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Elevate Ventures is set to move its headquarters from the north side of Indianapolis to much larger digs in a prominent downtown Indianapolis building this summer.
The venture capital firm is leasing about 12,000 square feet on the second floor of the 1 Virginia Ave. building, above the space formerly occupied by Scotty’s Brewhouse. The new space is about double what the organization has at its current office at 50 E. 91st St., on 91st Street just east of Meridian Street.
The new location will give Elevate Ventures more visibility to passers-by and enough room to host on-site training and events—something the firm doesn’t currently have space to offer.
The 1 Virginia building sits on a triangular block bordered by Virginia Avenue, Pennsylvania Street and Maryland Street, a block north of Gainbridge Fieldhouse and its adjacent outdoor space, the new Bicentennial Unity Plaza. The new office includes a second-floor balcony and access to an outdoor plaza on the north side of the building.
“We are over-the-moon excited” about the office move, said Elevate Ventures CEO Christopher Day.
The goal, Day said, is to create a entrepreneurial hub in the heart of downtown Indianapolis. Bottleworks and 16 Tech offer their own versions of such space on the fringes of downtown, as do the Launch Fishers and The Mill in Fishers and Bloomington, respectively, Day said. Now, Elevate Ventures can offer something similar.
“We’re really thinking about it as a central nucleus for the innovation ecosystem, and there really isn’t a space like that in downtown proper,” he said.
The organization aims to move into its new offices by August, in time for its 2024 Rally innovation conference Aug. 27-28 at the Indiana Convention Center.
About half of the new space, or 6,000 square feet, will be devoted to staff offices. Another 3,000 square feet will be dedicated to special events and to business and innovation workshops for entrepreneurs and startups.
The remaining 3,000 square feet will be available for use by partners. As an example, Day said the partner space could provide offices for startups that win Elevate Ventures’ IN-Prize pitch contest, which is now in its second year and offers up to $1 million in funding to each of five winners.
Day said the new offices are part of a larger reimagining of the organization that he’s calling Elevate 3.0. “We’re modernizing the entire organization top to bottom,” he said.
The first phase, which has already rolled out, includes an updated Elevate Ventures website, logo and branding. The new offices are Phase II. Phase III, which is set to roll out late this year or early next year, involves making better use of Elevate Ventures’ data for the benefit of its entrepreneurs. Day said the data project will help Elevate Ventures see patterns and trends in things such as company valuations and investment activity.
Elevate Ventures is currently structuring that data—two terabytes of data and millions of data points—so that it can use it to better advise Indiana startups.
“The amount of data we have is insane,” Day said. “There are a lot of things we can do to help make sure entrepreneurs are prepared before they go talk to other [venture capitalists] and investors.”
Launched in 2011, Elevate Ventures acts as the venture investing arm of the Indiana Economic Development Corp. It provides pre-seed, seed and Series A funding for Indiana startups, in amounts ranging from $20,000 to $2 million per round.
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Wow good for downtown. Hopefully this will get people to use the plaza. Amazing not moving to Hamilton County.