Bitwise Industries just furloughed employees. Here’s how company started, what it does

Over the past decade, Bitwise Industries has been the darling of revitalization in downtown Fresno — a fast-expanding tech company that earned national accolades and tens of millions of dollars in funding from the likes of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Citibank for its work with and in under-served communities.

The future of said company now appears to be in jeopardy.

On Monday, Bitwise announced it had furloughed its entire workforce — some 900 people across the country — amid questions of its financial stability and sustainability. That was followed Tuesday by a lawsuit filed in superior court alleging the company committed several financial misdeeds, including breach of contract related to its properties in Fresno, Oakland and Bakersfield.

What is Bitwise Industries?

BItwise Industries is three-pronged business.

It trains tech workers (more than 5,000 to date), develops software through Shift3 Technologies and invests in tech-friendly real estate in communities like Fresno, as a means of creating opportunities for like-minded tech start-ups.

The company started in 2013 by rehabbing a building at L and San Joaquin streets on the edges of Fresno’s so-called Mural District. The 8,000-square-foot space served as a hub for Fresno’s tech-sector, such as it was.

The company offered training and job placement through its Geekwise Academy, but also shared office space for two dozen tech start-ups, with another two dozen waiting in the wings.

Even then, Bitwise was looking to expand.

Within a year, company CEO Jake Soberal announced it had closed escrow on a historic 52,000-square-foot building at the northeast corner of Mono Street and Van Ness Avenue. It would open in 2015 and become the “mothership” of Bitwise’s operations and the first of four buildings the company would purchase in downtown Fresno.

It also operates two buildings on Ventura Street near Highway 41 and a third nearby on R Street.

Any expansion into real estate was driven by the needs of would-be tenants.

In a 2014 interview with The Bee, Soberal said he hoped Bitwise would inspire other technology companies to make their own investments in downtown.

“The last thing I want to do is be a developer. My ambition is that after this, technology companies in Fresno will say, ‘We want our space to be downtown. We want our space to have that sort of culture.’ So they start doing it on their own and there’s no longer a need for Bitwise to keep developing buildings.

“If it takes us doing three more buildings to do that, we’ll do that.”

Bitwise expands reach during, after pandemic

It was during the COVID-19 pandemic that Bitwise gained national exposure, helping California develop a resource websites for displaced workers. The site, OnwardCA.org, became a national model, with nearly a dozen states adopting similar versions of the site in 2020.

Buoyed by this success and an announcement that it would be expanding outside of the California’s central San Joaquin Valley, Soberal and co-CEO Irma Olguin Jr. were give major accolades. The pair were featured in Fortune Magazine; Olguin got a write-up in Forbes and was on Fast Company’s Queer 50 list in 2022.

That same year, Bitwise purchased a Denver-based software developer called Techtonic Inc. to help expand its apprenticeship opportunities. “This acquisition furthers our commitment to supporting resilient communities through workforce development by increasing access to high-quality, affordable tech-career pathways,” Soberal said in a statement at the time.

The acquisition was part of an expansion plan that included creating new campuses in places like Toledo, Ohio and Chicago. That expansion, announced in March, was made possible through $80 million the company raised from investors including the Kapor Center, The Motley Fool, Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Citibank.

This week in downtown Fresno, the front doors were locked at the company’s site on Van Ness Avenue near the Chukchansi Park baseball stadium downtown and its building at Ventura and R streets.

Associated tenant businesses did remain open.

Texas company alleges Bitwise illegally borrowed millions against properties it owns