Greater Fort Lauderdale has played an important role as a birthplace of global technology and innovation. This is evident in the products, services, and devices people use daily, including personal computers, mobile phones, mixed reality, satellite radio, and even pet products. Greater Fort Lauderdale is the launchpad for such household and boardroom tech names as Chewy, Citrix, eBuilder.com, and UKG. It’s also the home of cloud-based, fintech, and health tech companies, as well as a growing bevy of sustainable climate-ready tech solutions.
In all, tech drives $29.5 billion in regional economic impact, according to CompTIA’s 2024 State of the Tech Workforce (Cyberstates) report. It’s more than South Florida’s warm, welcoming climate for business and lifestyle alike that fosters creativity. A culture of collaboration encourages public-private partnerships that turn research discoveries into commercial products. This and much more make Greater Fort Lauderdale the ideal location to “Work in the Cloud. Live in the Sun.™”
The region has earned its place on the global map as a high-tech hotbed. In the “Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2024” by Startup Genome, the South Florida metro area jumped seven places, from #23 to #16 out of 300 global regions.
Skilled talent is among the region’s greatest competitive advantages. South Florida is home to nearly 136,000 net tech jobs, Cyberstates reported. With employers and residents migrating here, and a steady stream of graduates from 35 colleges and universities offering technology-related programs, the IT workforce continues its steady growth.
South Florida has been cited as one of the nation’s top startup hubs — ahead of New York, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Austin. The region ranked first statewide based on the $3.8 billion in capital invested across 460 deals in 2023. Cyberstates previously called Florida an emerging tech hub.
From a statewide perspective, Florida is #1 in high-tech employment in the Southeast and offers state-of-the-art connectivity, with the second-highest number of wireless telecommunications carrier establishments in the United States according to SelectFlorida. The state’s IT strengths are wide-ranging — from software to photonics to modeling and training. Overall, Florida is among the nation’s leaders in high-tech businesses and had the largest year-over-year increase of net-new tech business establishments for 2023 (+2,474).
From South Florida’s role as the birthplace of the IBM PC in the 1980s to the smartphone a decade later, Greater Fort Lauderdale has remained at the forefront of innovation. Today, the region’s technology assets continue to attract global companies while supporting startups and larger businesses alike. These IT companies enjoy a privileged position on the global telecommunications map, with convenient access to a major Internet Exchange Point, fiber optic connections, and high-speed data links to Latin America, Europe, and the rest of the globe.
Collaboration fuels success. The South Florida TechGateway regional marketing initiative (techgateway.org) provides an online asset map of technology companies, as well as news and insights about this fast-growing industry cluster. TechGateway.org helps job seekers by streamlining their job search process, accessing numerous local tech companies in one place.
Greater Fort Lauderdale and South Florida have long been celebrated for sun, surf, and tech. Now, the region can add climate-ready sustainable tech to its points of pride, having been named the only ClimateReady Tech Hub in the nation by the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration in late 2023. In July 2024, the EDA awarded $19.5 million in federal funding to the ClimateReady Tech Hub for novel sustainable, durable, resilient infrastructure, workforce development, and startup support, among other areas.
With investment potential topping $3 trillion and 40 million jobs worldwide in the coming decades, according to Morgan Stanley, the region is poised to lead resilient solutions. A short list of local innovators includes 1Print, a climate tech 3D printing company developing multi-functional, climate-friendly concrete coastal protection solutions; Greener Process Systems, whose modular system captures maritime and industrial emissions and CO2; Flood Sense, whose network of flood sensors can improve flood forecast accuracy; and Smart Seawall Technologies Inc., a wave diversion and shoreline systems solution.
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