Talk about your transformations: What’s old is new again in Midtown Atlanta, as the Georgia Institute of Technology Foundation is turning the 100-year-old former Biltmore hotel into a mecca for incubating technology startup ventures.
Originally developed as a luxury hotel and apartment complex in 1924 by William Candler, son of Coca-Cola executive Asa Candler, the Biltmore closed from 1982 until 1998, when it was purchased by Atlanta-based mixed-use developer Novare Group, which converted the 11-story structure into an office building in 1999.
The Georgia Tech Foundation purchased the property in 2016 and, after the Covid pandemic, began studying the Biltmore’s potential to become the new “epicenter” of the 2,500,000-square-foot (232,260 sq m) neighborhood known as Technology Square. Designed by the Atlanta-based firm TVS, Tech Square opened in 2003 to encourage innovation and to help launch startup companies, nurtured by Georgia Tech and corporate partners’ business support. Today, the Square has 35 corporate innovation centers, more than 30 Georgia Tech labs and programs, two new office towers opening in 2026 to expand the school’s Scheller College of Business and the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and the 21-story CODA building completed in 2019.
In 2020, Georgia Tech created a new Office of Commercialization headed by chief commercialization officer Raghupathy “Siva” Sivakumar, a 25-year Georgia Tech veteran and currently a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Sivakumar also leads the Georgia Tech Networking and Mobile Computing (GNAN) Research Group, where he and his students do research in the areas of wireless networking and mobile computing. A decade ago, he founded CREATE-X, a Georgia Tech initiative to instill entrepreneurial confidence in its students.
Building Atlanta for Startups
Prospects for the Biltmore began to align with Georgia Tech’s long-range plans in 2022, when the university, in partnership with the Boston Consulting Group, wanted to understand what it would take to make Atlanta a top-five center for entrepreneurial activity. “We learned that we needed to attract more entrepreneurial-minded people to come visit Atlanta,” Sivakumar says. “One of the other key findings was that Atlanta is very distributed in terms of its geography when it comes to its current entrepreneurial ecosystem. There isn’t one place you could point to and say, ‘that’s the epicenter of all entrepreneurial activity that is happening.’ The Biltmore naturally emerged as the location that could become that epicenter for not only Tech Square but [also], hopefully, in Atlanta for the long run.”
The Georgia Tech Foundation hired Atlanta-based Collaborative Real Estate, a full-service firm specializing in innovation districts and university-anchored real estate, to lead the Biltmore’s renovation. Sivakumar is working closely with Collaborative CEO David Tyndall, an original codeveloper of Tech Square, to relocate the school’s various entities into 100,000 square feet (9,290 sq m) of space over the next year.
Ultimately, the Biltmore will house Georgia Tech’s flagship student startup accelerator CREATE-X; Quadrant-I, Georgia Tech’s gateway for launching research-driven ventures; the Office of Technology Licensing, which helps companies commercialize research developed at Georgia Tech; VentureLab, a program offering comprehensive entrepreneurial and commercialization training; Startup Scaling Platform, offering space, mentorship, programming, and funding to help scale early-stage startups; the Corporate Engagement Office, which brings startups and strategic industry partners together; the Venture Investment Hub, hosting local and national venture capital firms alongside Georgia Tech and locally founded startups; and additional strategic partners supporting organizations and corporate innovation centers.
“The big win for us is that, now, all of these entities will have the same home in Tech Square . . . rubbing shoulders with each other,” Sivakumar says.
Preparing the Biltmore for its latest incarnation is rather straightforward, with Novare Group’s 1999 office renovation proving essential in having upgraded the Biltmore’s space for incubator use. “You can imagine that, with Asa Candler’s son William as its original developer, there was no expense spared in making the Biltmore a lasting asset,” says Collaborative Real Estate’s Tyndall. ”Likewise, when Novare Group and [its president and CEO] Jim Borders performed the renovation in the 1990s, great care was taken to equip it for its next century of use. As they say, ‘she has great bones.’ Beyond its high-quality construction, there is something really special about working with a building with so much seasoning. As urban planning pioneer Jane Jacobs observed, ‘New ideas need old buildings.’”
Growing with the Neighborhood
“The population center of gravity for Tech Square is moving toward the Biltmore’s front door,” notes Tyndall. “There will be some physical changes we’ll be effecting to enhance the accessibility of the Biltmore along West Peachtree [Street], but those have to be done in accordance with its status of being a registered historic property. There are also . . . ‘soft’ changes [ahead], in terms of internal signage and decor, which celebrate not just Tech Square but [also] the entire history of technological and entrepreneurial transformations that have emanated from Tech, Atlanta, and the whole state.”
The landmark radio towers atop the Biltmore offer a good example. They’ll be updated with LED lighting. Inside, the historic ballrooms will remain. “The ballrooms are a key feature of the Biltmore and entirely consistent with its use as an innovation hub, where the community gathers for programming, pitches, coworking, and collaboration,” says Tyndall. ”We anticipate even more utilization of these treasured spaces.”
Integrating the building itself into the dynamic of the larger Tech Square is a straightforward exercise, Tyndall notes. “Tech Square is well established as a community that truly transcends the individual buildings that make it up,” he says. ”Much of that connectivity comes from our robust communications and activation programs available to Tech Square community members.”
CREATE-X moved into its second-floor space in early June 2025, and Sivakumar says that, by year’s end, the Office of Commercialization will be relocated as well. The other entities are scheduled to be relocated by summer 2026. “Importantly, we are also hoping that the Biltmore will be home to more than just Georgia Tech entities, because building an ecosystem also requires other service providers,” he says.
For his part, Sivakumar was involved in multiple venture-funded startups based on research from his lab during the first 15 years of his tenure at Georgia Tech, and he became hooked on developing entrepreneurship. “I used a lot of different resources on campus to help me in my journey to commercialize research from my lab,” Sivakumar says. “Georgia Tech has historically had a wealth of resources for entrepreneurship and commercialization, and the Office of Commercialization was created with the specific purpose of bringing together units that were spread across different homes on campus into a single organization so we could be more concerted and organized, and cogent, in our offerings.”
“The way I see our role is, we serve two halves,” Sivakumar says. “The first is student entrepreneurship, in helping them launch new ventures, and the second . . . is research commercialization, getting the tremendous research happening in our labs out, into the marketplace, either through licensing to existing companies or through startups.”
Ultimately, Tech Square’s path to success will not be easy, but the Biltmore will play a key role, Sivakumar says. “To realize our goal of making Atlanta a top-five entrepreneurial ecosystem, we need to launch about a thousand startups a year, but we are not close to that. We will, maybe, launch 130 this year. But that is the goal, and the Biltmore will be the epicenter where a lot of the entrepreneurial activity is happening.”
