The geography of innovation in America is changing, but not in the way you might think. Despite projections of doom for coastal tech bubbles like the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston, such regions are as important as ever when it comes to venture capital investment in high-tech startup companies. But the massive increase in VC funding has also enabled the growth of viable startup ecosystems straight across the US, especially in the middle of the country.

When it comes to VC-financed high-tech startups, two things that are often presumed to be opposites are happening in tandem: The rest are indeed rising, to paraphrase venture capitalist and AOL-founder Steve Case, even as the geography of startup innovation remains as spiky as ever. Those are the big takeaways from a new study of the changing geography of venture capital-financed technology I conducted with my University of Toronto colleague Karen King. The study, published by Heartland Forward, compares the volume and rate of growth of venture capital investment in the 301 US metropolitan areas that received venture capital investment in 2019-2021 to the pre-pandemic period of 2009-2011. We pay special attention to the trends and patterns from the 126 metros in what we dub the American heartland, comprised of 20 states in the middle of the country.