Throughout a dark 2020, San Antonio scientists, entrepreneurs and tech workers made gains in cybersecurity, automation, aerospace, artificial intelligence, space exploration, energy production, e-commerce, financial technology and more.
The city’s tech stories last year were diverse. They included: approval of Port San Antonio’s Innovation Center; skyrocketing sales of Xenex’s germ-zapping robots; XArc’s partnership with the military and SpaceX; Plus One Robotics’ growth; Rackspace Technology’s return to the stock market; and the take-off of 6Connex’s virtual conferencing platform.
2020 was the year “the entire city has finally recognized our future lies in the development and investment and leveraging of technology,” said Dax Moreno, CEO of Verity, a local consulting firm. “This is the year that tech kind of emerged as the next step, the next phase, I think, of San Antonio’s economic growth.”
And 2021 is looking brighter.
Collaborators
San Antonio saw the highest tech job growth rate in the country, at 21 percent, during the third quarter, according to Dice.com, a tech career website.
The growth, said Moreno, reflects the persistence of local business owners, especially in tech. “We have committed entrepreneurs here,” he said.
Despite the growth, San Antonio was 47th among the top 50 U.S. metro areas for tech talent markets for the second year in a row, according to the latest report from CBRE, a commercial real estate service firm. Moreno sees this, too, as a positive.
“Even in a pandemic, nobody abandoned ship to go to the larger spaces,” he said. “We would love to move up, but it just says, OK, we’re still in the fight. We still know we have work to do, but we also know that there are, I think, real investments still to be made.”
Cooperation was one key to the tech industry weathering the pandemic, and 2020 saw more partnerships between incubators, universities, research centers and business.
“Collaboration is in our DNA, and I call it ‘coopetition,’” said Moreno. “There’s even the sense of like, ‘Hey, I can help you get better. I’m still going to beat you, but I’ll help you get better, too … and more people will come to us.”
Charles Woodin, CEO of Geekdom, said leaders of the city’s co-working spaces began meeting in April to discuss issues they were dealing with and lessons learned.
“I don’t know any other city where you’d be talking to potential competition like that,” he said. “So I think it’s a magical thing.”
Epicenters
2020 “was tremendous,” said Jim Perschbach, president and CEO of Port San Antonio. “It was a really a landmark year for us in terms of growth and opportunities.”
And 2020 only made the work that most of the 80 employers do at the port more important, he said.
At the Southwest Research Institute, Adam Hamilton, the contract-research nonprofit’s president and CEO, saw 2020 as a success thanks in part to a quick pivot of some of their business from commercial to government-focused when the pandemic took hold.
“We had projects canceled, projects delayed, projects reduced in scope, so we really had to redouble our efforts to look for funding opportunities from government organizations,” he said.
The institute re-oriented its aerosol physics lab from studying engine exhausts to evaluating the effectiveness of N95 masks. They also helped the government evaluate more than 40 million pharmaceuticals for their effectiveness in fighting the coronavirus.
SwRI expanded its campus by 300 acres, increased its capacity for developing intelligent transportation systems, continued its hypersonics research, completed a new building for studying energy production and gained new NASA missions, according to Hamilton.
Small firms, big growth
6Connex, a virtual conferencing software platform, saw more than 1,000 percent growth in the year, according to CEO Ruben Castano. Since January, the company went from fewer than 20 employees to more than 200, and tallied $20 million in revenue.
In “2020 just about our whole world became virtual, and having a San Antonio company that provides a complete virtual environment in which business skyrocketed … it’s been a pivot for the entire industry,” he said.
San Antonio ranked 20th among top U.S. metros in hiring remote tech workers, according to Dice.com. 6Connex was one of the companies doing the hiring.
“What is trending, what we’re hearing, what we’re seeing and, in fact, what we’re doing ourselves is the acceptance of remote employees,” Castano said.
Several Geekdom startups also gained momentum throughout the year.
Floatme, developer of a banking and finance app, closed on a $3.7 million funding round in December, according to Woodin.
Terry French, CEO of WXYZr, a near-field-communication company, came to Geekdom after the for-profit co-working space on East Houston Street reopened in June.
WXYZr’s applications allow “people to be able to just tap their phones and get menus or check in at different locations, and in a touchless world that we live in a technology like that thrives,” Woodin said. “So he’s really seen a lot of growth in success and partnership here in our community.”
The pandemic threw a curveball at Braustin Homes in the spring, but technology helped them rebound, according to CEO Alberto Piña. The virtual modular housing dealer opened a hybrid-dealership in May and garnered $1.9 million in investments in November.
“All of a sudden, customer experience with went hand in hand with keeping people safe,” he said. “For us, the video chats, buying a home strictly over the phone was a lot less crazy (of a concept) once it became safer to do.
“And then specifically in our space, it just fast-forwarded customer adoption of these practices five, 10 years ahead of schedule.”
Looking ahead
Braustin is on track to close out 2020 with $10 million in sales, and it’s planning to open 10 dealerships in 2021.
“The roaring twenties is what some economists are thinking we’re walking into,” Piña said.
In January, the city will find out if the U.S. Space Command’s headquarters will move to Port San Antonio, bringing roughly 1,400 military and civilian jobs with it.
“I’m looking forward to, frankly, just a lot of continued growth,” said Perschbach at Port San Antonio. “At the very local scale, I’m really excited to see what this Innovation Center looks like when the walls start going up and the electronics started going in. And more important I’m excited about some of these programs that we’ve put in place.”
At Geekdom, Woodin is optimistic that 2021 will see the formation of new companies in San Antonio.
“We’re in a much better place coming out of this recession... I think we can offer so much more help to so many more people,” he said.
At SwRI, Hamilton is looking forward to getting more people back on campus to foster more relationships and informal conversations that are often catalysts for breakthroughs in science, engineering and technology.
“I’m really excited for all of us about these vaccines being used to break the back of this pandemic and to see how this economy not just San Antonio, not just Texas, but the United States is going to respond,” he said. “I know there’s been a lot of suffering, and people are still going to suffer, but it’s also going to be exciting to watch how the economy reignites in 2021 when we get back to work.”
Brandon Lingle writes for the Express-News through Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms. ReportforAmerica.org. brandon.lingle@express-news.net
San Antonio tech grew in ’20, poised for more expansion in ’21 - mySA
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