On Tuesday, a group of founders and investors gathered at a creative studio in New York’s Lower East Side for a routine rite of passage in the tech world: a demo day. What set this event apart was that every early-stage company hailed from Latin America. And even more atypical was that several of the projects vying for venture dollars would use the funding to apply to move to Tulsa, Okla.—a city not exactly known as a hub for startups.
Michael Basch is hoping to change that. Basch and his VC firm Atento Capital may be familiar to readers of this newsletter for their push to build Tulsa into a tech outpost. Atento’s sole backer, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, has long championed the initiative, dating back to its Tulsa Remote program, which launched in 2018 and paid remote employees to move to the Sooner State. But the strategy has become even more refined over the past year, with Atento working with Latin America-based hard sciences startups to help them find VC funding and set them up with a $100,000 relocation package to fund visas, office space, and housing.
Basch stood on the sidelines of the demo day, watching the pitches and nodding along. When the founders of one of the companies, a Mexico-based materials startup called Monte Caldera, said that they planned to transfer operations to Tulsa, Basch grinned and pumped his fist.
The guiding motive for any venture firm, of course, is returns. Atento’s unique structure of having a sole limited partner, and a family foundation at that, means it can have another mission: diversifying Tulsa’s economy. As it turned out, looking to Latin America was the most efficient vehicle to achieve the goal. Atento doesn’t even take an equity stake in return for the relocation package.
“I would think of it more as a model for using philanthropic incentives to facilitate the investment of venture capital to change the landscape of a city…as well as the faces of the founders in that city,” Basch tells me.
Basch himself isn’t an Oklahoman, nor is he Latin American, though he married an Argentine and lives mostly in the college town of Córdoba, Argentina. Atento’s focus on the region seemed predetermined, though—its name means attentive in Spanish, and the firm sourced deals in Latin America and Spain thanks to Spanish native speakers on its investment team.
Atento began working with a Latin American venture firm and startup accelerator called GridX, which focuses on life sciences companies: a hot sector in the region thanks to the prevalence of research universities. Though not a tech center, Tulsa does have a rich background of research and manufacturing, and Basch had the idea of bringing GridX startups to Oklahoma to help them raise seed capital from U.S. investors who likely wouldn’t make the flight to Latin America.
Moving to Oklahoma full-time proved to be a natural, and symbiotic, next step for both the startups and Atento. Out of the first cohort that came over last fall, which included 11 companies, Basch said that eight have indicated they want to relocate to Tulsa.
The second cohort just came to Tulsa, with two startups considering the move, including Monte Caldera and Migma, an Argentine project developing antioxidants.
“We’re a startup, so we don’t have millions to put everywhere—we have to think differently and to be strategic, where our money gets more exponential,” Sofia Garcia Franco, the CEO and cofounder of Migma, tells me. “In that sense, I think that Oklahoma and Tulsa are a good opportunity because they are developing an ecosystem.”
To put it mildly, Atento’s project comes at an uncomfortable juncture in American politics. It was just a few months ago that X was raging over an ugly debate about H1B visas, sparked by Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-born Trump administration official and former a16z partner, with some Trump acolytes advocating against allowing any foreign-born workers, no matter how skilled, to come to the U.S. Immigration from Latin America is an even more hot button issue, amid legal battles over the deportation of migrants to a brutal Salvadoran prison. Oklahoma is one of the reddest states in the country, with 66% of voters backing Trump last year.
But Basch insists that it’s the perfect time. “In a moment where the word migrants is considered a bad thing,” he tells me, “I think all Americans can agree we would love to have the top 1% of global scientists living in America and the top 1% of entrepreneurs living in America.”
I pushed back, pointing to the rupture over Krishnan, but Basch argued that the program should be common sense. “As someone that likes to believe that America still wants the best talent on Earth, and America still is a place that the words in the Statue of Liberty matter,” he says, “This program is as close to something that as many people on all sides of the aisle can get behind.”
The founders, for their part, are venturing into the tense moment without reservations. Hector Medina, the CEO of Monte Caldera, said that uncertainty is baked into the startup experience. “That’s part of the game,” he tells me.
And Basch is already planning how to expand the program, looking to partner with governments like Chile and Argentina to find new companies to come to Tulsa. “The foundation has a history of scaling things that work,” he tells me, pointing at its Tulsa Remote program, which brought in thousands of people after setting an initial goal of 10. “There’s a lot of appetite.”
Leo Schwartz
X: @leomschwartz
Email: [email protected]
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
