When Matthew Kim, founder and CEO of Vigilant Biosciences in Fort Lauderdale started his company in 2011, he quickly found funding to be a serious challenge. Ultimately, he persuaded an out-of-state investor to help, but in his most recent financing round, he received support from venVelo, an early-stage angel fund in Orlando, the Florida Institute for Commercialization of Public Research, and some wealthy individuals in South Florida.
Funding a startup, he said, takes “constant networking, telling the story to anyone who will listen.” And now, his early detection product for the dental industry, which was inspired by his family’s history of oral and other cancers, is gaining traction. Vigilant Biosciences raised $5 million in 2016, pushing the total raised since the company’s founding to $12.5 million. Vigilant recently began shipping its first product, and by early 2017, will post revenues from operations.
With an encouraging year ahead of him, Kim said, “the future is bright for startups” in South Florida.
Companies such as Vigilant Biosciences are setting the tone for a startup community that is reaching new milestones. For the second year in a row, the Miami metro area ranked second among the 40 largest metropolitan regions in business creation in 2016, according to the Kaufman Index of Startup Activity. The region was second only to Austin, Texas, in startup activity.
As 2017 kicks in, entrepreneurial growth is gaining strength, say entrepreneurs, investors and mentors. More experienced business people are moving to South Florida, more investors are willing to invest in early-stage companies, and there are better networking opportunities for those in the industry to connect, launch startups and make deals.
“It’s a numbers game, a funnel. You have to have hundreds of thousands of startups to get thousands of early stage companies, in order to end up with hundreds to be venture-capital financed,” said Tim Cartwright, who started Tamiami Angel Funds, one of the largest angel groups in the state. In 2017, Cartwright will be raising money for his new Adrenaline Fund for “seed” investments, or capital used to start a business.
That’s a departure for the state, where seed capital and early stage investmenrs have been hard to find, and big venture capital dollars have proven elusive.
The big dollars have not been elusive for Magic Leap, a Dania Beach-based startup that could soon dramatically lift South Florida’s prominence on the national tech sector map.
Magic Leap has raised $1.4 billion and is hiring hundreds of people for its offices in Dania Beach and Plantation, as well as worldwide. The company is developing technology described by founder Rony Abovitz as “a new mixed reality computing platform that will enable people to interact with the world in ways never before possible.”
Magic Leap has yet to launch its first product. Could 2017 be the year? New marketing chief Brenda Freeman recently told online publication Recode that Magic Leap is “very much on time” and is “racing to launch.” She declined to detail the company’s timeline.
“Magic Leap is going to do incredible things. Just look who the investors are — those are not dumb people who are investing half a billion dollars. They must have seen something,” observed Cartwright, who is not an investor…