Small Block

Where America Invests in Itself.

Decision intelligence for Qualified Rural Opportunity Zone investors and their advisors.

What is the rural difference really worth?

From the local level to national scale.

4,173x
ceiling per dollar at 50,000 population
24x
ceiling per dollar, New York

These numbers are being recalculated for the new designations. Data like this typically takes two years to update. Ours will be up in the next two weeks.

About these numbers

Under OZ 2.0, a city or town over 50,000, and any urbanized area touching it, is not rural. Everything else is. Size sets it, not farmland or distance.

2020 Decennial Census, incorporated places, 19,481 incorporated places, ranked by population. Both axes use a log scale. 18,688 is an upper bound: some small places sit inside an urbanized area next to a larger city. Ceiling per dollar is how far a dollar could multiply if the place grew to hold every person counted. It is a ceiling, not a return.

Our conviction: more capital will want to reach rural than there are people, projects, places and tools ready for it. That disconnect is the mispricing.

What we do

One letter or one number can make or break a stake, or all of them at once. Small Block helps you save time and money, but more importantly, not lose it all.

For: fund managers and general partners, capital raising teams, securities and fund formation counsel, tax counsel, tax compliance CPAs and fund administrators.

Place-Fit Capital

See every type of funding a Qualified Rural Opportunity Zone place or project can draw on, under the definitions that govern it.

Workflow Optionality

Your systems and data stay yours. Each step of a Qualified Rural Opportunity Zone raise shows what needs a license or registration.

Outcome Asymmetry

See the upside and the risk exposure of each Qualified Rural Opportunity Zone place and investment, side by side.

Our mission

Tools for humans and machines working through uncertainty; clarity on when to use letters, numbers, both, or neither.

Track record

We're not the only ones who can go from $1M to $100M. We are the ones helping 100 Qualified Rural Opportunity Zones do the same over the next 10 years. But who's counting?

$1M
granted to 20 new local startups.
$100M+
  • $35M commercial real estate capital
  • $25M in public and philanthropic funding
  • $40M+ follow-on investment capital (80% from outside the region)
  • $40M+ in revenue generated by the early-stage companies

We've worked within and across rural places with some of the highest poverty rates in the U.S., and we do the work before the coalitions exist.

Southern Missouri
Southeast and southern Missouri have some of the most persistent-poverty counties in the United States.
Delta Region
About one in five residents of the Delta Regional Authority's region lives in poverty, against 11.6% for the U.S. (2020 Census), and 136 of its 252 counties and parishes are in persistent poverty (FY2023).

Risk runs both ways: the capital that needs a way out, and the place that has to hold on to what it built. We plan for both from day one, from the scale-up to the hand-off. It isn't a zero-sum game. The capacity and wealth that stay behind give back from where it came to what comes after.

We've led applied research, designed programs, written grant narratives and budgets, worked boots-on-the-ground, and managed compliance reporting for public funding across state and federal agencies, and our work spans two-thirds of the acronyms of the federal alphabet.

Letters
DHS, DOC, DOI, DOT, DOL, ED, HHS, HUD, USDA, VA (EDA, DRA, SBA).
90%
award rate on state and federal contracts and grants.
Zero
audit findings.

We share with others how to de-risk and increase capacity before the first dollars ever arrive. Less about what you have. More about what you do with it, or without. So, let’s get to work.

The Small Block platform

By default, Small Block “opts-out” of your data and funds. Meaning, you own what is uniquely yours until you explicitly ask us to help. Even then, we make sure that you can always set your own privacy levels, own your data, keep your current workflows, and manage your own funds. From the first decision through year 30, for each responsibility you can:

  1. Work in the platform yourself.
  2. Integrate internal or external data.
  3. Connect with another person.
  4. Have Small Block build it for you.