History & Impact
Our History
Startup Tucson was founded in 2012 on the heels of one of the first Startup Weekends in Tucson. Since that time, the innovation community has grown tremendously with more funding, support organizations, accelerators, and incubators popping up every year.
Startup Tucson is also the founding organization of TENWEST Impact Festival, a festival celebrating the intersection of innovation, culture, technology, and social impact. The festival grew to 14,000 attendees in 2019 and continues to be a central hub of thought-leadership in Southern Arizona.
Startup Tucson has continued to serve as an advocate, educator, and connector for entrepreneurs. We serve over 3,000 entrepreneurs each year with over 400 active members in our network membership. Our alumni have brought over 44 million dollars of investment and over 400 new jobs in the short years since our founding.
In recent years, Startup Tucson has continued to mature as an organization, building customized programs to serve the needs of a wide variety of entrepreneurs, including creative, food, and small businesses. Our positioning at “the front of the funnel” helps us attract entrepreneurs and then connect them to the resources, mentors, or organizations that best fit their needs.
We focus intentionally on creating broad, inclusive services to bring more diversity into the innovation pipeline. We work collaboratively across the innovation ecosystem to lift up and support our partners, with the collective goal of inspiring and elevating entrepreneurs to create and innovate in order to build a more equitable, vibrant, and forward-looking economy.
2023-2024 Impact
Lifetime Impact
Our impact
Startup Tucson is committed to transforming the Southern Arizona economy through entrepreneurship and innovation. In 2023-2024, we directly engaged 3,409 entrepreneurs/ecosystem supporters through our entrepreneurial and professional development programming and events.
Our programs have proven effective in helping startups create jobs, hire local talent, attract investment, and propel Tucson towards resilient economic growth. In 2023-2024 alone, Startup Tucson companies self-reported receiving a total of $9.8 million in capital funding support and added a total of 127 new jobs to the Tucson community.
In addition to helping startups launch, we also help build the startup community by assisting individuals in gaining the skills they need to build successful businesses and be a part of the innovation community, connecting all players in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Our participants are incredibly diverse, with nearly 59% having one or more female founders, 37% minority-owned, 5% veteran-owned, and 9% having one or more student or recent graduate founders. We continue to do specific outreach into diverse communities and provide the support needed for these founders, including reaching out to rural communities. This is also true with female and POC founders. The national average for women-owned businesses is 27%, and our network is 59% women-owned. For minority-owned businesses, the national average is only 17%, and our network is 37% POC-founded.