Greenlight Guru growing quickly making software for medical device makers

Indianapolis-based tech firm Greenlight Guru is on a growth tear.

Since it began debuting software that company co-founder David DeRam says “is changing the way medical device companies bring products to market and keep them there,” Greenlight has been growing exponentially.

Grow—which hit the market in October—is the newest offering on Greenlight's platform, which also includes Go, to help launch products, and Guru, to provide expert assistance to users.

“It’s been a game-changer,” DeRam said. “This is the product the industry has been waiting on for 15 years. It allows [medical device makers] to build products that are higher quality, safer and get them to market faster. We’re passionate about true quality. Not merely compliance.”

The company says that its system “provides visibility that decreases the risk so [clients] can advance the success of [their] medical devices.”

Greenlight Guru, which is headquartered on the southwest side of downtown near Lucas Oil Stadium, tripled its revenue from 2015 to 2016 and more than doubled it in 2017, DeRam said. He declined to divulge the company’s revenue, but said 2018 could be its biggest year yet.

“We’re very bullish,” he said. “That’s partially because of the product, but mostly because of the team. This is the best team—from top to bottom—I’ve ever been a part of.

“I’m a big believer that people work how they feel,” DeRam added. “We’ve really worked on the culture here. We’ve invested in coaching and stress giving and receiving feedback. We want positive conflict. The basis for all of this is trust. You have to trust one another and trust that you want the best for one another.”

Greenlight Guru, which was founded in 2013, grew from 19 to 31 employees in the last year. DeRam expects to add nine more employees during the first quarter of this year in “software development, sales and marketing and customer success.”

Last year, Greenlight promised the state it would grow to at least 134 workers by the end of 2020 in exchange for up to $1.55 million in conditional tax credits and up to $200,000 in training grants

So far, Greenlight has been able to draw talent from both coasts to work at the firm, DeRam said.

Jon Speer, a managing partner at Martinsville-based Creo Quality LLC and an advisory board member for Rose Hulman Institute of Technology’s Biology & Biomedical Engineering department, is also a Greenlight Guru co-founder. DeRam, an Indiana University graduate and long-time tech entrepreneur, is also the founder of The Progeny Foundation, an Indianapolis-based foundation aimed at providing high-quality educational and development opportunities to children.

Greenlight’s clients, which include Indiana-based Cook Advanced Technologies and Cambridge, England-based AbCam, aren’t surprised by the firm’s rapid growth.

“Greenlight Guru’s software helped us tremendously in the last few months of 2017, during which we had an important [ISO] audit,” said Schelte Post, quality manager at MR Coils, a global company based in The Netherlands.

 “It was very easy to show auditors in what phase every project was, and simply show every piece of documentation we have,” Post said in a statement. “In the auditor’s conclusion session, he noted that our choice of the Greenlight Guru platform made the interviewing and documentation reviewing transparent and fast. I’m amazed we were able to use and implement the software so quickly."

Greenlight has clients in 400 cities in 40 countries on five continents, DeRam said.

The company, DeRam said, was started with $2.25 million from angel investors and investments from the company’s own founders.

“We’ve been very capital efficient,” DeRam said. “There have been no institutional dollars.”