The nonprofit that wants to make Columbia the next hub for tech startups (2024)

COLUMBIA— As an upperclassman at the University of South Carolina, Andrew Nye had an idea.

While doing consulting work as a student, the finance major was tasked with helping a Charleston nursing home streamline its billing reimbursem*nt system. It was an issue he'd heard about before, with his parents running a small physical, occupational and speech therapy clinic.

"I'd hear about these issues at the dinner table growing up," Nye said.

But Nye had a solution. He wanted to roll out an electronic medical system, which he's coined Qatalyst Health, that would help make the reimbursem*nt process at nursing facilities easier.

With that idea in mind, and at the encouragement of an entrepreneurship professor, Nye applied for ColaStarts. The six-week program, put on by a new nonprofit called GrowCo, is aimed at mentoring entrepreneurs with new ideas.

GrowCo is headquartered in the Boyd Innovation Center, a modern space on Saluda Avenue in Five Points, and funded by the Boyd Foundation. GrowCo wants to make Columbia the next hub for what it calls high growth/high tech startup companies— new entrepreneurial opportunities that have the ability to be scaled up for larger growth.

Startups are young companies often led by a newer face to the business world, led by a unique idea. Success stories in the industry range from ride-sharing apps like Uber to powerful search engines like Google.

Since the companies are so new, they often have less to lose than larger, more established businesses and a lot more to gain from innovative ideas. Their popularity has been on the rise in cities across the country. In 2021, the rate of startups jumped the most it had in a single year in nearly two decades, according to Business Dynamic Statistics from the U.S. Census.

The Boyd Innovation Center opened in the summer of 2022. The coworking space, where new business leaders can rent space, has been used to hold networking events like Tech Beans, a weekly coffee meetup for startup founders. In September of 2022, the organization named Caroline Crowder, a South Carolina native and USC alumna, as its executive director.

And while some might think Columbia isn't the ideal place for a tech startup community, Crowder believes that by making the industry more accessible to a variety of people, the capital city can buck the trend and join other places like Knoxville, Tenn., and Tulsa, Okla., that aren't traditionally associated with startup culture.

"Those places are a few years ahead of us and have a lot of programs that we can look to and mirror in the future," Crowder said.

Despite its relatively new status, Crowder estimated the nonprofit serves around 200 or so startup companies and entrepreneurs through mentorship programs, tech happy hours and access to resources that can help companies get the attention of larger investors.

"We don't have the density of tech startups here yet, so that's the core issue that we're addressing; we're helping create more founders and inspiring them to start in Columbia," Crowder said, explaining that with more founders and entrepreneurs, the hope is to attract more investors to fund the projects.