Celebrating Your 2023 Midwest Madness Champions—Bloomington, IN
This one is for our 2x Midwest Madness winners, Bloomington (W)Indiana!
Since 2021, we’ve been pitting 64 different cities against each other for a little fun, friendly competition for Midwest glory. We aim to highlight what’s happening across the startup and VC scene in the region by using cities from our annual Midwest City Rankings. In case you missed our 2023 rankings, they’re out now!
In 2021, Bloomington, IN was our winner. In 2022, Columbia, MO took the win. In this year’s tournament we saw our biggest competition yet with some hard-fought matchups throughout. In the end, after a close poll with Cincinnati, Bloomington secured the victory with 57.6% of the vote (out of 4,822 total votes) and became 2x Champions in the Midwest Madness Tournament. In addition to Midwest glory (what’s really better than that?) and a commemorative framed tweet, we host a party in the winning city! Back in 2021 we weren’t able to celebrate in person, but 2023 was THE year that changed for Bloomington.
This year, the Mill hosted and co-organized the event at their facility. After weeks of planning, half of the M25 & Midwest Startups team made their way down to Bloomington to celebrate. Nearly 100 people from the Bloomington community made an appearance for an evening of networking, confetti, t-shirt cannons and of course some Midwest Madness.
While Bloomington’s dominance in this tournament (and in our annual Midwest Startup City Rankings) might be surprising to outsiders, the city has been quietly building out its tech scene for over a decade and celebrated some big wins in recent years, including multiple acquisitions like Periodic (to Exclaimer in 2022) and Envisage Technologies (to Vector Solutions). In addition to hosting this year’s party, the Mill has served as the city’s epicenter for startup activity since opening its doors in 2018. There’s a lot to be said about uniting many of the college town’s entrepreneurial efforts under one roof: the Mill has been host to conferences, accelerators, code schools, and a robust offering of meetups in just a few short years.
“The Midwest Madness party with M25 was a blast! We’re pretty proud of our startup community for winning Midwest Madness twice in the past three years. Bloomington’s not the biggest city on the list, but our ecosystem is tight and definitely knows how to have fun,” said Mill Executive Director, Pat East. “Thanks so much to M25 for the cool t-shirts and the confetti cannons, and most of all for making the drive to celebrate with us in person. Special shoutout to our friends at Cardinal Spirits and Switchyard Brewing for donating great cocktails and beer. One World Catering put out a delicious spread of food and the Chocolate Moose sent an ice cream cart stocked with summer goodness. It was a perfect evening, and we hope to do it all again next year.”
We are already looking forward to the 2024 competition! Which city will be the next Midwest Madness Champion? There is less than eight months until the next tournament kicks off. Let us know what you want to see or if you have any predictions for next year’s tournament. Looking forward to launching off more t-shirts with our genuine Invest in the Midwest t-shirt cannon next year!
