. The Hub aims to host companies that are tackling urban challenges ranging from energy efficiency and public transportation. At the opening ceremony, Alicia Glen, NYC deputy mayor for housing and economic development, extolled New York City’s virtues as a test bed for new urban-focused technology enterprises, saying, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”

Maria Torres-Springer, president and CEO of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), similarly lauded The Hub’s potential to work with the city, calling it another part of the “tech ecosystem we’re building in New York City.” The NYCEDC, who helped fund New Lab, contributed a $2.5 million grant to the Hub, which was supplemented by $5 million from Millstein Properties, who owns the building.

For more details, visit Grand Central Tech’s website.


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