Consumer / OtherPittsburgh

DashStrom

Consumer / Other

DashStrom is a Pittsburgh-based education startup that runs out-of-school programs combining active games with social-emotional learning to help children build confidence, grit, and a growth mindset. The company was named a 2026 Startup to Watch and is backed by InnovationWorks.

Founded

Region

Pittsburgh

Investors

Innovation Works

People

About Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh's tech economy grew out of Carnegie Mellon's robotics program, one of the oldest and deepest in the country, with the University of Pittsburgh's own research base sitting right alongside it — two major universities anchoring one relatively compact city. It's also a place that didn't start as a tech hub at all: this was steel country for a century, and that engineering-and-manufacturing inheritance still shows up in what the region builds — robotics, autonomy, and deep tech that comes out of hard industrial know-how, not a recent software boom.

Region Stats

Total firms 299

VC / investors 6

Companies 286

Universities 7

Known For

Robotics

Autonomy

Deep Tech