Coworking hub and business incubator HQ Raleigh is changing its name to Raleigh Founded
HQ Raleigh, one of the largest coworking space providers in the Triangle and an important community resource for local tech startups, is changing its name to Raleigh Founded.
The move comes after a subsidiary of the office space provider Regus filed a lawsuit against HQ Raleigh earlier this year, accusing HQ Raleigh of trademark infringement.
Jess Porta, director of HQ Raleigh, said her company had a trademark on its name and logo and felt they would’ve had a good shot in the suit. But the back-and-forth nature of a lawsuit could be time intensive and expensive. Additionally, HQ Raleigh had already been contemplating a name change for some time, Porta said.
“We had been talking for the last year and a half about our brand,” Porta said in a phone interview. “We keep talking about ourselves as an economic development group that also does coworking.”
The HQ Raleigh name, in their opinion, had become more closely tied with just coworking.
Founded in 2012 by Christopher Gergen, Brooks Bell, Jesse Lipson and Jason Widen, HQ was named HUB Raleigh when it opened on Hillsborough Street. The goal was to provide space and resources for fast-growing tech startups that were beginning to form in Raleigh at the turn of the last decade.
Since then, HQ Raleigh has become a large player in the region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, as Raleigh itself has become one of the country’s fastest-growing tech centers.
Last year, 327 companies had operations at one of its spaces across the city, a 107% increase from 2017. The company says it now hosts more than 400 companies.
It has proven fertile ground, too. Pendo, perhaps the Triangle’s most promising startup, began as a four-person team at HQ.
But, in recent time, HQ has tried to widen its mission to include a more diverse group of businesses, including non-tech companies and main-street businesses.
The group now has four locations across Raleigh as well as affiliations with other coworking hubs across the state, including in large cities, like Greensboro, and small rural communities, like Yanceyville in Caswell County.
It hosts a Business Law Clinic, which provides free legal services to companies, an accelerator program and N.C. State’s Entrepreneurship Clinic, which matches students with companies on projects.
The new name and logo was designed in house, with team member Devon Lewis doing the graphic design work.
The group chose the name because it still emphasized the city in which it has grown.
“We felt like our companies will be able to identify more closely as Raleigh Founded companies,” Porta said. “It signifies they are part of this community, and also that they were quite literally founded in Raleigh.”
Porta said that while coworking will still be an integral part of Raleigh Founded, the group plans to roll out more services for startups and small businesses, especially around women and people of color.
Additionally, it plans to launch a Main Street program to give retail and restaurant startups pop-up space to experiment with new ideas, a free membership campaign for those whose finances have been affected by COVID-19 and more virtual programming, like office hours with accountants, attorneys and investors.
“2020 is all about taking a situation that could have been very negative and turning it into something positive,” Porta said.
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This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate
This story was originally published August 15, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Coworking hub and business incubator HQ Raleigh is changing its name to Raleigh Founded."
