Kansas City
Kansas City
Growth Lives in Kansas City
Tech companies across a range of industries have found success and a home in Kansas City. Women-led firms have thrived in the ecosystem as well. The city maintains a great price-to-income ratio and high scores on quality of life factors.
Zoom
Garmin
Ericsson
Northrup Grumman
Sprint
Thermofisher Scientific
Zillow
Amazon Flex
Chewy
Top Companies have thousands of employees in Kansas City
#7 Best City for women in Tech
#4 top city for tech hiring
$1.6B startup funding between 2016 and 2018
“One in 10 working Kansas Citians are employed by tech companies”
—Startland News
:Talent
Over 100,000 Kansas Citians work in the tech industry, and Kansas City is one of the top five cities in the US for attracting tech talent according to CBRE.12
The Kansas City area added 11,040 tech jobs between 2012–2017
2K receiving bachelor’s degrees or higher in computer science fields from regional universities and colleges each year
There are 100,700 tech workers in Kansas City
Top 20 Cities for Great Tech Jobs
—Business Insider
:Cost
Kansas City is one of the most affordable up and coming tech hubs in the US—from housing prices to cost of doing business.
The average rental cost in Kansas City, MO is $8267
Consistently one of the most affordable housing markets among metropolitan areas with populations >1 million
Median Housing price in Kansas City is $162,487
Kansas City Startup Funding 2016–2018 was $1.6B
—KCSourceLink
:Quality of Life
Kansas City rises in ‘best places to live’ list
—Business Journals
:Connection
Located in almost the exact center of the US lower 48 states, Kansas City offers reasonable flight times to all destinations
Nonstop destinations9
See full list at nsflight.com
The average commute time in Kansas City is just 23 minutes
Kansas City has 38,700 miles of fiber route, the most in the US
Cisco Smart + Connected City to build out its first AWS Smart Region in partnership with Xaqt, one of the startups that began its story in the Kansas CityEntrepreneurial Ecosystem.
:Strategic Sectors
Fintech
- 144 banks, credit unions, savings & loans, etc. in the Kansas City region
- Several successful emergent companies including blooom (a financial services company now worth $1B), ZOLOZ (a digital security firm that recently becomming part of the AliBaba family), and Machine Halo (a national leader in public safety technology development)
- Kansas City is also home to C2FO, a two-time Forbes Fintech 50 company
Cybersecurity
- Existing cybersecurity workforce employs 6,724, and the KC region is prepared to seize the growth opportunity in the industry.
- FBI regional HQ in KC
- U.S. Army’s Combined Arms Center (CAC) HQ nearby
- The Kansas Intelligence Fusion Center (KIFC)—
one of the nation’s top
fusion centers—supports the Attorney General in using global intelligence to prevent (not just investigate after the fact) terrorism and crime
Intergrated Solutions
- Some of the largest and most recognizable KC companies are tech companies who provide integrated technology solutions to enterprises and customers alike.
- Garmin and Sprint are both homegrown and headquartered in KC, as are Cerner—a health care technology pioneer—and VMLY&R, a national Top-5 digital marketing communications service group.
- KC engineering companies designed water systems for 15% of the world’s population.
Entrepreneurship
- With more than 600 life science companies, N.C. collectively employs 63K people at an average wage of $80K per year. Of the 600 N.C. companies, 400 of them are in the Raleigh area and the Research Triangle.
- Growth in the life sciences industry has outpaced almost every other sector with the advantage of access to converging technologies.
- Raleigh’s leadership position poised to strengthen over the coming years.
Telecommunications
- More than 34K people employed by telecom companies and related operations in the KC area
- Telecommunications is an integral part of KC’s thriving economy and job growth.
- Major KC employers in the field are Sprint, Google, AT&T Corp., CenturyLink, Inc., Birch Communications and Ericsson.
- Sprint is headquartered in Kansas City
:Growing companies choose Kansas City
Kansas City’s economy is built on a diverse mix of industries and strategic focus. Recent investment in the region includes:
Ericsson
300 employees at Kansas City location
Freight Quote
2,000 employees at Kansas City location
Garmin
5,000 employees at Kansas City location
Honeywell
800 employees at Kansas City location
Johnson Controls
1,100 employees at Kansas City location
MRI Global
350 employees at Kansas City location
Northrup Grumman
350 employees at Kansas City location
Sprint
6,000 employees at Kansas City location
Thermo Fisher Scientific
370 employees at Kansas City location
Microsoft
1,200 employees at Kansas City location
Zoom
200 employees at Kansas City location
Well Sky
330 employees at Kansas City location
Kansas City tech scene ranks 5th in the US for Brain Gain12
and contributes nearly 10% to the regional economy11
Sources
1 2020 Scoring Tech Talent, cbre.us; 2 C2ER, coli.org; 3 Cushman and Wakefield Kansas City Office MarketBeat Report Q2 2020; 4 Cushman and Wakefield Kansas City Industrial MarketBeat Report Q2 2020; 5 Zillow.com; 6 Statisticalatlas.com; 7 Unpakt Blog, blog.unpakt.com; 8 Crunchbase News, news.crunchbase.com; 9 nsflights.com; 10 Wikipedia, wikipedia.org; 11 Kansas City Area Development Council, thinkkc.com; 12 The Business Journals, bizjournals.com;
