State of the Incubator Union: A Look at Georgia Incubators

By the Chubby Research Team on Monday, November 16th, 2009

We’d recently added over 300 incubators and their portfolio or tenant companies to ChubbyBrain and also presented some high-level national metrics on US incubators.

Now we’ll be periodically turning to individual states to take a deeper look at their incubators and portfolio companies.

Today, we’ll be taking a look at Georgia, home of 9 incubators. Of the 142 companies housed currently or in the past within these incubators, 82 were scalable and hence added to ChubbyBrain. (Note: Our focus on ChubbyBrain is primarily on scalable companies so consulting, retail or service companies that may be in these incubators are not included in our database or the remainder of this analysis). This means Georgia’s scalable percentage stands at 57.7% which is much higher than the average of 44% nationally.

The incubators are broken down by the percentage of total incubating companies in Graph A. As the graph shows, the largest Georgia incubator is the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) which stands as 9^th largest in the country. The ATDC holds almost 50% of Georgia’s scalable companies. ATDC is followed by the Georgia BioBusiness Center hosting around a quarter of the companies looked at. Together the companies ATDC and Georgia BioBusiness Center host 75% of the companies looked at in Georgia.

As can be seen by Graph B, the top 2 sectors in Georgia appeared to be Healthcare and Technology followed by almost equal Internet and Business Products and Services. A breakdown of the top three sectors by industry is shown for Healthcare, Technology, and the Internet. In accordance to the national trend, Healthcare appears as the top sectors medical devices & equipment and pharmaceutical/drugs being the top industries within. Evidently, software appeared to be the top Industry (followed by services) when the Technology Sector was broken down. (Graph D). Unlike the previous, Graph E shows services as the top industry followed by software in the Georgia internet sector.

Not surprisingly, Graph F shows that most incubator companies in Georgia were located in Atlanta and Athens. Atlanta is by far Georgia’s’ largest city and so by sheer population alone, Atlanta should have a large number of incubating startups.

Largest Incubators

Graph A

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