Start-Up NY – the initiative put in place by New York’s Mayor Governor Andrew M. Cuomo around a year ago – seeks to offer businesses substantial incentives to move their work to New York, either by expanding their existing businesses or “starting up” new ones. The initiative being given is that these companies will be exempt from paying taxes for a staggering ten years! This means, no income tax, business, corporate, state or local taxes, sales and property taxes, or franchise fees. That means companies can make a huge saving.

Two of the eight companies that will benefit from the initiative this year are: Appistry and Liazon. Appistry is a cloud computing firm based in St. Louis that is seeking to expand into the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, at Buffalo University. Using the program, the firm will pour $2.45m into its expansion, and, once in New York, offer eight new jobs.

Liazon is set to hire a further 500 individuals over the next five years thanks to help from Start-Up NY. This firm offers private online health benefit exchanges.

According to the Governor, 659 jobs in total are being created (the bulk of which Liazon can take credit for), thanks to this initiative. A hundred of these are from BAK USA.