The Bay Area has long been the center of the technology world, and it remains the undisputed king of startups. But lower wattage tech hubs are popping up as hospitable homes for the next Facebook or Google.
The bloom of more silicon cities has spread tech jobs into some unlikely
places such as Florida and Utah, but it has also brought some of the attendant annoyances familiar to Northern California, including rising costs for office space.
U.S. venture capital firms — the financiers seeking to find and fund the next Google or Facebook — wrote $12.1 billion worth of checks for U.S. startups in the first quarter of 2016, according to a PwC and NVCA MoneyTree report based on data from Thomson Reuters. About 40 percent of that sum went to young companies in the Bay Area, a share of startup financing that has increased from a decade ago.
But some of the biggest deals in the first quarter of 2016 went to companies outside of the Bay Area. Magic Leap — a Dania, Florida, startup that is working on technology to mix virtual images with the real world — collected $794 million from investors. Domo, a business software startup based in American Fork, Utah, added $131 million to its coffers so far this year, and it is laying the groundwork for an initial public offering.
The spread of startup money outside the Bay Area has helped those cities take advantage of growth in high-tech jobs, which has far outpaced that of office jobs overall.
