Come kickoff our weekly Thursday Gathering, and connect with your community here at Venture Café St. Louis! We provide the space, complimentary beverages, and all the vibes for a socially engineered evening of improving the human condition through innovation. Join us!

Universities are full of experts who not only can help businesses with their problems, but they can often help with finding funding for research and development. In this session, Working with University Partners, we will discuss ways you can work with university partners, what SBIR/STTRs are, and how researchers can help you find funding with grants and other funding opportunities.

Devon Moody-Graham, principal at CEOMom Empire, LLC, will be answering all your questions regarding International Business Resources.

Tax Credits 101 will provide an overview on potential tax credits for commercial development projects.  A variety of tax credit programs including workforce credits, property abatement, R&D and other credits will be explained and attendees will be able to ask questions about their specific projects.

Learn how to increase and improve the lifetime value of your current customers with cross-selling, upselling, obtaining referrals, and improving retention rates. How do you turn your customers into advocates so they constantly introduce you to potential leads without being asked? The three key themes we’ll talk about are the bottom half of the buyer journey – Retention, Expansion, and Advocacy. It’s hard to sell to new customers, so let’s do everything we can to keep them!

Conversations create ideas, ideas create innovation and innovation creates wonder. Welcome to the Conversation Corner! By utilizing a pre-made prompt, we hope to instill a sense of goal – focused communication amongst those who attend this activity! The prompt can be something as simple as “What beverage selections is Venture Cafe missing?” to more complex and nuance conversations such as “How can we work solve the growing global climate issue?” Lend your ideas and your voice to start the snowball effect of innovation. As we say at Venture Cafe, Connect, Learn, Share!

Check out the gallery of Cortex Innovation Community's 20th Anniversary Thursday Gathering! Cortex has been an integral ecosystem partner to the Greater St. Louis community, from encouraging new businesses and entrepreneurship to cultivating a community that is looking towards the evolution of St. Louis through innovation. Here are some of the highlights of an engaging and fruitful evening of the Cortex Innovation Community Celebration, from what the district has to offer to what it hopes to achieve moving forward.

Check out the gallery of our Leading The Way: Industry Innovation in St. Louis event! This gathering showcased different ways that St. Louis is on the cusp of breaking new ground in our community and how they are going about doing that. We heard from a few innovators who were all about charting new territory by either expanding our business to other "ventures" overseas, or by cultivating the hidden talent of industry leaders that might just need resource and empowerment to create something that will last a lifetime.

Check out the gallery of our Cyber St. Louis: Innovation For Progressive Impact, Thursday Gathering! We partnered with a community partner by the name of EDUrain for this event to host a slew of business partners and speakers to explain to guests about the impact that Tech is making in various ecosystems such as Education, Business & Social Impact! Take a look below to see some of the highlights from the event!

Check out the gallery of our Cybersecurity MiniCon & Career Fair Gallery! This was a collaborative effort between Venture Cafe St. Louis and Gateway Higher Education Cybersecurity Consortium to bring more jobs and opportunities to those looking for the chance to break into the budding Cybersecurity space here in St. Louis!

Check out the gallery of our Innovation Bridge to Canada Event!