Ypsi software company moves to historic building, receives $10,000 grant to upgrade

White Pine Software Technologies recently received a $10,000 Innovate Ypsi grant from Ann Arbor SPARK that will allow the company to add technology infrastructure and fiber optic internet access to its office space in a historic Ypsilanti building.

The building at at 300 N. Huron is more than 100 years old and once served as town hall for the community. White Pine will move into the second-floor office space some time after the March 3 completion date for the infrastructure upgrade.

White Pine, founded in 2014, currently occupies space in Ann Arbor SPARK’s East business incubator and offers data management and analysis to science, engineering, and computer science companies.

When a company generates a lot of data in labs while calibrating equipment or carrying out other engineering functions, that data is often managed by what White Pine president Robert Smith calls "homegrown" systems. When companies decide to upgrade those systems, White Pine helps them standardize the way the data is managed.

"What we do is apply an ISO standard developed in Europe for managing that data in ways that make it easy to plug in large amounts of analysis tools and manage it according to IT standards for traceability, security, and other things," Smith says.

Smith says he has lived in Ypsilanti for 30 years and it was a natural decision to base his business in the community, but he probably would have kept looking for another location if he hadn't been able to secure the grant. He says the building was already wired for business-quality internet service, but his data-driven business requires infrastructure that is "very solid and reliable."

Smith says he was happy to be able to locate his business in the North Huron building situated near the Riverside Arts Center and other local amenities.

"The grant was really the thing that made the decision easy," Smith says. "Otherwise, we would have wrestled with it a long time and would have had to go somewhere else. We probably would have ended up in a business park, but they are not interesting places to work."

This piece is part of a series highlighting local business growth in the Ann Arbor area. It is supported by Ann Arbor SPARK.