About half of those employees will be newly hired positions, with the remainder coming from L3’s campus on nearby Innovation Way, which employs 775.
The Triangle Office building is the third location of the Mason Tech Elevator, a collaboration between the city and and private partner Top Gun Sales Performance, one that takes technology and bioscience companies in their infancy and connects them with the tools and infrastructure needed to grow as well as provide a reduced lease rate for office space.
Perry credited the company’s partnership with the city’s economic development team and its proximity to the new Mason Tech Elevator campus as determining factors for the expansion, which he said would occur in August or September.
The new space would blend two of the company’s efforts: a space avionics group and an infrared camera imaging and detection business.
“The vision for the space would be for us to flex engineers in and out of the space and be able to utilize this for innovation projects, new project development, lab-type testing on some of our electronics systems,” Perry said. “So, really a flexible space where we can have people come in and collaborate to come up with new products, new ideas, new innovations.”
Perry was one of several business officials who lauded the city’s efforts during a celebration Monday of the new campus, praising them for their role in helping launch small- and mid-sized tech and bioscience companies, an effort that officials say has added more than 600 jobs with an average salary of $80,000 to the local economy.
“This has been a great growing ground for innovative businesses and an opportunity to fuel (an) innovative ecosytem,” said Mason Mayor Victor Kidd. “We have among us some very intelligent … forward-thinking people who have been able to turn their brain power into very successful companies and we appreciate that very much.”
The extension of the program into a third location adds 85,000 square feet to retain growing companies and attract new opportunities, doubling the entire portfolio to 170,000 square feet of total space across three campuses.
Mason’s start-up initiative began in partnership with CincyTech in 2007. An expanded model authorized in 2012 gave the city control of the second floor or about 30,000 square feet of a 68,000-square-foot building at 5155 Financial Way. That new location created a pathway for companies outgrowing the Mason Municipal Campus to expand.
Since then, the city, in conjunction with its partners, the CincyTech pipeline, word of mouth from the Mason growth company portfolio and the leadership team of Top Gun Sales Performance, have participated in the attraction, incubation and growth of 22 entrepreneurial biohealth and digital companies.
Companies that are that part of the Mason Tech Elevator portfolio include Genetesis, Layer Logic, Intellicasting and Lantek in the new location, as well as Assurex Health/Myriad Genetics, ADB Companies, Atomic Robot, Hipaax, Trayak, ConnXus, Include Health, Bard Inc., Festo, Riverbend Worldwide, Stack and L3 in the first two locations.
Genetesis, the first tenant of the third Mason Tech Elevator location in May 2017, produces technology that is able to detect coronary artery disease in emergency-room patients in just 90 seconds without being submitted to X-rays, EKGs, blood draws or a treadmill stress test over the course of as much as 28 hours.
Genetesis co-founder, CEO and 2013 Mason High School graduate Peeyush Shrivastava said he believes there will be a great deal of cross pollination among companies entering the Mason Tech Elevator.
“It’s going to be a productive environment for very different disciplines of companies to be in but at the same time it does the Tech Elevator service to its name, to its legacy of tech that’s agnostic to life sciences versus IoT (internet of things) versus whatever the heck else comes in here,” he said.
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