Philly’s corporate leaders and tech builders finally talked.

Here’s what they said.

More than fifty people packed into Fitler Club on March 31 for the “Enterprise Innovation Exchange” — a roundtable to design the Enterprise Lab. Another 25 registered we had to turn away. The demand told us something before a single word was spoken.

This is a conversation Philadelphia has been waiting to have — driving sustainable growth through enterprise innovation.

Setting the stage

Our hypothesis: the Philadelphia region is truly an enterprise lab. Business density, a cross-section of industries found almost nowhere else, world-class universities, deeply talented founders, and successful tech companies at scale — all of it immersed directly in customers’ worlds, away from Silicon Valley’s hype culture.

Bring corporate champions, enterprise startups, and ecosystem leaders together around real problem-solving, and two things happen. Philly’s enterprise startups raise their trajectory — growing revenue faster, attracting investment and talent. And local businesses become more innovative and agile, creating more jobs in the process.

I’ve seen what lighthouse customers do for a startup’s trajectory — at SAP, alongside companies like Qlik and Celonis, and across the Paris ecosystem. The first customers don’t just generate revenue. They create credibility, references, and momentum that compound.

That’s what we’re engineering here, deliberately, for Philadelphia in the Enterprise Lab - powered by the Philly Builds AI alliance.

But our one-on-one interviews, survey responses, and even those who showed up at our “pilot” workshop had already shown the gap plainly: corporate innovation leaders and tech builders don’t know each other, can’t find each other, and don’t share a common stake in local success. Many of our tech companies have their customers entirely outside the region. Our businesses don’t know world-class solutions exist in their own backyard.

AI is the forcing function. This shift is faster and more complex than anything before — and it demands real, sustained, and trusted relationships between the people building and the people buying. Complexity requires collaboration. This is why local matters.

We put five questions to the room. Here’s what came back.

Q1: What can Philly learn from how other regions crack corporate-startup engagement?

Marek Gootman from the Brookings Institution set the economic frame. The Philadelphia region is missing 70,000 traded-sector, high-quality jobs. We rank 50 out of 50 among large metro areas for economic mobility — not just the city, the entire 5-county region including middle-income households. Enterprise B2B software, platforms, and services is explicitly named by Brookings as a priority opportunity industry, having already created more than 39,000 jobs, up 23% since 2012.

Other regions have cracked pieces of this. Atlanta structures anchor companies to offer sandboxes to startups. Des Moines concentrated on insurance tech and built critical mass. A Philadelphia company is currently participating in Atlanta’s program — not a local equivalent (and perhaps noteworthy as a gap).

The Paris model resonated most. A deliberate bet on branding, a curated showcase of top startups promoted nationally and internationally, and crucially — corporate sponsorship of the ecosystem as a condition for innovation. The big companies funded initiatives, brought in experts, and hosted events. That was a spark for the Enterprise Lab.

Grace Francisco, who leads Philly Builds AI, connected this to Philadelphia’s specific advantage: proximity to regulated industries where AI excels — life sciences, fintech, supply chain — and founders immersed in their customers’ real world. That’s differentiation no other region can replicate.

Q2: What’s actually in it for corporate leaders — and what’s a realistic first step?

This is the question that unlocked the room. And before the corporate voices answered it, let’s be direct about what the case actually is.

De-risking AI adoption is the most immediate value. Local startups are more committed partners — more responsive, more invested in your success, more willing to co-develop and iterate than a vendor flying in from the coasts. First-look access to locally-built solutions means you’re not competing with every other enterprise for attention. Peer learning — from other corporate innovation leaders navigating the same challenges — is something no conference circuit reliably delivers.

And there’s a broader case: supporting local builders is good corporate citizenship with measurable ROI, not just a check written to a cause.

Not experimenting is also a risk. In the AI era, standing still is a strategic choice with consequences.

Then the corporate voices in the room made it concrete.

A CIO from a mid-sized financial institution described competing at the same level as the big banks with a fraction of the resources. The barrier to working with local startups isn’t willingness. It’s visibility. “We just don’t see them.” He sees the same vendors in his space from conference to conference. But he knows — and wants — innovation that can be applied from other industries. The appetite is there. The mechanism isn’t.

The CIO of a major global hospitality company acknowledged something honest: when they look for creative tech partners, they look toward Silicon Valley. Not because local options don’t exist. Because they don’t know what’s here.

A senior innovation leader from a global medical device company brought the proof of what’s possible. For every current AI project, she has pulled in startups for co-development — testing, annotation, building at scale. One co-design partner is now a top-30 fastest-growing startup. The features originally built for her company are now being used by one of the world’s largest tech platforms. The startup didn’t know the specific problem existed until they were embedded in the relationship. That’s the power of co-development.

Q3: What’s the one thing a corporate leader could do right now that would make a real difference to a builder?

Rick Nucci, who built Guru and Boomi from zero to scale in Philadelphia — twice — answered this directly. The first tracked metric at Guru was ten unaffiliated customers — ten strangers who bought. Before the strangers came the relationships. Local companies taking a meeting, giving honest feedback, making an introduction. That’s it. That’s the ask.

Rick also flagged something new in the current AI moment: a resurgence of on-site engagement, with three and four VPs and C-levels showing up to startup meetings in person. He’s never seen that before. It signals how high-stakes AI decisions feel inside large organizations right now. They’re not relying on Zoom-length relationships to navigate this disruption. This shows the “shared stake” of community.

When the two groups connect, “magic happens” — startups understand the technology at a depth enterprises can’t match, enterprises have real problems startups don’t know exist but can solve for at speed.

The enterprises represented in the room couldn’t have been more different. But this was the common understanding and interest of all the leaders.

The founder voices echoed this. An early-stage personalization engine founder, a procurement company founder with nearly 20 years of experience, an RFP response tool founder for healthcare and tech — all said the same thing in different ways. The ask isn’t complicated: the right introduction to the right person with the right pain point. Not another conference. Not a cold email. A warm introduction that makes a real conversation possible.

None of these founders are struggling because they lack something valuable. They’re struggling because the introduction infrastructure doesn’t exist.

Q4 + Q5: What does it take to get there — and where are we actually stuck?

Grace made the case that the region has all the pillars. It just hasn’t achieved flywheel motion – yet. It’s a coordination problem, not a talent problem or a technology problem.

The missing “best practice” is design partnerships — where startups and enterprises co-develop solutions together rather than transacting at arm’s length. Common in Silicon Valley. Happens with all breakthrough startups. Essentially absent in Philadelphia. The good news: that’s a solvable problem, and it starts with a forum where both sides have a structured reason to show up.

Here’s what often gets missed in that conversation: the success stories already exist. The Boomi talent flywheel is already turning — Bob Moul, Bob Moore, and Jake Stein among the founders it spawned. RJ Metrics gave us dbt Labs, Crossbeam, and Common Paper. Guru is on its second act. These aren’t anomalies. They’re a pattern. We don’t need to manufacture a story about Philadelphia’s enterprise tech ecosystem — we need to tell the one that’s already compounding.

The Quaker cultural inheritance keeps showing up as the friction point between what’s real and what gets told. Too quiet about wins. Too modest to claim the narrative. That has to change — because operating in a global market requires ambassadorship, and the raw material is already there.

The honest structural gap: there’s no common forum, no shared registry of who’s building what, no warm introduction mechanism at scale. Corporates don’t know how to find local solutions. Founders don’t know how to navigate local corporations. Neither side has had a structured reason to try. That’s what Enterprise Lab is designed to fix.

An idea we’ve been developing — first introduced at the PACT Phorum workshop earlier this month — found its moment in this room. It reframes the whole model of how corporates and builders engage. We’re not ready to fully unveil it yet, but we’re ready to start testing it.

The mic drop

As the evening wound down, a corporate leader with deep Philadelphia roots said something that stopped the room:

Corporate leaders who believe in this city have an absolute obligation to support local companies. Too many leaders say they want to support Philadelphia and then call the vendors and contacts they already know in New York or elsewhere. That’s simply unacceptable. And that has to change.

The room broke into applause.

That’s the energy we’re building on.

What’s next

• The Sherpa Series for founders kicks off April 8, with a Corporate Venture fireside chat. Enterprise Sales to follow in May. Register here.

• Then the “AI Science Fair: Enterprise Edition” at the Technical.ly Builders Conference during Philly Tech Week on May 7 — five themed tables, twenty-minute rotations, real AI use cases from corporate teams and builders side by side. One of those tables points directly toward what we’ve been designing. Come curious.

The corporate champions who showed up March 31 are proof that appetite exists. The builders are proof that supply exists. What’s been missing is the structure to bring them together deliberately, repeatedly, and on terms that work for both.

That’s what we’re building. And we’re just getting started.

• Corporate innovation leader and this resonates? Reach out — we want to hear what’s top of mind for you. You can take the survey here for another week.

• B2B enterprise tech in Greater Philadelphia? Take survey and get listed Enterprise Builders Directory at enterpriselabphl.com. It’s how we start making the invisible visible.

Thanks to the Chamber of Commerce for Greater Philadelphia and Fitler Club for their support!