Fifteen months after its openingthe Madison entrepreneurship center StartingBlock has announced that it will soon have “the last piece of the puzzle” in place: a previously empty floor occupied by six of the city’s more promising later-stage startups and tech companies.

StartingBlock, a nonprofit within American Family Insurance’s Spark building at 821 E. Washington Ave., has been in development since 2012, when a group of community business leaders unveiled their plan to take Madison’s startup economy “to the next level” with a hub of entrepreneurship. Since its soft launch in June of 2018, the eastside center has hosted a mix of mentorship groups, accelerators, startups and entrepreneurs in a shared office space over two floors.

What didn’t open in 2018 with the rest of the center was its uppermost floor (the third floor of the center, or the fourth floor of the Spark). Project leaders had described the space as reserved for “anchor tenants,” companies with a larger employee count and a firmly established track record of growth. Read the full story here.