The epicenter of San Antonio’s startup system downtown is Geekdom, which occupies its own building, the historic Rand Building, on Houston street.
Launched in 2011, Geekdom has grown to become the hub of startup activity and now the technology co-working site and collaborative workspace has become a source of capital to ignite the ideas that take shape there.
In its early years, Geekdom provided $25,000 grants to startups based there through the original Geekdom Fund. Many of those startups are no longer in business including Remote Garage, Sporty Bird, Grapevine, Kirpeep, and Embarkly, among others. But some still are in business. ParLevel Systems received a $25,000 grant. It went on to participate in the Techstars Cloud program and then raised $7 million in venture capital, according to its CrunchBase profile.
That initial Geekdom fund aimed to jumpstart the city’s startup community by providing seed-stage funding to tech startups.
Just recently, Geekdom announced the launch of The Community Fund, which will provide seed-stage funding to entrepreneurs. To apply, an entrepreneur must be a member of Geekdom for at least 90 days.
Geekdom plans to select one entrepreneur every month for a $10,000 reward.
“The Community Fund is critical in filling an ongoing need that currently exists and will continue to as San Antonio develops,” Geekdom CEO David Garcia, said in a statement. “As the hub of growing startup scene in the city, we realize that if we don’t take this step and provide initial seed funding for startups, others may not either. Our desire is that we can get other individuals and entities to join the effort to increase the funding we are able to award each month.”
Garcia made the announcement on Jan. 30th at Geekdom’s annual state of the ecosystem meeting at its event center. At the event, Geekdom Co-founders Graham Weston and Nick Longo gave a talk moderated by Geekdom Chairman Lorenzo Gomez. The report on Geekdom can be found here.
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