Published Oct 25, 2019 by Maggie Martin
The Amegy Bank building at 1801 Main Street will soon be home to The Downtown Launch Pad, a 17,000-square-foot space that’ll feature incubator programs, labs, coworking and innovation areas.
The Launch Pad will be anchored by two accelerator programs, MassChallenge and gener8tor.
The Houston Chronicle reports Central Houston, a nonprofit focused on the redevelopment and revitalization of downtown, created the project. The Downtown Redevelopment Authority, which provides financial incentives through public and private sector partnerships, will fund the project. The Cannon, a coworking space and entrepreneurial hub, will manage the space.
The Launch Pad is slated to open next spring.
“This is, to me, one more step in our creation of an innovation corridor,” said Bob Eury, president of Central Houston and the Downtown Redevelopment Authority.
The Launch Pad will sit within Houston's Innovation Corridor, a roughly 4-mile stretch that runs through the heart of the city from downtown south to the Texas Medical Center. The corridor will be anchored by The Ion, a 270,000-square-foot facility created by Rice University that will bring together the area’s entrepreneurial, corporate, investor and academic communities to collaborate and drive our digital tech ecosystem forward.
Downtown Houston is robust with more than 150,000 employees, over 4,500 companies and has generated at least $8.4 billion in development since 2000.
Read more about the Innovation Corridor here.