Update, 9/16/2019: 1776 is expanding to North Bethesda.
Bethesda and Silver Spring, MD, are truly up-and-coming areas. Great for walkable and metro-accessible entertainment and restaurants. They are rapidly becoming more dense, urban, and with the opening of the Purple Line approaching, more connected. What they lack, however, are cutting-edge, high-paying technology jobs.
These areas are ripe with well-educated populations, with a mix of ages and experience, young and old. Why they are not a more popular destination for startups and technology companies to place their businesses is a mystery. Similar suburban areas in Virginia, such as Arlington (especially Clarendon), Tyson’s Corner, and Reston, have had a huge burst of technology startup activity over the last ten years. Montgomery county’s urban areas, if anything, have likely lost tech jobs, e.g. with the departure of Discovery from their Silver Spring landmark building.
One promising development is the slow but steady growth in co-working spaces available in Bethesda and Silver Spring. These may bring new, nascent talent and budding enterprises to the area. But alone, they will not be enough.
My fellow technologists in Montgomery County lament the need for us to commute into DC, or worse, brave the American Legion Bridge daily, in order to get jobs working with newer technology, good workplace cultures, and competitive market wages, with which to support our families. One could even posit that the terrible traffic in the region is exacerbated by the imbalance in tech jobs between VA and MD, made worse by the single choke point that is the 495 bridge. Zero practical public transit options exist to get us MD residents to our jobs in VA. The conversation in the media focuses on the roads and the transit. But what about the location of the jobs? There was a bright spot when Amazon was considering Montgomery County for the location of their HQ2. Finally, there might be an anchor to bring more tech jobs this side of the Potomac. But alas, we lost out to Virginia once again.
What few tech companies do exist in Montgomery County can be hard to find. A few years back, I wrote one of my more progressive county council members, Hans Reimer, to ask whether he had a list of technology startups in the Bethesda area. To my surprise, the answer I received was that no-one on the council has been tracking this information. Since a list hasn’t been forthcoming from the county council or local media, as part of this post, I am compiling and hosting a list of local Montgomery county startups and tech companies.
My criteria for this list include that technology be a major function of the company, that the available jobs be for new software development and not just IT, and that the company’s primary business is not government contracting. The company does not need to have its headquarters in the county, but should have a major office located there. I intend to keep this list up to date and as comprehensive as I can, so please DM me on Twitter or leave a comment here with additions or changes. For now, it is a work in progress, so please contribute if you have anything to add.
Bethesda
- Xometry: Manufacturing on Demand
- HelioCampus: Education Analytics and Visualization Platform
- RightEye: A commercialized eye-tracking solution for general healthcare and wellness
- ProQuest: research and learning software for libraries and education
- Salsa Labs: Supporter Engagement Platform for Non-Profits
Silver Spring
Rockville
- Bethesda: video game developer
- Speak Agent: evidence-based academic language learning platform