This spring, we shared a New York Times article about Quicken Loans Chairman and Founder Dan Gilbert and his quest to remake Detroit, with the goal to “turn downtown into a high-tech hub, where young entrepreneurs both live and work.”

Last week, he took another step toward achieving his goal by announcing a $1.5 Million pledge to Venture for America to continue sending our talented and enterprising Fellows to Detroit and Cleveland over the next five years. Already, he’s pumped about $1 billion into the city to acquire almost three million square feet of real estate.

Venture for America made the announcement at the VFA Summer Celebration last Thursday (check out photos here!), where our friends and supporters from around the country, including Detroit, joined us in New York. We are thrilled to work with Dan and Quicken Loans to keep moving forward, and can’t wait send over a dozens more Fellows to Detroit and Cleveland over the next 5 years to join our first class!

Today, we are thrilled to announce a new partner and supporter: UBS Americas.

Over the next three years, UBS will invest $1.2 Million to support two core VFA program areas: education and training.

In addition to becoming the primary supporter of the Venture for America Fellow Training Camp at Brown University over the next three years, UBS will give VFA access to its resources and expertise.

In the press release from UBS, CEO Bob McCann spoke about their newest partnerships, which also includes a $100,000 commitment to American Corporate Partners, a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting veterans in their transition from the armed services to the civilian workforce.

“Our announcement today underscores UBS Americas’ vision of creating a stronger America where everyone has the opportunity to fulfill their potential and achieve financial independence,” said McCann. “Venture for America and American Corporate Partners have clear mandates to take actionable steps at the very heart of what it will take to get the American economy going again – with two important bastions of our future: the next generation of entrepreneurs and our veterans. That makes them the ideal partners for our mission.”

We could not be more excited to be working with UBS as part of their Revitalizing America initiative.

VFA Founder Andrew Yang on how cities tend to breed companies that solve the problems of their region

When I visited Cincinnati I met with a company called General Nano – they manufacture a carbon nanotube material that can be used to make planes more resistant to lightning strikes. The U.S. Navy is an investor through the Office of Naval Research. The military comes through Cincinnati in part because G.E. Aviation, which manufactures airplane components, is in the city.

General Nano is an example of a company that would be unlikely to be founded in, say, New York. If you look at the latest wave of New York startups (e.g., Rent the Runway, Warby Parker, Foursquare, Gilt Groupe, Etsy, Kickstarter, etc.) they tend to capitalize on New York’s existing industries (e.g., fashion, retail, etc.). Cities tend to produce startups that are either solving their problems or building on existing strengths.

Other companies in Cincinnati include The Brandery, a startup accelerator that emphasizes brand building, and Blackbook HR, a software solution to help corporations integrate employees into the community and help them feel more rooted. Both of these were born in the shadow of Procter and Gamble, the consumer products giant that is perhaps Cincinnati’s most prominent corporate anchor. In this case, both branded innovation and employee satisfaction are issues of interest to the established organizations of the region.

You can see the same phenomena in other cities. New Orleans is a haven for education reform as the only city in the U.S. where more than half of all public school children attend charter schools. Also in New Orleans are 4.0 Schools, a design lab for education innovation, and Kickboard, an analytics and student tracking software company for teachers.

Baltimore, the home of Johns Hopkins University, has a cluster of innovative health tech companies such as Reify Health, which uses mobile technology to improve and measure medical treatments. Reify Health was started by four Johns Hopkins medical and graduate students who left school to start the company. Baltimore also has cyber security start-ups, like Riskive, that benefit from the city’s proximity to Fort Meade and US Army Cyber Command. Cleveland has companies like Linestream, which provides next-generation motor controls to save energy and money for appliances, and Maker Gear, which sells 3-D printers, in sync with the city’s robust manufacturing base.

There’s an overly simplistic notion that Silicon Valley is the only place for technology companies to thrive. We all remember Facebook moving out West in ‘The Social Network.’ But even Mark Zuckerberg said in 2011, “If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston” and advocated “You don’t have to move out here to do this.”

The problems that you see startups tackling are dramatically different in different cities. Silicon Valley is unlikely to produce the same set of companies as New York or Cleveland because the region has a different set of strengths and defining institutions. We need people building companies all over the country to innovate in aviation, consumer products, education, health, cybersecurity, biotech, manufacturing, and everything in between.