Arlington Spends $125k To Lure Tech Company Away From DC
A software company called Basket Savings—which has developed an app that lists local grocery store offerings by price—is moving to Clarendon, thanks to an economic development package from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
Basket is moving to the third floor of 1220 N Fillmore St, an office condo it's subleasing from developer, builder and owner Bush Construction, VP Andrew Viola tells Bisnow. The development, Station Square, opened with 65k SF of office space in 2006. Andrew says Bush and its JV partner sold the fourth floor as office condos and the retail space, but still owns the 22k SF third floor.
Basket is taking about 6k SF of space and getting about $125k in Virginia funding for a purported $10M investment in the local economy. Basket plans to have about 65 employees in the space, according to the governor's office.
Basket founder and CEO Neil Kataria says when you look at the current landscape of tech startups in the headlines, many of them are focused on people who have more money than time and are willing to pay whatever price to have their soy latte and kale salad delivered in less than 15 minutes. That's him on the left, with Arlington Board chair Libby Garvey, the governor and co-founder Andy Ellwood.
Neil says Virginia is more representative of the country at large than NYC or San Francisco, despite Arlington being one of the wealthiest counties in America by median income. The company just launched its mobile app in January, so Arlington and Virginia are banking on Basket hitting high-growth targets. In December, the company was raising a Series A funding round after launching in 2014 with $3.3M in seed funding.
That's how Arlington is slowly whittling away at its office vacancy problems, thanks to economic development packages like this one for smaller tenants. McAuliffe has been a frequent visitor to Arlington recently, helping convince tech companies like Opower to stay or Silicon Valley companies like Shift to open East Coast HQs in the county.
