The City of Las Vegas and StartUpNV have partnered with Dealroom (dealroom.co) the past few years to provide an online resource that maps out the city’s startup ecosystem for stakeholders—making Las Vegas the first city in the U.S. to do so. Now, that platform has evolved to include the whole state.
A new Nevada database by Dealroom, which operates similar platforms around the world, tracks startup activity statewide in collaboration with multiple economic-development agencies, StartUpNV announced last month. The expanded platform puts the state’s startup community at the fingertips of its members, said Jeff Saling, executive director for StartUpNV.
“So, if you’re somebody who’s new, who just moved to Las Vegas or Nevada, and you want to get engaged in our startup community, it’s a good place to start,” he said. “You can find all the startups that are in our community. You can find the people who write checks, the funders—the venture capitalists that are in the community. You can find jobs, you can find events—it’s really a consolidation of everything in one spot.”
The website reports how many companies have been funded over a given period of time, how much capital has been raised and how much the startup ecosystem has grown, among other metrics, Saling said.
The platform allows investors to learn more about new companies, whether funded or unfunded, he said, so that startups and funders can go “potentially shopping” on the platform.
“Dealroom was founded around a central mission to make discovery of promising companies easier for everyone, wherever they are in the world,” Yoram Wijngaarde, CEO of Dealroom, said in a statement. “The new Nevada startup database is about just that, chronicling the most exciting companies based across the Silver State, such as those innovating in EV batteries, cloud computing, nanotech and more.”
The free initiative was made possible by partnerships with the Governor’s Office for Economic Development, the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance, the Clark County Office of Community and Economic Development and the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada.
Each of those organizations and even lawmakers can benefit from the platform, Saling said, because they can see how the startup ecosystem is growing and how different policies may affect it.
“There’s thousands of other cities around the world that have found this to be incredibly useful,” Saling said. “And so, we’re hopping on a train that’s already been proven in many other parts of the world, and are among the first in North America to get it online and get it working here.”
The startup community is so far excited about the platform, he said, emphasizing that people who start their business now with this resource have an advantage previous startups lacked.
Amer Tadayon, CEO of Lucihub, a Las Vegas-based startup and video production platform powered by artificial intelligence, said that Dealroom’s Nevada database has already made a difference for his company.
Using the platform to prepare for an upcoming funding round made what would usually be days’ worth of work take just minutes, Tadayon said.
“There’s all kinds of things on the platform that are really helpful,” he said. “And ... if you’re an entrepreneur and you don’t have access to this, it makes your job probably 10 times harder.”
Economic slowdowns like the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic have proven the need for Las Vegas to diversify its economy, Saling said, and fostering the state’s startup community is just one way to do that.
“If you look at the parts of the U.S. and the other parts of the world that have a strong startup ecosystem, a lot of wealth gets created,” he said. “A lot of jobs get created to help diversify their economies and it just generally raises the economic standards for the whole community.”
Las Vegas is an especially compelling place for startups to launch, Saling said, because of Nevada’s business-friendly environment, its breadth of entertainment for young people and positive opportunities for families.
“People are finding that it’s a wonderful place to live,” he said. “And that word is getting out. And then you pile on top of that the economic opportunity of a compelling and robust startup community, and that just makes our state that much more attractive to everybody else.”
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