New Miami Businesses presented with Governor’s Business Ambassador Honors
The Governor’s Office and Enterprise Florida (EFI) honored four new business ventures headquartered in Miami-Dade at their Board of Directors meeting last week. The Board and Lt. Gov. Carlos López-Cantera presented The Governor’s Business Ambassador Award to these outstanding companies for creating new jobs and contributing to the overall business development of Miami-Dade County and the State. Award recipients included:
- NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises
Telemundo Center, a state-of-the-art, $250 million HQ that brings all of the company’s various arms — corporate, news department, sales, creative — under one roof.
- Cosentino
Leading surfaces company, claims to have invented granite countertops. Family-owned, leader in design sphere. The company moved from Texas to Miami, where they traded their pick-up trucks for convertibles and love it.
- Welwaze
This company champions women’s health via technology that delivers thermal mapping of breast tissue to monitor for abnormalities. First Welwaze went to Silicon Valley, but company owners felt they weren’t as receptive as South Florida… “Miami is home!” proclaimed Co-Founder and Executive Chairman Alex Jimenez-Ness.
- Genius Plaza
Genius Plaza is an education platform dedicated to democratizing education, embodying the ideal that access to information equals access to opportunity. As the first multicultural education platform built for diverse communities, Genius Plaza recently moved its business to Miami from Saratoga, NY.
Before the award winners were recognized, the EFI Board heard comments from Miami-Dade Beacon Council President & CEO Michael Finney. He summarized the Amazon HQ2 experience and spoke to the regional collaboration and coordination that took place in order to successfully present a quality proposal. “We had 120 individuals and 40 organizations involved in order for us to present this robust proposal. This is unpresented in the economic development world…The key message I want to leave you with is that these key relationships and partners are very important to our ability to compete for future economic development projects.”