An Akron tech startup, nurtured in the business incubator in the city’s downtown, is planning to relocate to Independence.
Cuyahoga County is luring the company, 7signal, with a $480,000 Business Attraction Forgivable Loan.
The county’s loan will be forgivable “only upon the company’s creation of 48 jobs having average annual salaries of at least $100,000 and maintenance of those jobs within the County over 7 years,” according to a news release issued by Cuyahoga County.
7signal, located in space in the Akron incubator called the Akron Global Business Accelerator, said last fall it had more than 20 employees (about 12 of them working in Akron), and more than 80 customers across the United States and in Europe.
Engineers in Finland, who worked for mobile giant Nokia, started the company that provides software that makes wireless communications connect easily and operate more reliably inside buildings such as hospitals.
In addition to the $480,000 Cuyahoga County loan, the city of Independence has said it will give 7signal a job creation grant valued at up to $200,000, according to the Cuyahoga County news release.
The tech firm’s departure will put a dent in the amount of income taxes collected by the city of Akron, which must compete globally as well as locally to keep and grow jobs.
“We work to attract and retain potential and existing businesses on a daily basis, but this situation simply became a numbers game,” Mayor Dan Horrigan said. “When we look at making an offer to a company, we have to weigh the return on investment to the community. We feel we have been a great home for 7signal; we recruited them, we invested in them and we offered them incentives that made sense for Akron. But we prefer to invest in and incentivize companies that want to stay and grow in our city.”
The company moved to the United States in 2011, setting up shop in the business incubator known as the Akron Global Accelerator. The facility is in the former B.F. Goodrich complex off South Main Street downtown.
7signal initially got some traction by targeting hospitals, places where monitoring the quality of Wi-Fi performance is especially critical.
In July, the company launched a cellphone app to monitor Wi-Fi performance, picking up news/entertainment company NBCUniversal as a customer, with employees downloading it to their phones.
NBCUniversal is “like a lot of companies,” said Jeff Reedy, 7signal’s CEO, said in a Beacon Journal story in September.
“They are cutting the cord [on landlines], getting rid of desktop computers and are heavily depending on employees’ mobile devices and the Wi-Fi working.”
The app is free. Where 7signal makes money is by providing companies and institutions access to data that shows how Wi-Fi is performing throughout their networks, whether they have a single location or multiple sites. Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., was another early user of the app.
Along the way, 7signal has attracted significant investment, including money from the new NEXT Fund, established by the nonprofit regional economic development group JumpStart Inc., with offices in Cleveland.
The fund is JumpStart’s first for-profit fund, and its investments in companies range from $500,000 to $1.5 million.
Send local food news to Katie Byard at 330-996-3781 or kbyard@thebeaconjournal.com. You can follow her @KatieByardABJ on Twitter or on Facebook at www.facebook.com and read the Akron Dish blog at www.ohio.com/food.