Incubator Gives Ed-Tech Startups a Place to Go

NEW YORK CITY-With the city having just announced the five winners of a competition to bring creative and innovative businesses to Lower Manhattan, it's an opportune moment to look at what the private sector is doing in this regard. FurtherEd, reportedly the largest national provider of online-based education for lawyers, accountants, and other professionals, recently opened a free incubator space at 61 Broadway to help tech-based startups launch their companies and develop product lines.

FurtherEd's 8,400-square-foot workspace is designed to a provide culture conducive to growth and collaboration for tech startups. In addition, companies utilizing the space will have the opportunity to work alongside the FurtherEd team, according to a release.

“We did something similar back in July, and we were just testing the waters at that time,” Jeff Reekers, COO of FurtherEd, tells GlobeSt.com. “We invited a few companies in from the ed-tech space; we had some space open up in our office, so we thought 'let's meet some people and see if it works out.' We didn't push it really hard, but we had an awful lot of inquiries.”

At that time, FurtherEd was still known as LawLine; the new moniker reflects a broadening of its scope. “We've always been a very learning-based company; LawLine was essentially the continuing legal education portion of the company, and that was what we were doing for the first 10 years or so,” says Reekers. “Over the past 12 months, we've developed new products, broadening the continuing education for accountants, real estate agents and other professionals. We also created a learning-management system. And we created a tool called teachem for K-12 education.” The sum, Reekers says, was a broadening of the company's horizons across the ed-tech space.

Last month's announcement from the Bloomberg administration, broadening the “Made in NY” promotional campaign to include the city's booming tech sector, provided a spur to further action. “We thought to ourselves, 'it's a really good time for what we had started seven months prior with opening up the office space along with all of the developments we have,'” Reekers says. “We don't pretend to have the knowledge of every fantastic product that will be going to market over the next two years, but we want to be at the heart of a very large movement in the ed-tech space. This seemed the best way to do that from a company point of view: to surround ourselves with those people that have those ideas and that background.”

For the startup organizations that would use the 61 Broadway space, “There's still a lot of need in terms of growing a real company: not only having a product, but also knowing how to sell that product, market it, distribute it,” Reekers says. “There are a lot of developers that have created fantastic tools, and to a large extent, the winners are those that are able to bring them to market successfully. That has been something that FurtherEd has done very well. So if we see something that we want to surround ourselves with, then we can help people get those products out.”

The Lower Manhattan site could be the first of several, says Reekers. “We want to expand locations pretty quickly,” he says. “We're looking for new space to accommodate this at the beginning of next year, potentially in a more technologically-friendly environment—the heart of where that's happening in New York—while still keeping our roots down here.”