Indianapolis ed-tech firm secures $1.45M in state incentives

Computer science education is becoming more common in America’s K-12 schools—and that looks like a big opportunity to Indianapolis-based Ellipsis Education.

Ellipsis, which is the doing-business-as name for Coder Kids Inc., offers computer science curricula for students in grades K-12. The company previously did business under the name Codelicious but changed its name to Ellipsis last month as part of a rebranding.

The company, which has 30 employees, last month secured an offer of up to $1.45 million in state tax incentives from the Indiana Economic Development Corp. That offer is based on Ellipsis’ growth plans, which include hiring another 91 people by the end of 2025. The incentives are performance-based, meaning that the company can only claim the tax credits after it hires Hoosiers.

“We are growing in response to more national focus on computer science,” said Sena Hineline, vice president of marketing at Ellipsis. “While computer science hasn’t been a core curriculum in schools, that has significantly changed recently.”

According to the Chicago-based Computer Science Teachers Association, as of last year, 53% of U.S. high schools offered at least one course in computer science, compared with 51% of schools in 2021 and 35% of schools in 2018.

Ellipsis’ customer base includes mostly school districts and individual schools, with customers in the Midwest but also California, Texas, Florida and Nevada. The company also does a small amount of business with the penal system—correctional facilities that offer adult-education classes for inmates.

“We’re national, with a Midwestern concentration,” Hineline said. The company has shifted to a remote-first work model, but it does have a physical office on the 16 Tech campus, and state incentives would only apply to people hired in Indiana.

Ellipsis’ lesson plans are designed so that instructors can effectively teach the coursework even if they don’t have a background in computer science. Courses cover a range of computer-science-related topics that vary based on students’ grade and experience level. A class for kindergarten students, for instance, teaches students things like what algorithms are and how to use the internet safely. High-school lessons teach programming languages like JavaScript and Python, game development and career opportunities.

Ellipsis was founded in 2015, but it didn’t get into its current line of business right away.

The company started off running after-school computer science programming. After a few years, it pivoted to offering computer science curricula for in-school courses, and it exited the business of  running after-school programs.

At one point the company had as many as 50 employees, Hineline said, but some of those positions were eliminated when the company went through a restructuring related to its change of focus.

This marks the second time Ellipsis has qualified for state tax incentives. In 2019, the IEDC offered the company $300,000 in tax credits based on its plan to hire 29 employees by the end of 2022. According to the IEDC’s online transparency portal, the company has claimed $93,959 of that amount to date. It has until the end of 2026 to earn the rest of the incentives.

The company has also gained attention from investors—it secured a $3.8 million round of seed funding in mid-2021.