Reclaim Technologies co-founders Alex Treas, Elizabeth Gaw and Jenn Guerra. Photo by Ben Hensley

The month of May saw economic ripples tear through the community when the once-heralded Fresno darling Bitwise Industries suddenly closed its doors in what would become a very bad month for tech industry in the Central Valley.

In the months since, the community has stepped up to the plate, organizing support rallies, employment fairs and opening up job opportunities for the 300 former Bitwise employees suddenly seeking local jobs.

The sudden collapse left a void in the Valley when it came to widely accessible tech education and business-to-business tech services.

That’s the void that the team at newly founded Reclaim Technologies hopes to close.

Operating out of the building formerly known as the “Bitwise Hive,” the company has been building up client lists and beginning to serve the business community.

Founded by Jenn Guerra, Alex Treas and Elizabeth Gaw, Reclaim Technologies aims to create tech opportunities for businesses and eventually, tech jobs for local industry professionals.
Reclaim Technologies was “built out of necessity to move forward,” Treas said. “Obviously a lot of tech jobs went away. What didn’t go away was the experience and the skills here in the Central Valley.”

The three are former Bitwise employees. Guerra was a Bitwise apprenticeship funding manager. Treas was a director for cowork and Gaw a software developer for Tatstat.

The team at Reclaim agrees that the work Bitwise did in its decade in Fresno was extremely important in terms of promoting the use of tech in business. Their aim is to rebuild the local tech industry’s reputation, providing quality technical app and website assistance.

“We’re here to move forward,” he said. “That’s why our name is Reclaim — because we want to reclaim our place in tech and the Central Valley and hire local talent for local solutions.”

Following the Bitwise collapse, the three friends realized that they had the potential to fill a need in the community.

“We’re minority-owned, women-owned [and] LGBTQ+-owned,” Treas said. “We bring so much diversity as a company and that’s what I really loved about Bitwise.”

Treas said that the ideology of “treating humans as humans” that characterized the Bitwise corporate culture is something that Reclaim will continue to focus on.

“That’s where the motto comes in – ‘Tech with a heart,’” said Gaw, who handles coding for Reclaim. “I feel like those giant tech companies like Apple and Microsoft, they’ve grown so big but now they kind of treat their people like numbers and profits and money. We want to try to steer away from that.”

Aiming to assist underrepresented and marginalized businesses, Reclaim’s first project is Strfrnt — a design template that offers a user-friendly interface for website design, limiting the amount of backend work for the user.

Revealing the continued need for tech services in the Central Valley, Reclaim has accumulated more than 20 clients in the short month they have been operating, with a majority first-time clients.

“I’ll say 98% of the clients that we’re working with are brand new,” Treas said. “We’re here in Fresno, so that’s been really receptive.”

The business hopes to expand in three phases, with phase one — forming an LLC and building clientele — well under way.

“We want to be community based and build from there,” Guerra said. “I think when you’re involved in a community people don’t forget who you are.”

Phase two looks to seek funding, primarily through their own investments — and investing in storefront services. Phase three will aim to seek salaried employees and build the team with benefits for employees.

Eventually, the team would love to see the business grow, but in the short term, the trio hopes to make a solid footprint in the Central Valley before thinking about expanding further.

“In a way we probably are focusing more here,” Guerra said. “We want to be sustainable and create our own money,” she said. “It would be great to have funding, but not over our heads. We want to be sustainable and to have people trust us and be reliable and good in business in our area.”

Treas said that if things run smoothly, phase three could begin within a year.

Reclaim Technologies hopes to work with clients of all types as well, highlighting local and small retail businesses, but also recognizing the potential in other industries.

“I’d love to work with agriculture and these big corporations that have such fun integrations with technology,” Treas said. “You could get drones involved; you could get so much involved, but having the idea and getting it from dream to reality, there’s that middle ground that you have to have Reclaim to help out with.”

Eventually, Treas said he hopes Reclaim can fill the need of a tech incubator in the Central Valley, fulfilling some of what Bitwise had built prior to its collapse.

Make no mistake though — Reclaim Technologies is not Bitwise Industries.

“If someone says ‘we are associated with Bitwise,’ I say ‘heck no,’” Gaw said. “We are our own company, we are doing our own mission and we’re not going to follow the same mistakes they did.”