Atlanta Magazine honored two of the Enterprise Innovation Institute’s programs — Engage Ventures and the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) — with Groundbreaker Awards for their respective work in helping drive technology and innovation.
The magazine created the awards in 2012 to highlight the individuals and projects each year that are driving Atlanta forward with new, initiatives and innovative ideas.
This year’s theme was “Technology & Innovation” and Atlanta Magazine fêted the 2018 winners at a Nov. 1 reception held at the Atlanta History Center.
Engage, launched in 2017, is a mentorship-driven accelerator and early-stage venture fund that targets high-tech startups. The Engage accelerator is open to startups across the country, with a focus placed on mentoring and market access strategies. Its founding partners include AT&T, Chick-fil-A, Cox Enterprises, Delta Air Lines, Georgia Tech, Georgia-Pacific, Georgia Power Foundation, Goldman Sachs Group, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), Invesco Ltd., Tech Square Ventures, The Home Depot, and UPS. The fund was initially launched with $15 million from the 10 founding corporate partners (Goldman Sachs joined in 2018). Those corporations also actively support Engage through mentoring, education, and collaboration.
“If we can bring together some of the leading innovators with titans of industry to develop relationships, then—fast-forward five years from now—you can only imagine where that could lead,” Engage Managing Director Thiago Olson told the magazine.
One year in and several cohorts later, Engage’s 24 portfolio companies have obtained venture financing of about $75 million in the last six months. Engage also reports its portfolio companies have 38 signed enterprise contracts between the startups and Fortune 500 companies.
Read Atlanta Magazine’s Groundbreaker Award profile on Engage Ventures here.
ATDC, which was founded in 1980, is the state of Georgia’s technology startup incubator. Its focus is to work with technology entrepreneurs across the state to help them learn, launch, scale, and succeed in creating viable companies.
“What we’ve created here is a community,” ATDC Interim Director Jane McCracken told the magazine. “The better the companies we grow, the better our city and state will be.”
To date, startups that have graduated from ATDC, which is one of the longest running and most successful university-affiliated incubators in the United States, have raised more than $3 billion in investment financing and generated more than $12 billion in revenue in the state of Georgia. Read Atlanta Magazine’s Groundbreaker Award profile on ATDC here.