Move over, Silicon Valley. New York's tech scene is heating up.
Alphabet, Google's parent company, is planning to expand its New York City footprint and potentially double its current workforce there to more than 12,000 employees, The Wall Street Journal reports. The news comes on the heels of reports that Amazon is choosing Long Island City, a neighborhood in Queens, as one of its two new headquarters locations.
The moves highlight the rising strength of New York's tech industry, which includes a robust community of more than 7,000 startups. In 2017, NYC companies raised $12 billion in venture capital funding--almost double the $6.4 billion secured in 2014--and are on track to exceed last year's amount in 2018. The city is also the second-largest producer of billion-dollar "unicorn" startups in the U.S., as well as the second-highest performing startup ecosystem in the world, according to Startup Genome.
Industry giants like Salesforce and Spotify have been flocking to New York over the past three years, says Julie Samuels, executive director at Tech:NYC, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the tech startup community in the city. "It's crossed over from something small to something really big," she says.
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