angel or seed funding, from a range of sources; one, San Francisco-based AppJet, has even been acquired (by Google). Two Dogpatch Cambridge startups have raised angel rounds, and six more are pursuing angel funding.
“Our goal is to, in some small way, help foster entrepreneurship in each of the three markets, but also to try to get members of the community working with each other,” Barrett says. “We want people to get backed, whether it’s by Polaris or not, so we are actively inviting other financing groups into Dogpatch to get them exposed to these entrepreneurs.” In fact, an “angel demo” event is scheduled for Dogpatch Cambridge tonight.
Now that there are three Dogpatches, Polaris is also doing everything it can to build a “virtual community” uniting the teams in Boston, San Francisco, and New York. “We look for opportunities to import the best of the West to the East and vice versa,” says Barrett. Already, a few of the Dogpatch teams have members in multiple cities: an energy technology company based in Cambridge, kWhOURS, has a person in San Francisco, and Assured Labor, a mobile platform for job recruiting in emerging markets in regions such as Latin America, has workers in Cambridge and New York. And at least one of the Microsoft-Dogpatch events being planned for the next 12 months will cut across all three Dogpatch locations, says Barrett.
Word about the expansion at Dogpatch Labs Cambridge, which is at 222 Third Street in the old American Twine building, has started to leak out, so there’s already a “robust pipeline” of startup teams interested in taking up residence, according to Barrett. But even if the new space fills up, there will be room for more teams sooner or later, as alumni move out. “Most of the people in there now are almost six months into this, so there is another whole class about to form,” says Barrett.
