Chicago-based user experience and digital product development consultancy, ÄKTA, recently announced it will move to 205 W. Wacker Drive to accommodate the company’s rapid growth. The new two-floor space will quadruple the size of the previous office and ÄKTA will invest roughly $2 million in improvements.

“ÄKTA has experienced tremendous growth over the last five years and this new headquarters represents the next chapter of our story,” said ÄKTA CEO John Roa. “We are creating one of the city’s most pioneering work spaces as an investment in our team and in Chicago as an epicenter of growth and innovation in the tech industry.”

ÄKTA joins a long list of companies growing or expanding in the city. This issue of Chicago Growing identifies 57 growing companies (including five headquarters),* illustrated on the interactive map below:

_{*Refers to data (where disclosed) for new and expanding companies with a physical address in the 14-county Chicago region that meet at least one of these criteria: $1M investment, net gain of 20,000 sq ft, net gain of 20 FTE jobs, headquarters facility, and/or WBC involvement in expansion. WBC captures project information from media outlets, press releases, company websites, subscription services and WBC internal reporting; the quality of each record depends on the availability of data and resources to input and confirm information. Data is finalized in the first quarter of the following year to allow for the time lag in project reporting; year-to-date numbers are subject to revision.}