The Birmingham News/Beverly Taylor
The Innovation Depot is one of CNN Money's "seven hot startup incubators."
BIRMINGHAM -- Birmingham's Innovation Depot was the only Southeast business incubator singled out in CNN Money's "seven hot startup incubators" story today.
The CNN Money website notes the 140,000-square-foot downtown Birmingham incubator is enjoying success and has its choice of applicants.
"Last year, the Innovation Depot graduated 10 companies and generated $274 million in revenue," the website said.
"This is pretty remarkable given the state of the economy," Devon Laney, chief operating officer of the Innovation Depot, is quoted as saying. "We also received 128 applicants and accepted 18."
The article named Vipaar and CareFusion (formerly MedMined) as two of the Innovation Depot successes. Innovation Depot is supported by the city of Birmingham and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Other incubators that made the list were Oklahoma City's Metro Tech; San Jose, Calif.'s Environmental Business Cluster and its San Jose BioCenter; Sunnyvale, Calif.'s Plug and Play Tech Center; New York's Mi Kitchen es su Kitchen; and Albuquerque, N.M.'s WESST Enterprise Center.
Accolades are nothing new for Innovation Depot. Earlier this year, it captured the "2011 Dinah Adkins Incubator of the Year" award at the National Business Incubation Association's International Conference in San Jose, Calif., where it went up against 2,000 counterparts from across the U.S. and 65 other countries.