Page 38 - BusinessWest July 7, 2025

Dan White says Holyoke has been attractive to many
innovative companies, for reasons ranging from competitive
utility rates to a supportive city government.
analyze nanoscale materials; and florrent, a maker of supercapaci-
tors for energy storage, to name a few.
As opposed to software, Stone said, hardtech refers to more
physical technology. “It’s a wide net — it covers advanced manufac-
turing, clean tech and green tech, even things in the defense space,
energy, food and ag tech. It’s sort of an amorphous term, but the
throughline here is folks that are building physical things, which
takes a different form of investment and attitude than building soft-
ware or building other types of businesses.”
And Holyoke, located not far from major innovation centers but
offering a lower cost of doing business with a host of amenities, is
the ideal spot to grow a hardtech hub, he added.
“It’s hard to compete on innovation. There are people innovat-
ing here, but you can’t compete with Boston or New York in terms
of density of schools, and we know the attraction the cities have,”
Stone explained. “But for a Clean Crop, when you’re spending
money in Cambridge or Somerville for a bigger space, it starts to
be disadvantageous, and it makes much more sense to grow a base
here and have a little bit more room to stretch out and grow. So
that’s the vision, and hopefully more companies will take note.”
Selling a City
HardTech Holyoke was conceived in 2023 when FORGE, a
nonproft that helps innovators with physical projects navigate the
journey from prototype through to commercialization, teamed up
with Cofab, Clean Crop, and the city of Holyoke on a gathering to
celebrate the startups, engineers, researchers, manufacturers, and
others building new physical products in and around the city.
“So we put an event together, and we expected 50 people to
show up, but 100 people came, and there was a good buzz,” Stone
recalled. “There was a good sense after the event that people found
it a good place to connect and network with this community. So
we’ve been trying to do it annually ever since.”
It actually took about a year and a half to get the second
HardTech launched, but attendance topped the first, drawing about
150, as did the number of participating companies. “It’s a bigger for-
mat, and we have a bigger space here, and we’re really appreciative
of the folks at Open Square who donated space for this,” he noted
at the start of the June 18 event. “I’m kind of leaning into the exhibit
theme — I like to think of this as an art gallery opening night for
manufacturing companies.”
Inside that ‘gallery,’ along with the participating companies’
exhibit tables, were displays explaining what Holyoke brings to the
table in several categories, including:
• Energy and water, including the lowest regional energy costs, a
high percentage of renewable sources, access to power infrastruc-
ture through Holyoke Gas & Electric, and high water supply and
wastewater treatment capacity for water-intensive processes;
• Space and location, including 1.5 million square feet of indus-
trial space available in the city, local development resources, turnkey
“We’ve got quite a
lot of demand that
we’re just growing
into right now,
but we’re on track
to expand our
facility here to full
utilization by the
end of this year.”
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JULY 7, 2025
Business W est