Gov. Andrew Cuomo was joined by officials from a high-tech company on Thursday to announce that company will locate operations in Rochester and create about 500 jobs.
The company is called LiveTiles. It’s a software company that does work for educational and corporate clients around the world and is also involved in artificial intelligence.
LiveTiles is owned by an Australian firm, but has headquarters in New York City, and now it will be locating one of its hubs in Rochester, on Commercial Street in the High Falls neighborhood.
CEO Karl Redenbach says the jobs that are being created are good, well-paying jobs.
"These are all high-paying jobs that we have, ranging from developers to marketers, through to what we call customer success and technologists that evangelize our product to customers.”
Redenbach says right now they already have about 60 jobs in that building and they expect to ramp up to around 500 jobs over the next five years.
LiveTiles did get an incentive package for $17 million project, which includes $7 million from the state, including a $3.5 million grant through the Finger Lakes Forward Upstate Revitalization Initiative and $3.5 million through the Excelsior Tax Credit Program in exchange for job creation commitments.
There is also assistance from Monroe County and the City of Rochester, but Redenbach says the main attraction was the available talent pool in this area.
Matt Hurlbutt is President and CEO of Greater Rochester Enterprise which helped bring LiveTiles to Rochester.
He says the effort some months back by Rochester and Buffalo to attract a new Amazon headquarters to the region may not have been successful, but it produced some data that helped this area get noticed.
“We talked about a halo effect, the Moody’s Analytics ranking that came when we were pitching Amazon was helpful in this regard, especially as you’re dealing with a company that’s got executives from Australia, are making state-by-state decisions and the ability to verify from a Moody’s analytics report, for example, the things that we say every day are very important.”
Local officials also believe that the information gathered for the attempt for a new Amazon headquarters recently helped Amazon decide to locate a distribution center in Henrietta.
