October 2022 Top Five
The top five most-read daily news stories on VirginiaBusiness.com from Sept. 14 to Oct. 14 included an announcement of a major agricultural operation in Chesterfield County expected to begin operation in late 2023 or early 2024. 1 | Lowe’s to open distribution facility in Suffolk The North Carolina-based home improvement [...]
Belabored shortages
Faced with a shortage of drivers, Trevor Dunlap had to find a new way to recruit interested candidates for his Chesapeake-based trucking and warehousing companies, Givens Transportation Inc. and Givens Inc. “It’s very challenging to find qualified people and then be able to retain them,” he says, “and the wages we’re p[...]
Sky-high rents
The Navy man sat in Barbara Gatewood Sgueglia’s office in tears. His rent was being raised from $1,600 to $2,750, and with several children and his wife in school, he just couldn’t swing it, even if the landlord offered to split the difference. Anything else he could afford would likely be “much less appealing,” says [&h[...]
Reading the room
In 2017, David Kern, a retired Naval submarine officer turned entrepreneur, had a lightbulb moment. While working on a data analytics project at a desk in the Naval Station Norfolk annex, he realized that his company, Virginia Beach-based Kern Technology Group LLC, needed to shift from focusing on product development to becoming[...]
Zebox opens U.S. incubator in Arlington
ElectroTempo Inc. CEO and co-founder Ann Xu wants her company’s software to reach 70% of the United States by 2027. Founded in 2020, Electro Tempo provides analytics and tools to help vehicle fleets, utilities and governments optimize the size and location of electric vehicle-charging infrastructure. The company took a step to[...]
An overview of Hampton Roads
With a population of 1.79 million people spread across 17 localities, Hampton Roads is the second-most populated region of Virginia, just behind Northern Virginia. Virginia Beach, with approximately 457,000 residents, is the commonwealth’s biggest city by population, and neighboring Norfolk has the highest density in the regio[...]
Upward mobility
Last year, when Old Dominion University was searching for its new president, the executive search firm contracted by the university also provided a bit of business intelligence about how the university of 24,000 students in Norfolk was viewed nationally. “Old Dominion University was seen as a university on the rise,” says OD[...]
Coming home
As a kid growing up in Virginia Beach, “Scotty” Gray saw military aircraft so routinely that he wanted to become a pilot. Today he is U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Christopher (still “Scotty”) Gray, commander of Navy Region Mid-Atlantic, where he oversees an area that stretches from Wisconsin to North Carolina and includes 14 inst[...]
StartVirginia: Oct. 2022 Heard around Virginia
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Astraea Inc., a geospatial analytics startup based in Charlottesville, spearheaded an effort to provide free satellite imagery that could be used by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, as well as civilians and humanitarian organizations. The company’s platform allows users to see and analyze images of any location on the planet […]
Where the wind’s blowing
If all goes according to plan, towering wind turbines off the coast of Virginia Beach will begin spinning out enough electricity in 2026 to power up to 660,000 homes. Dominion Energy Inc.’s $9.8 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) farm will have 176 turbines — each rising 800 feet above the ocean, with around 8,000[...]
September 2022 Top Five
The top five most-read daily news stories on VirginiaBusiness.com from Aug. 15 to Sept. 14 included two items focusing on TowneBank, the No. 1 bank in Hampton Roads by market share. 1 | TowneBank to acquire Farmers Bank Suffolk-based TowneBank agreed to acquire Windsor-headquartered Farmers Bankshares Inc., parent company of Farmers Bank, in a […]
D.C. sues bitcoin whale Michael Saylor for tax fraud
MicroStrategy Inc. founder Michael Saylor was sued in August by the city of Washington, D.C., which alleges that he defrauded the nation’s capital of more than $25 million in income taxes. The lawsuit argues that Saylor falsely claimed to reside in Virginia or Florida while instead living in a luxury Georgetown penthouse. The [...]