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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe Indiana Economic Development Corp. is offering incentives to two out-of-state tech startups who have committed to expanding their Indiana operations after participating in an Indianapolis-based startup accelerator.
Those two companies are Sweden-based imagiLabs AB and Minnesota-based HMMP LLC, which does business as Awesome People Leaders and is based in the Minneapolis suburb of Richfield. Both companies have office space at 16 Tech, and both say they’re committed to hiring Indiana-based employees starting this year.
Both of the startups participated in the first cohort of the Butler Accelerator for Education and Workforce Innovation, which launched last year as a partnership between Butler University, Wisconsin-based gener8tor and Indianapolis-based TechPoint.
The program launched last year with the intent of running twice per year. So far, it has worked with a total of seven startups in two different cohorts, each of which has received a $100,000 investment from Butler.
The accelerator program just wrapped its second cohort earlier this month. A Butler spokesperson said the school has not yet set a date for the next cohort of the program.
ImagiLabs offers a platform for teaching the coding language Python to students in grades 3-9. The company launched in 2018 and now has paying customers in 17 states, including Indiana.
ImagiLabs co-founder and CEO Dora Palfi grew up in Hungary, went to college at New York University and now lives in Sweden. She said she had never been to Indiana before participating in the Butler accelerator.
Palfi said the experience convinced her that Indiana would be a good place to grow her business. “It was really incredible how much of a network we were able to develop [in Indiana] during that short three-month period.”
Indiana is also one of several states that require computer education as a graduation requirement, and Palfi said that, too, was an attraction.
ImagiLabs currently has four employees in the U.S. and Europe, and the company operates as a remote-first workforce. Palfi said she hopes to hire her first Indiana employees by the third quarter of this year, with a focus on sales and customer support roles, and is looking into moving the company’s formal headquarters to Indiana.
The IEDC has offered ImagiLabs tax incentives of up to $200,000 based on the company’s plan of adding 20 Hoosier jobs by 2029.
The IEDC has also offered up to $300,000 in tax credits to Awesome People Leaders based on that company’s plan to hire up to 24 Hoosiers by 2029.
These incentives are performance-based, meaning that the companies can claim the tax credits only after they add jobs.
Awesome People Leaders, which launched in 2022, offers online leadership training that is delivered to users as part of their regular work hours. It also offers leadership coaching.
The company’s target users are people who work at companies with fewer than 1,000 employees and who work as supervisors, project managers, mid-level managers or similar roles.
“I believe no one wants to be the manager someone’s complaining about at the happy hour,” said Awesome People Leaders founder and CEO Heather Polivka.
Polivka is no stranger to the Hoosier state—she earned her graduate degree at Purdue University, completing an internship in Indianapolis along the way.
Awesome People Leaders first launched its product in 2022, but Polivka said participating in the Butler accelerator helped her develop a prototype for a version that incorporates generative artificial intelligence. Indianapolis-based software and product design firm Engineered Innovation Group is developing the product.
She said the accelerator put her in touch with “exceptional mentors, people that are helping to guide my business and serve as a sounding board. … I learned more in that 12 weeks than I could have imagined.”
Currently, Polivka is the only employee at Awesome People Leaders, though she also works with a network of contractors. She said she hopes to begin hiring Indiana-based employees by the end of the year, including leadership coaches, technologists and sales positions.
Though Polivka said she intends to remain in Minnesota, she is working to establish Indianapolis as her company’s official headquarters.
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