CHICAGO—The city's office market received a big shot in the arm last year as investors from across the nation poured money into the downtown's burgeoning tech sector, according to a new report from JLL. Although tech companies have been recognized for several years as some of the brightest lights in the CBD, JLL officials say this flow of venture capital shows that the sector also has tremendous depth, and the benefits should continue to spill beyond its traditional River North home for many years.

“You now have real money coming into Chicago-based start-ups,” Nooshin Felsenthal, senior vice president of investment sales, JLL, tells GlobeSt.com. “And it's not just Chicago-based venture capital firms investing.” Instead, the city is now taken seriously by investors that once kept their focus on tech hubs like Silicon Valley and Boston.

“Chicago had been this hidden gem,” she says, but in 2014, nearly $1.6 billion in total funding flowed into Chicago, a 50% increase over 2013 and the most ever. This was the second year in a row that Chicago passed the $1 billion threshold.