Business

NYC’s Silicon Park

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You can call it Silicon Park.

A new tech corridor is emerging in the heart of Manhattan, reshaping the map of the city’s vibrant Web 2.0 startup scene.

If you had to pinpoint the epicenter, Park Avenue between 32nd and 33rd streets would be a good place to look: the headquarters of Gilt Groupe, perhaps the only tech firm in the city that warrants a $1 billion-plus valuation.

That office — which once housed Right Media, an earlier city startup success bought by Yahoo! in 2007 — is in the hottest ZIP code for venture capital dollars and deals: 10016.

CLICK HERE TO SEE WHICH PARTS OF MANHATTAN ARE HOTBEDS FOR TECH-STARTUP INVESTMENT DEALS

Gilt co-founders Alexandra Wilkis Wilson and Alexis Maybank, along with founder Kevin P. Ryan, started in 2007 with the concept of “Flash Sales.”

The Web site offered designer clothing at deep discount, usually starting at noon for only 48 hours. After that it was gone.

The company’s chairwoman is former Martha Stewart executive Susan Lyne and it has secured more than $270 million in capital since 2007.

“While Gilt Groupe greatly influenced the overall venture investment dollar figures within the Murray Hill/Midtown East area, the deal volume clearly shows that those East Side neighborhoods are a hub of startup activity,” said Jonathan Sherry, co-founder of research firm CB Insights.

The area comprises Kips Bay, Turtle Bay and Murray Hill, stretching from the mid-20s to the 40s on the East Side, and it saw 40 venture capital deals that amounted to $351.8 million from 2009 until today, according to data provided exclusively to The Post by CB Insights, which tracks venture and startup activity.

CB Insights’ numbers of deals and dollars broken down by ZIP code offer a surprising picture of Silicon Alley, which is traditionally considered to start in SoHo, make its way through Union Square, Gramercy and the Flatiron and head West through Chelsea, where Google made its city home.

However, the venture activity shows that since 2009 the East Side is making a case as the city’s new startup soul.

The two zip codes above Kips Bay — 10017 and 10022 — are also in the top 10 in terms of money raised since 2009. Meanwhile, SoHo, Union Square and Chelsea were still strong hubs of startup activity.

Confronted with the hard numbers, some of the city’s top tech players were surprised by the results and not all were willing to accept them.

Certainly, neighborhoods straddle multiple zip codes and one large deal could sway results, but the fact is the East Side from the mid-20s to mid-50s saw 76 deals amounting to more than $840 million. The top 10 zip codes combined saw 289 deals totaling $2.3 billion.

Brad Hargreaves, a gaming specialist and also the leader of one of the city’s startup incubators, General Assembly in the Flatiron District, conducted his own search for the heart of Silicon City.

His unscientific study also turned up a streak of tech activity running up Manhattan’s East Side in the area mostly known as Murray Hill.

“What really surprised me was the Murray Hill area,” he said. “I found that fascinating, so many deals being done on East Side on Park Avenue in the 30s.”

The companies in that area have names like Xgraph, Offerpop, Adkeeper.

Some of the names ring a bell to Warren Lee, a venture capitalist with Canaan Partners.

Lee recalled Adkeeper recently raised more than $40 million, and Gilt Groupe, in the same neighborhood, just raised almost $140 million.

“Companies that raised a lot of money also have pretty large teams,” he said. “It’s tougher to find office space in SoHo to fit 150 people. There’s more commercial class A building space in those (Midtown) zip codes.”

Lawrence Lenihan, a venture capitalist with FirstMark Capital based in the city, said location decisions could be as fickle as sparing commuters an extra 20 minutes, and that’s why they set up shop closer to Grand Central Terminal.

“An extra 15 to 20 minutes as a commuter could be a deciding factor for an incredible engineer,” he said. “Yes, it is that shallow.”