Brian Lewis/The Gazette
"We're moving along," says John Korpela, business incubator network manager for Montgomery County. "We expect to be up to 40 to 50 percent occupied in a month or so."
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Montgomery County's fifth business incubator is set to welcome its first companies next week.
Five companies — three information technology businesses and two biotechs — have signed up to lease space at the $6.7 million Germantown Innovation Center on the campus of Montgomery College, said John Korpela, the county's business incubator network manager.
"We're moving along," Korpela said. "We expect to be up to 40 to 50 percent occupied in a month or so."
The Germantown center will be in 32,000 square feet on the second floor of the 67,000-square-foot Goldenrod office building. The first floor will be utilized for classrooms and office space for college officials.
The Germantown center will be the county's second largest behind the 60,000-square-foot Maryland Technology Development Center, which started in 1999 in the biotech corridor of Rockville.
The facility is the 20th technology-related business incubator in the state, according to the Maryland Technology Development Corp. In 2006, the state's technology incubators directly employed about 5,400 workers and generated $1.2 billion in gross state product, a Tedco study says.
Other Montgomery incubators are the 23,000-square-foot Rockville Innovation Center, which opened last year in the city's downtown square; the 20,000-square-foot Silver Spring Innovation Center, which formed in 2004; and the 12,000-square-foot Wheaton Business Innovation Center, which opened in 2006.
Incubators help fledgling companies grow by providing space, conference rooms, receptionists, consulting services, seminars and other resources usually at lower costs than businesses could find on their own. In Montgomery, more than 70 companies have grown large enough to leave the incubators, creating at least 1,700 jobs in the county, officials said.
Among the largest of those graduates is Rockville Internet telephony software and security company NextPoint Networks, a merged entity involving the former NexTone Communications. As NexTone, the business topped Deloitte & Touche's 2006 list of the fastest growing technology companies in Maryland, with 2005 revenue of $14.7 million.
The business grew from a handful of employees in 1998 to more than 200, when a merger with Reef Point Systems of Massachusetts was completed this year. While the corporation's name changed, its headquarters remain in Maryland, with other offices in Massachusetts, Florida, Tokyo, Singapore and London.
NexTone leased space at the Maryland Technology Development Center from 1999 until 2003.
