I have spent a lot of words lately on where Chicago tech is right now. This is the other half of that: how it got here. Eight years, eight stories, the booms and the busts and the quiet wins that most national coverage skipped right over. Read them in order, and you get the real arc of the city, not the highlight reel.
The series, in order
- 2018, How Tempus Labs Kicked Off Chicago’s Unicorn Era. The precision-medicine company that proved Chicago could build something hard and valuable.
- 2020, VillageMD and the Year the Pandemic Rewired Chicago VC. When venture capital moved to Zoom and finally came to local founders.
- 2021, Unicorn Day 2021: Chicago’s Record Class of Unicorns. A dozen billion-dollar startups in a single year, and the cooldown that followed.
- 2021, The Rivian Normal Plant and the Birth of an Illinois EV Hub. A dead Mitsubishi factory becomes the anchor of a new EV corridor.
- 2022, The 2022 Chicago Corporate Exodus. Boeing, Caterpillar, and Citadel all leave in seven weeks, and why the obituaries were overdone.
- 2023, The Aurora Supercomputer. One of the world’s first exascale machines, quietly humming away in the suburbs.
- 2024, The Outcome Health Fraud. The boom’s darkest chapter, a $1 billion cautionary tale.
- 2024, Belvidere’s Revival and the EV Corridor’s Second Act. The harder trick: dragging a legacy plant into the electric era.
And where it is heading now
The history sets up the present. If you want the current chapter, start with the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, the frontier bet on the South Side, then the university engine turning research into companies, and finally the applied, industrial AI that is doing the unglamorous work. Same city, same instinct: build the hard thing, and let everyone else chase the hype.
Bookmark this one. I will keep adding to it as the story does what it always does in this city: move faster than the coverage.