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Ecosystem builders and startup support programs are gaining a new tool to track economic impact and invest in founders, thanks to the launch of a new platform.
Homefield unveiled its platform this week during a kickoff event for the Albany region’s entrepreneurial community.
The system allows organizations such as incubators, accelerators and economic development agencies to move away from manual data collection and measure long-term metrics like job creation and capital raised.
The event marked a full-circle moment for Homefield founder and president Heidi Knoblauch, who left economic development agency Empire State Development exactly two years prior, on Sept. 10, 2024.
“I had sat on the state side of these reports, watching programs try to prove their impact by hand,” Knoblauch said, “and watching the record stop when a founder moved on.”
Publicly funded programs frequently struggle to keep tabs on founders after they graduate, meaning the full scope of a startup’s growth often goes unrecorded. While these programs often know which businesses are poised for success, they traditionally lack the mechanisms to financially back them, Knoblauch noted.
Across the country, entities that support early-stage companies are pressured to prove the return on public investments, yet they face an uphill battle in maintaining accurate records of jobs created, revenue generated and subsequent funding rounds. By combining automated impact tracking with the infrastructure to launch specialized investment funds, the platform aims to plug a significant gap in capital access for emerging companies.
The challenge of tracking economic outcomes is a widespread issue, particularly as regions compete for state and federal grants that require stringent, evidence-based reporting. Providing an automated, verifiable way to measure these metrics could boost an ecosystem’s ability to secure future funding and support local workforce development.
Moving beyond manual tracking
For years, the administrators of incubators and publicly backed startup programs have relied on tedious methods to gather outcome data. Because these programs run on public money, they are required to report their economic impact back to funders or state agencies. Most of these organizations build their reports by hand, leaning heavily on survey emails sent to busy founders.
When busy founders move to the next step, however, they often stop responding to questionnaires, meaning the true, long-term impact of an accelerator is lost just as the company begins to scale.
As a result, the outcomes reported years down the line can become inaccurate or incomplete, leaving programs without the proof they need to secure renewed funding.
Homefield’s solution automatically collects impact metrics while a company is active in a program and continues to track those figures after graduation. Users can monitor jobs created and retained, alongside both dilutive and non-dilutive capital raised and total revenue increased.
“Every job, dollar and commitment is logged once and checked against company records,” Knoblauch said. “When a funder, a board or a state agency asks for a report, it comes off that record at the click of a button, and it is the same number every time.”
Empowering emerging managers with ‘Cohort Funds‘
On the capital side, the organizations working most closely with promising, high-growth startups rarely have an actual fund to back them. Consequently, companies in these ecosystems often raise significantly less money than similar ventures located in regions with established investment networks.
To address this disparity, Homefield is introducing what it calls “Cohort Funds.”
These are semi-blind pools of capital designed to invest in a specific group of companies, typically bound by a program or time frame. The platform allows users to track economic impact as well as operate these investment funds directly from the same interface.
Setting up an initial investment vehicle is notoriously expensive. Forming a first fund costs more to run than it earns in standard fees, Knoblauch noted. Essential operations like formation, administration, banking and compliance are typically priced for large institutional investors, keeping smaller managers out of the market. By centralizing these back-office functions, the new platform provides a pathway for ecosystem leaders to launch their own funds without the prohibitive overhead.
Homefield aims to support small funds and emerging managers by lowering those operational barriers. It introduces the concept of an “impact unit,” a verified record of a specific outcome, such as a job created or a dollar raised. Because each unit is serialized, it can be tracked, transferred and retired without being counted twice.
“A dollar invested through a fund carries two returns — the financial return, if it is a good investment, and the impact it produces, which the founder owns and can be reassigned to the investor,” Knoblauch said. “That second return is what lets a first-time manager back companies conventional funds pass on.”
Going live at Startup Tech Valley
The official rollout took place at Startup Tech Valley, a networking and pitch event in the Capital Region. Hosted at Brown’s Revolution Hall in Troy, New York, the evening marked the kickoff for the organization’s 2026-2027 season.
Launched in 2013 by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Severino Center, Startup Tech Valley has hosted over 200 pitching companies over the past decade. The event was free and open to all, drawing a broad crowd that included entrepreneurs, business leaders, investors, mentors and students.
Knoblauch announced Homefield’s launch to the audience and invited startup support programs to register and begin tracking their economic impact on the platform.
By providing the combined infrastructure to measure outcomes and deploy capital efficiently, the company hopes to directly influence regional economic mobility and firm creation. Two years to the day after she left the state side of impact reporting, Knoblauch sees this launch as a necessary step to help publicly funded programs sustain their innovation efforts.
“This is the solution for easily tracking impact and leveling the playing field,” Knoblauch said. “More funds equal more capital for entrepreneurs.”
