Startup Creator Returns to St. Louis
Date Posted: December 11, 2019
Posted In: Ideas, News,
From STLToday:
by David Nicklaus
Early this year, Fady Hawatmeh’s mother asked if he would ever move back to St. Louis. He said no.
He had started a company in Chicago based on artificial intelligence software, and he remembered the hometown he left in 2012 as a place that wasn’t especially supportive of startups.
“I didn’t think it had the kind of ecosystem I needed,” he recalled recently. “In terms of creative vision and passion, I never thought St. Louis was going to be that kind of place. I thought St. Louis was just a big-company town.”
A few months later, though, Hawatmeh decided it would be a useful exercise to apply to Arch Grants, which makes $50,000 grants to promising entrepreneurs who are willing to locate in St. Louis.
He “kind of zipped through the application” and didn’t take the process seriously until his company, Clockwork.ai, made it through two rounds of screening. Not until August, when he came to St. Louis for a finalist competition, did he think about what he would do if he won.
“I’m thinking, holy cow, I might be moving back to St. Louis,” Hawatmeh recalls. He was one of 20 winners announced Nov. 1, and since the judging he’s met people who changed his mind about the potential for startups her