This is a city that burned to the ground and responded by inventing the skyscraper. It turned its geography into the nation’s freight yard, its politics into a machine, and its universities into research engines. It engineered futures markets, modern cellular telephony, and now wants to industrialize quantum computing.

If you’re trying to understand how investment in invention translates into entrepreneurship and attention, Chicago startups are a case study in what happens when a region treats innovation as infrastructure, not theater.

The Chicago setting: risk, resilience, and a culture built for commerce

Chicago’s story starts with geography and risk.

The city grew up where railroads, canals, and the Great Lakes converged; perfectly placed between East and West, North and South. By the late 19th century, it had become “the great internal gateway” of the U.S., a logistics and industrial choke point where grain, livestock, lumber, and manufactured goods all passed through and were priced.

Then it burned down.

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 wiped out roughly a third of the city and displaced 100,000 people. Rather than rebuild what it had, Chicago re-invented how a city could be built; experimenting with fireproof materials, steel-frame construction, and new building codes that paved the way for the world’s first true skyscrapers.

That combination (catastrophic risk, followed by aggressive reinvention) is still baked into the culture. You see it in:

• Its history as the nation’s meatpacking plant and distribution hub.
  
• The rise of the Chicago Board of Trade and CME Group, where futures and options markets turned commodities risk into tradable, hedgeable contracts.
  
• A political and labor history that forces constant negotiation between capital, workers, and government—messy, but deeply pragmatic.

Today, the Chicago metro economy is one of the most diversified in the United States. No single industry accounts for more than 13% of total employment, according to World Business Chicago and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That matters for startups because it means:

• Tons of legacy industries to disrupt (logistics, manufacturing, food, finance, insurance).
  
• A big, stable regional market not dependent on one boom-and-bust sector.
  
• And a deep bench of corporate buyers, partners, and acquirers.

This is not a “one-story” economy like a tourism town or a single-industry boom region. It’s a dense, layered operating system.

Inventions from Chicago: a narrative of creativity and applied ingenuity

Chicago is not just a place where things get traded. It’s where a lot of modern life was invented.

• The skyscraper. Chicago architects and engineers (including William Le Baron Jenney and later firms like Burnham & Root) pioneered steel-frame construction and elevator integration, enabling the world’s first skyscrapers in the 1880s and 1890s.
• The Ferris wheel. George Ferris’s giant rotating wheel debuted at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago as an audacious response to the Eiffel Tower; a literal engineering flex to prove American industrial prowess.
• Mail-order retail and catalog commerce. Chicago was home base for Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, which reshaped consumer markets through catalogs, logistics, and national distribution. That’s the spiritual ancestor of e-commerce and DTC retail.
• The vacuum cleaner, the zipper, and the grain silo. Illinois and Chicago-area innovators contributed key industrial and everyday inventions, from early vacuum cleaning technologies to the modern zipper and agricultural storage systems that changed global commodities logistics.
• The cell phone. Engineer Martin Cooper, working for Motorola, made the world’s first handheld cellular phone call in 1973. Motorola’s work in and around Chicago was foundational to modern mobile communications.  Ben Lalez shares that Paul and Joseph Galvin founded the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in Chicago in 1928. Within a couple of years, they developed the first mass-produced car radio. The name “Motorola” came from combining the words “motor” and “ola” (from Victrola, those old record players).
• Blood banking and medical advances. Chicago institutions helped pioneer blood bank practices and other medical innovations that underlie modern healthcare systems.

When you trace that arc, from skyscrapers and Ferris wheels to cell phones and futures contracts, you get a recurring pattern: Chicago doesn’t fetishize invention for its own sake. It commercializes.

New building methods become real estate markets. New communication technologies become telecom giants. New financial instruments become global exchanges. That’s the through-line: innovation as something you industrialize and scale, not just celebrate in a museum.

Now, layer on the current wave. Chicago’s next bet is that it can do the same thing with quantum.

• Illinois has four of the top 10 federally funded quantum centers and has attracted startups like Infleqtion and PsiQuantum.
• Governor JB Pritzker’s latest budget proposes allocating roughly $500 million toward quantum technologies, explicitly to make Illinois a global hub for quantum, semiconductors, and AI.
• The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP) on Chicago’s South Side is a planned 128-acre campus (part of a 440-acre Quantum Shore district) whose stated goal includes creating the world’s first commercial million-qubit quantum computer.
• PsiQuantum has already broken ground at IQMP after a $1 billion Series E round. The company and the state expect that facility to anchor “a massive quantum ecosystem” and potentially house the first fault-tolerant million-qubit quantum computer in the U.S.

Chicago’s pattern holds: take a frontier technology, build an industrial-scale platform around it, and dare the rest of the world to keep up.

The macro economy of Chicago: diversified, corporate-dense, and structurally important

Macro-economically, Chicago is not a scrappy up-and-coming tech town; it’s already a pillar of the U.S. economy.

The region consistently ranks among the top U.S. metros by GDP and is one of the few global cities whose economy spans manufacturing, finance, logistics, healthcare, professional services, and information technology in roughly balanced proportions. World Business Chicago points out that no single sector dominates; manufacturing, finance and insurance, professional services, healthcare, trade, and transportation all carry substantial but not overwhelming shares of employment and output.

On top of that, Chicago sits near the top nationally for Fortune 500 headquarters. ConnectCRE notes that the Chicago area ranks third in the U.S., with around 15 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in the city or metro.  These include:

• United Airlines
• Walgreens
• Exelon
• Abbott and AbbVie (nearby)
• Archer Daniels Midland (ADM)
• Mondelez International
• CME Group

For startups, this matters more than the ego of “we have X unicorns.” Corporate density and sector diversity define the local demand side: enterprise customers, pilots, partnerships, acqui-hires, and exits – even relevant jobs to fall back to when the startup doesn’t work out.

Illinois’ Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) leans into this. Its “Why Illinois” positioning explicitly emphasizes the state’s central location, logistics advantages, diverse economy, and strong talent pipeline.

In other words, Chicago isn’t a monoculture startup hub in the mold of early-stage Silicon Valley. It’s a diversified, corporate-heavy, globally integrated economy that treats entrepreneurship as an overlay on top of industry, logistics, and finance.

That’s both its advantage and its constraint.

Government as co-architect of the innovation system

Unlike states that treat entrepreneurship as an afterthought, Illinois is explicitly constructing an innovation policy stack.

At the state level, the Office of Entrepreneurship, Innovation & Technology (EIT) within DCEO is set up “to help Illinois’ entrepreneurs, innovators, and small businesses grow by providing funding, expertise, and statewide support networks at every stage of development.”

A few elements of that stack directly matter for startups in Chicago:

• The Illinois Innovation Venture Fund (INVENT) makes direct equity investments in Illinois-based startups to attract private capital and strengthen the venture ecosystem.
• The Angel Investment Credit Program offers state income tax credits of up to 35% for investments in qualified Illinois startups—effectively de-risking early capital for angels.
• SBIR/STTR matching grants, innovation vouchers, and wet-lab capital programs provide non-dilutive funding and shared infrastructure for tech commercialization.
• The Tech Incubator Enhancement Grant Program (TIEG) has deployed millions to strengthen incubators and accelerators statewide, catalyzing more robust Startup Development Organizations (SDOs).

Overlay that with a focus such as their quantum push:

• The Quantum Enterprise Zone program designates quantum campuses and offers tax benefits to resident companies.
• Pritzker’s budget proposal for $500M in quantum infrastructure and incentives is intended to make Illinois “a leading hub for quantum development,” anchored by the Chicago Quantum Exchange and IQMP.
• The state and DARPA signed a memorandum to create a Quantum Proving Ground at Illinois’ quantum campus, linking federal R&D and state infrastructure in a single platform.

At the regional level, World Business Chicago (WBC) serves as the city’s public-private economic development arm. Their 2023 Business Bulletin notes that Chicagoland companies raised approximately $4.73 billion in growth capital in 2023 and highlights that the region ranks among the top U.S. locations for women-founded startups.

This combination, state capital programs, tax incentives, and a public-private business development engine,is unusually sophisticated by U.S. standards. It positions government as an investor, convenor, and infrastructure provider, not just a regulator (which in and of itself is a problem).

The risk, of course, is that policy becomes the story instead of the platform. Chicago’s challenge is whether that stack accelerates founder-led entrepreneurship, or just adds a glossy quantum brochure on top of an already complicated system.

Startup Development Organizations: Chicago’s operating system for founders

If you look past the press releases, what actually touches founders are the Startup Development Organizations: incubators, accelerators, university centers, innovation hubs, and community groups.

Chicago arguably has one of the most dense SDO stacks in the country, especially when you include sector-specific and demographics-focused programs. The Chicago Entrepreneurial Resources guide compiled by GET Cities and the Tech Equity Working Group (TEWG) is 58 pages long and still describes itself as non-exhaustive.

A non-trivial subset of the SDO landscape:

• 1871: The flagship digital-tech incubator, with programs for early-stage startups, corporate innovation, and underrepresented founders. The GET Cities guide highlights 1871’s membership, pitch competitions, and events like BLKtech, LTNtech, and WMNtech focused on Black, Latinx, and women founders.
• MATTER: A global healthcare startup incubator and “community nexus and corporate innovation accelerator” mobilizing entrepreneurs, clinicians, and industry partners to improve health and care.
• mHUB: The nation’s largest independent HardTech and manufacturing innovation center, running accelerators in climate & energy, medtech, and sustainable manufacturing, plus the mPOWER and Landis fellowship programs targeting women and founders of color in physical product innovation.
• Chicago:Blend: A nonprofit focused on DEI in VC and startups, with data, resources, and a Venture Fellows program connecting underrepresented aspiring investors with entrepreneurs.
• P33 / TechChicago: A nonprofit co-founded by Penny Pritzker with the mission to “transform Chicago (and all of Illinois) into a global tech and innovation hub that creates opportunities and economic growth for all.”  They lead TechChicago Week, talent programs, and ecosystem marketing.
• World Business Chicago – ChicagoNEXT: WBC’s innovation arm, supporting the tech economy, sector councils, and events like the Chicago Venture Summit.
• GET Cities and TEWG: Focused on building city-wide infrastructure that addresses gender and racial inequities for tech founders, including access to early capital, mentorship, and networks.
• Portal Innovations: A life sciences and deep-tech venture platform combining lab space, funding, and expertise. Portal recently closed a $100 million life sciences fund tied to its Chicago hub and expansion markets.
• TechNexus Venture Collaborative: A long-standing corporate innovation hub that co-builds startups with large enterprises, especially in media, sports, and industrial tech.
• Bunker Labs: A national network with a strong Chicago presence, supporting veteran and military-spouse entrepreneurs.
  

Then there are the universities:

• University of Chicago’s Polsky Center and Polsky Exchange, the Booth New Venture Challenge, and the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE), which UChicago leads as “a catalyst for advancing quantum information science” in the region.
• Northwestern University’s The Garage, which supports student and alumni founders across sectors.
• University of Illinois’ Discovery Partners Institute (DPI) in Chicago, focused on tech talent pipelines and innovation. DPI is being strategically re-aligned to link with IQMP, positioning Chicago as a global center for tech innovation and new-economy jobs.
• Illinois Tech’s Kaplan Institute, which combines engineering talent with startup programs.

And wrapped around all of that: a broad network of SBDCs, sector labs, neighborhood innovation centers, and community organizations cataloged by the GET Cities resource guide.

You can reasonably argue Chicago has solved for “having enough organizations.” The question is whether they function as an operating system or a bunch of overlapping apps.

Capital: from angels to venture and strategic money

The capital side is similarly thick but unevenly distributed.

On the institutional side, Waveup’s 2025 overview notes that “more than $6B in VC funds poured [into Chicago] in 2023 alone” and points to large rounds like Invenergy ($1B+), Fly.io ($95M total), and NanoGraf ($65M+ Series B).

That capital is spread across a mix of classic venture, growth equity, and sector funds, including:

• New Stack Ventures
• ARCH Venture Partners
• Origin Ventures
• Lightbank
• OCA Ventures
• Hyde Park Venture Partners
• Chicago Ventures
• Jump Capital
• Sandbox Industries
• Adams Street Partners
• First Analysis

Many of these funds straddle Chicago and national markets, often investing well beyond the city. ARCH, for example, is a global deep-tech and life-sciences investor; Adams Street is a global PE/VC platform.

On the early-stage and angel side, there’s a history of organized angel networks:

• HPA (formerly Hyde Park Angels), one of the Midwest’s more active angel groups.
• Heartland Angels and other regional groups focusing on seed-stage deals.

The state’s Angel Investment Credit Program sweetens the pot for these investors with tax credits for investments in qualified Illinois startups.

Corporate and strategic capital also loom large. Chicago’s Fortune 500 base turns into:

• Strategic investors (CVC arms and corporate venture initiatives).
• Pilot and procurement relationships (especially in logistics, insurance, and industrials).
• Exit routes that don’t always show up as flashy unicorn valuations but matter for founder liquidity and career recycling.

On the macro numbers, World Business Chicago’s 2023 Business Bulletin pegs Chicagoland’s growth capital at $4.73B for 2023 and notes that the region is among the top U.S. hubs for women-founded startups raising venture capital.

At the same time, Crain’s and other local analyses have pointed out that venture activity has cooled from the 2021 peak, and that Chicago still trails coastal hubs on per-capita early-stage funding, especially for underrepresented founders.

So the capital story is classic Chicago: substantial in absolute terms, diversified, somewhat conservative compared to the coasts, and still leaving a “missing middle” where founders struggle to move from local seed to scale-stage growth.

Sectors: where Chicago actually competes

If you zoom out to sector specialization, Chicago’s startup activity is not random. It grows on top of its industrial roots.

Key areas where innovation and entrepreneurship align with the city’s economic base:

• Fintech and trading tech, built on top of CME, CBOE, and a legacy of quantitative finance and derivatives.
• Logistics, supply chain, and mobility, leveraging Chicago’s position as a rail, air, and trucking hub.
• Food and ag-adjacent innovation, connected to regional agricultural production and global food majors like ADM and Mondelez.
• Healthcare and life sciences, with Northwestern, UChicago Medicine, Rush, MATTER, and Portal Innovations as anchors.
• HardTech, manufacturing, and climate/energy via mHUB and the broader industrial base.
• Quantum, AI, and deep tech through the Chicago Quantum Exchange, IQMP, and ARCH/Portal-style investors. Build this more with the Quantum corridor of the U.S. and it’s pivotal.

Chicago’s unicorn and breakout story reflects that:

• Groupon and Grubhub as earlier-wave consumer/internet successes.
• Braintree/Venmo in fintech.
• Tempus in precision medicine and health-data AI.
• project44 in logistics tech.
• Relativity in insurance and insure-tech.

In other words, this isn’t a city trying to copy “Bay Area SaaS” as a fashion trend. It’s building where it has comparative (and in some cases absolute) advantage.

“Chicago has everything it needs to lead diverse industries, world-class talent, and a history of practical innovation; but it hasn’t yet activated these strengths as a cohesive system. Its global appeal is natural, though under-leveraged, and international founders should see it as a premier landing zone for HardTech, healthcare, logistics, and manufacturing innovation. The city’s next leap won’t come from rebranding, but from structuring collaboration across universities, corporations, government, and investors. Once Chicago embraces this operating model, it will stop being compared to other hubs and start defining a category of its own.” – John Zozzaro, Founder/CEO Innovative EcoSystems

Capacity building: 10 considerations for Chicago’s startup future

Let’s use capacity building as a diagnostic.

1. Overcoming silos: shared infrastructure and community

Chicago’s biggest strength and biggest handicap is the same: there is a lot of everything.

Dozens of SDOs, multiple universities, competing civic coalitions, and overlapping city/state programs create a thick mesh of support, but also fragmentation. The GET Cities TEWG report was explicit that one of its goals was to design “city-wide solutions and collective infrastructure” precisely because founders, especially women and people of color, were bouncing between uncoordinated resources.

The state’s TIEG grants and World Business Chicago’s ecosystem councils are attempts to treat incubators and hubs as shared infrastructure rather than isolated brands.

What Chicago does well:

• It has built specialized physical infrastructure (wet labs, hardtech prototyping, quantum facilities) that most cities can’t even dream of.

Where it needs work:

• Founders still experience the system as a maze. The next frontier is interoperability: common data, shared intake, and outcomes-driven routing rather than “whose membership do you have.”

2. The missing middle: the gap between early startup and established company

This is the structural issue in Chicago.

At the seed stage, local angels, HPA, early-stage VCs (New Stack, Chicago Ventures, Hyde Park Venture Partners, etc.), and university competitions (Booth NVC, Polsky, The Garage) give credible first money and validation.

At the scale stage, big corporates and growth equity funds exist in abundance.

In between (Series A to C, especially for companies without obvious local corporate buyers) founders often end up raising from the coasts or relocating. WBC’s own numbers show solid total capital volume but not a proportionate number of home-grown “breakouts” relative to the city’s population and GDP.

The state’s INVENT fund is designed to pull more early growth capital into Illinois startups; the question is whether it can materially close the gap or just top off existing deals.

3. Long-term funding and incentives for the ecosystem’s builders

One thing Illinois is getting right, especially compared with cities that rely entirely on philanthropy and sporadic corporate sponsorship, is treating SDOs as critical infrastructure.

• TIEG grants explicitly fund incubator enhancement.
• Illinois’ Wet Lab Capital Program has already deployed millions to expand biotech lab capacity.
• Quantum Enterprise Zones and IQMP are multi-decade plays, not one-off ribbon cuttings.

Chicago’s risk, though, is political half-life. Quantum looks brilliant now because you have alignment: Pritzker as a quantum-obsessed governor, Penny Pritzker via P33, strong university leadership, and DARPA partnership.

The real test of capacity building is whether these funding and incentive structures survive leadership changes and cycles. Chicago’s ecosystem builders will need more endowments, revenue-generating models, and multi-year commitments that aren’t just “this governor’s pet project.”

4. Measuring outcomes, not activity

Chicago may be the best city in the world at events (and I’m saying that coming from Austin, Texas, which is flooded with them)

TechChicago Week, Chicago Venture Summit, numerous pitch competitions, and a constant calendar of demo days can easily create the illusion of progress.

But real capacity building demands ruthless outcome measurement:

• Net new high-growth firms created.
• Quality of jobs and wages, not just headcount.
• Follow-on capital raised.
• Repeat founders and return-founder rate.
• Founder demographics and mobility (who is actually being served).

GET Cities’ TEWG report is a step in the right direction, using data to expose inequities in access to early capital.

Where Chicago needs to push further is agreeing on a shared dashboard of ecosystem outcomes and tying public funding, incubator grants, and PR to that, not to vanity metrics like event attendance or social media impressions.

5. Culture and behaviors: collaboration should be natural, not forced

Historically, Chicago has had a reputation for “Midwestern humility” and heads-down execution. That’s a double-edged sword.

On one side, you don’t get the performative startup theater that plagues some other regions. On the other, founders often under-pitch, under-network, and assume that if they build something solid, attention will follow. It doesn’t.

Organizations like Chicago:Blend, GET Cities, and P33 are trying to change the culture by making collaboration and visibility part of the default behavior; tracking diversity data, curating introductions, and incentivizing cross-org work.

Still, you hear a consistent founder refrain: “It’s hard to know who’s doing what, and the big players often stay in their own lane.”

If Chicago wants to unlock its full capacity, it needs to normalize:

• Introductions across competitive lines.
• Shared programming rather than overlapping cohorts.
• A culture where established founders and VCs consider ecosystem service part of the job, not charity.

6. Including the full spectrum of talent

The good news: Chicago is one of the most racially and economically diverse big cities in America, with enormous pools of underutilized talent.

The bad news: like most ecosystems, the visible startup layer is historically typical (demographically) and more Northwestern/Booth-centric than the city itself.

This is precisely why GET Cities, TEWG, 1871’s BLKtech/LTNtech/WMNtech programs, mHUB’s Catalyze initiative, the Landis Fellowships, and Chicago:Blend’s data work exist: to close the gap between who lives in Chicago and who actually gets access to capital and networks.

Capacity building here means treating inclusion as infrastructure:

• Broadband, transit, and childcare that make participation feasible.
• Neighborhood-based innovation hubs tied into the downtown/core ecosystem.
• Stronger bridges from community colleges, bootcamps, and nontraditional talent pipelines into founding and startup roles.

If Chicago gets this right, its diversity becomes a massive strategic advantage over more homogeneous hubs.

7. Architecting environments for peak performance

Chicago’s HardTech and life-sciences infrastructure is too quietly world-class: mHUB for hardware and manufacturing, MATTER and Portal for healthcare and biotech, plus expanding wet-lab capacity funded by the state.

Add IQMP and the quantum campus and you get something rare: founders can literally go from lab to prototype to scale in the same metro, with appropriate facilities at each step.

The weak spot isn’t physical infrastructure, it’s cognitive and emotional infrastructure:

• Systems that help founders navigate burnout, risk, and the long arc from invention to market.
• Management and commercialization training baked into technical programs.
• Board, advisor, and executive-in-residence talent tuned to startup scale, not just corporate governance.

This is where Chicago’s universities and SDOs can lean far harder into founder psychology, entrepreneurial leadership, and scale-up management as distinct disciplines, not afterthought workshops.

8. Aligning government, academia, and the private sector around shared outcomes

If you want a case study in alignment, look at quantum here.

• The state (Pritzker administration) is putting in $500M+ and designing QEZ incentives.
• Universities (UChicago, UIUC, Northwestern) are leading scientific and engineering efforts through the Chicago Quantum Exchange and related centers.
• The private sector is represented by PsiQuantum, Infleqtion, IBM, Nvidia’s venture arm, and others investing and locating at IQMP.

The Chicago Sun-Times summarized it bluntly: Pritzker and local leaders “have a plan to build a quantum manufacturing campus at the former U.S. Steel South Works site,” with the governor calling for $500M in public and private funding to make Illinois a quantum leader.

That’s alignment.

The question is: can Chicago replicate that level of coordination in less sexy but equally important domains like early-stage capital access, neighborhood entrepreneurship, or talent retraining?

Alignment is not everyone agreeing on talking points. It’s:

• Shared metrics.
• Shared infrastructure.
• Clear division of labor between the state, city, universities, corporates, and SDOs.

Quantum shows Chicago can do it. The rest of the ecosystem now needs the same treatment.

9. Ecosystems that accelerate innovation and reduce risk through local competitiveness

Chicago’s diversified economy and corporate density give it a massive ability to de-risk startups if it uses those assets well.

An ecosystem reduces risk when:

• Founders can pilot with local corporates and iterate quickly.
• There’s enough sector expertise to kill bad ideas early and amplify good ones.
• The labor market is deep enough that founders and early employees aren’t betting their entire lives on a single binary outcome.

Chicago is set up for this in logistics, insurance, manufacturing, food, and increasingly healthcare and quantum. WBC underscores that Chicago’s tech sector is one of the nation’s fastest-growing, powered by corporate-startup collaboration and a robust talent pool.

Where the city hasn’t fully cashed in is brand and velocity. Compared to coastal hubs, diligence cycles can be slower, risk appetites more conservative, and narrative-building less aggressive. That’s fixable, and it’s where capital and ecosystem leaders need to act less like a Midwestern chamber of commerce and more like an unapologetic global sales machine.

10. Adapting global best practices to local realities

Finally: Chicago’s great temptation is to copy other ecosystems’ surface features.

• “We need our own South by Southwest.”
• “We should have a ‘Silicon Prairie’ brand.”
• “Let’s import a coastal accelerator playbook.”

The better path is borrowing global models (research hubs, public-private campuses, federal tech-hub designations), then adapt them ruthlessly to Chicago’s assets: Great Lakes logistics, national-lab proximity, existing manufacturing base, and a diverse urban population.

That same logic should apply to:

• How SDOs structure equity and revenue (don’t just copy Y Combinator terms into a deep-tech region with very different time horizons).
• How venture funds structure follow-on and reserves for capital-intensive companies.
• How talent programs are built (not just importing Bay Area “founder fellowships” into a city where many talented people have families, multiple jobs, or community obligations).

Chicago will win not by being the next startup hub but by being the first city that industrializes deep-tech, HardTech, and applied innovation across a truly diversified, real-economy base.

So, what does Chicago actually do well and where does it need to improve?

What Chicago does exceptionally well:

• It treats innovation as infrastructure. From skyscrapers to futures markets to quantum campuses, Chicago builds physical and institutional systems around technology, not just programs.
  
• It leverages a diversified economy and corporate density to ground startups in real demand.
  
• It has one of the most mature SDO stacks in the country, spanning sector-specific hubs (MATTER, mHUB), generalist incubators (1871), quantum consortia (CQE), and DEI-focused organizations (GET Cities, Chicago:Blend).
  
• It is making a serious, globally visible bet on quantum and deep tech, backed by real money, federal alignment, and world-class institutions.
  
• It has built credible early-stage and growth-stage capital infrastructure, with more than $6B in VC deployed in 2023 and a roster of serious local funds.

Where Chicago still needs to push harder:

• Defragmenting the ecosystem. The sheer number of organizations is a strength only if they function as a coherent operating system; something easily fixed with something like Founder Institute’s platform in place. Right now, too many founders still feel like they’re doing their own routing.
  
• Closing the missing middle. The region must deliberately build structures (funds, guarantees, co-investment vehicles) that bridge local seed success to serious scale without requiring founders to relocate or fully re-anchor on the coasts.
  
• Hard-wiring outcome measurement. Public money and ecosystem prestige should be tied to actual startup formation, quality jobs, and successful exits, not event calendars. TEWG’s equity-focused data work is the template; it needs to become the norm.
  
• Mainstreaming access. Programs for women and underrepresented founders exist and many are excellent. But until the composition of funded founders and fund managers looks materially more like Chicago’s population, inclusion remains a partially-solved problem, not a capacity asset.
  
• Turning quantum-style alignment into a habit. The quantum push is a proof of concept for deep alignment between state, city, universities, corporates, and capital. The real challenge is to apply that same discipline to “boring” but crucial areas like workforce transformation, neighborhood entrepreneurship, and SME digitalization.

If you zoom out, Chicago is not an underdog hoping to be “discovered” by venture capital. It’s a heavyweight industrial and intellectual hub deciding what it wants to be in the next century.

The question is not whether Chicago can build successful startups, —it already has. The question is whether it can fully align its history of industrial experimentation, its present push into quantum and deep tech, and its sprawling ecosystem of SDOs and capital so that entrepreneurship becomes the natural consequence of living and working there.

If it does, Chicago won’t be competing to be “the next Silicon Valley.” It will be something more interesting: the first region to prove that you can retrofit a mature, diversified economy into an operating system where invention, investment, and entrepreneurship compound by design.

–