Bitwise Industries has selected Douglas Jemal’s 368 Sycamore Street as its Buffalo location according to Buffalo Business First. The Fresno-based company works with primarily marginalized communities to obtain the skills and resources o to access opportunities in the tech industry. The company was heavily lobbied to open a facility in Buffalo by the region’s business community.
Bitwise Industries provides paid apprenticeships to students to learn tech skills. It has a proven model of providing pathways into the technology industry for people coming from stories of poverty and/or exclusion. It has ten locations across the country and due to Covid, has been holding locally classes virtually while it searched for a permanent location.
Jemal paid $615,000 for the three-story, 32,698 sq.ft. warehouse in March. The circa-1949 building was most recently occupied by Concept Logistics. Bitwise is currently refining its plans for the building which will include classrooms, space for its own business, a daycare center, and additional space for other companies to co-locate there. An completion and opening date have not been set.
Bitwise Industries uses its unique two-sided marketplace approach to drive outcomes and growth. The company teaches people the skills they need to access opportunities in the tech economy–ranging from Salesforce administration to web development–and hires many of those trainees to build enterprise technology solutions for customers as a part of Bitwise Technology Consulting.
In each of the ten cities that it serves, Bitwise seeks to renovate a blighted historical building, creating a technology hub and houses its operations at the city’s urban core to bring back life to the area. The company has already transformed a combined total of nearly a million square feet of downtown commercial space throughout the country.
Bitwise Industries is supported by a broad range of investors that includes: Kapor Capital, Motley Fool Ventures, JP Morgan, ZOMA Capital, Candide Group, Gingerbread Capital, Promedica, M&T Bank, 43North Foundation, the Ralph C. Wilson Foundation, Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, Acumen America, and the New Voices Fund.
