EVOLVE Technology Program
Affordable office and manufacturing space. Entrepreneurial mentorship. Local talent and investment connections. These are all things that early-stage startups need to bootstrap their business and scale up – and you don’t have to do it in Silicon Valley. In fact, at Youngstown Business Incubator in Ohio, you can enjoy the benefits of advanced manufacturing equipment and focused entrepreneurial development at a fraction of the price.
The incubator is a five-building campus in the heart of downtown Youngstown, Ohio, that offers affordable space and a center for advanced manufacturing that specializes in digital technologies and additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, with many facilities and machines available to startups for prototyping and manufacturing. Those include (but are not limited to) compressed air, metal printers, a 5-axis milling machine and their XJet Carmel 1400 Ceramic Printer – the first in the United States and the only one currently offering zirconia material commercially.
The incubator also offers their EVOLVE Technology program, which provides startups with entrepreneurial coaching, product commercialization strategies, technology integration and access to capital. The program is nonprofit and doesn’t take an equity stake in their portfolio companies, said EVOLVE Technology program director Chandler Fiffick. And they can offer all this at a staggeringly affordable cost compared with the Silicon Valley.
“Our portfolio companies get a rent of $6 per square foot,” said Fiffick. “I work with really, truly early-stage startups to get these companies to the point where they can raise pre-seed and seed rounds. We have had a lot of success there.”
Evolve Impact
Jeremy Spaulding, one of the nine entrepreneurs-in-residence at YBI, specializes in coaching early-stage founders on how to commercialize and grow their business. He says the pairing of affordability and advanced manufacturing technology available at YBI gives startups much more runway to get off the ground.
“When you’re growing a business, there’s a certain amount of bootstrapping that has to happen, and it’s a lot easier to do it in an affordable area like this,” said Spaulding. “Here, if you raise that $3 million to $5 million, you can scale a business very quickly and efficiently.”
And it’s not just early-stage startups that take advantage of what YBI has to offer. Ursa Major Rocket Technologies, based in Colorado, makes rocket propulsion systems and uses their YBI facility to make 3D-printed proprietary copper alloys and manage in-house additive manufacturing for rapid prototyping, research and development.
“They saw the value of opening a second location here because of the additive manufacturing niche,” said Fiffick.
One of YBI’s biggest success stories is Turning Technologies, founded in 2002. Starting with just three employees, the company became a leading global developer of educational technology and services to education institutions, corporations and government agencies worldwide. It became Echo360 in 2022. More recently, JuggerBot 3D started out by selling industrial-grade desktop printers and evolved into creating multi-material, medium and large format printers, for industrial purposes. It now sells a line of industrial-grade 3D printers that offer enhanced print speeds and material possibilities.
Interested in taking your idea to the next level? For more information, email director Chandler Fiffick at [email protected].
Youngstown Business Incubator
241 W. Federal St., Youngstown
(312) 805-3083 | ybi.org