On Tuesday, a group of founders and investors gathered at a creative studio in New York’s Lower East Side for a routine rite of passage in the tech world: a demo day. What set this event apart was that every early-stage company hailed from Latin America. And even more atypical was that several of the projects vying for venture dollars would use the funding to apply to move to Tulsa, Okla.—a city not exactly known as a hub for startups.
Michael Basch is hoping to change that. Basch and his VC firm Atento Capital may be familiar to readers of this newsletter for their push to build Tulsa into a tech outpost. Atento’s sole backer, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, has long championed the initiative, dating back to its Tulsa Remote program, which launched in 2018 and paid remote employees to move to the Sooner State. But the strategy has become even more refined over the past year, with Atento working with Latin America-based hard sciences startups to help them find VC funding and set them up with a $100,000 relocation package to fund visas, office space, and housing.
