Expanding firm needs nerds

Nerd is the word in downtown Kansas City. A tech firm with an expanding work load needs more space and more employees.

The Nerdery is a Minneapolis-based interactive design and development company that partners with clients to engineer and execute their interactive projects, including websites, mobile and social-media apps. Since starting in 2003, the company has outgrown its offices a dozen times over and today employs 500 people in its Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City locations.

The company expanded to Kansas City in 2012 with an initial workforce of 26. The company has now moved its work space to the historic Western Union Building on  7th street in downtown Kansas City. They are looking to expand their workforce by about 100 workers over the next five years.

“We’re real excited about the the Kansas City market from a talent perspective,” President Tom O’Neill told the Kansas City Business Journal. “We’ve been really encouraged by the great tech talent we’ve found in the city so far, pretty much through word of mouth, from hiring a couple of developers and having them refer their friends. It just made a heck of a lot of sense to invest there, especially with the support that Missouri and Kansas City have given us.”

The expansion will be helped along by  as much as $2.28 million through the Missouri Works tax credit program plus $90,000 in training funds through the Missouri Works training program, said Amy Susan, a spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Economic Development.

Kansas City was recently recognized as one of the top Most Promising Tech Hubs to Watch in 2014 by techie.com. Kansas City was selected as the first city in the nation to receive Google Fiber, a high-speed internet connection that is up to 100 times faster than average broadband speeds.

“There is a lot of opportunity for The Nerdery in Kansas City,” said O’Neill.“With the great talent pool of potential Nerds and support network available to us, KC is an exceptional location to further our work here – and to further our vision to be the best place in the world for Nerds to work.”