Engineered Innovation Group lands state tax incentives

When Jake Miller launched the Engineered Innovation Group in December 2021, the Indianapolis-based firm consisted of one person—Miller.

Without taking any outside investment, the software development and consulting firm has now grown to 26 full-time employees, and Miller has big ambitions for what’s next.

Engineered Innovation Group helps startups and established companies build and launch new software products. The company recently landed an offer from the Indiana Economic Development Corp. for up to $650,000 in state tax incentives, which it can earn if it creates at least 25 additional jobs within the next five years.

“We’ve grown really fast, and we’ve been pretty strategic about it,” Miller said. “The first year was about building a business and getting work at all costs. … This year is about operational efficiencies, increasing margins and such, with the second goal being expanding our service offerings.”

The firm’s most recent hire, announced last week, is Karen Mangia, who previously held senior leadership roles at Salesforce, Cisco and AT&T. As president, Mangia will lead Engineered Innovation Group’s newly formed insights and innovations practice.

Another area of expansion for the firm is artificial intelligence—an area in which Miller said he sees huge potential. “In the next five years, every company will be an AI company. And consumers will interact with AI just as naturally as we interact with each other.”

In March, the Engineered Innovation Group launched a data science practice headed by Charlene Tay, who formerly held data science roles at Indianapolis venture studio High Alpha and later at Pattern89, which was acquired by Shutterstock in 2021.

Engineered Innovation Group established its data science practice in response to customer interest, Miller said, and the practice became profitable in its first month of launch.

The firm has also been implementing AI into its own operations. As one example, it used the technology to generate an avatar it calls Paula. When new employees join Engineered Innovation Group, part of their training involves watching a video in which Paula explains the company’s policies.

Miller is also asking his staff to adopt tech tools such as GitHub’s Copilot to become 30% faster at producing code by the end of the year. The firm is working on an internal coding tool that Miller said could reduce the time required for projects from several weeks to five minutes. “We’re likely to either open-source that or commercialize it,” Miller said of the tool.

“We’re going to lead that charge in the market,” Miller said. “We’re not scared about [technology] replacing our jobs. There’s always going to be something to do.”

Eventually, Miller said he’d like to launch an Engineered Innovation venture studio that could launch its own software startups.

Miller has a background in both software engineering and entrepreneurship. He joined Indianapolis-based ExactTarget in 2012 as a software engineer, remaining with the company after it was acquired by Salesforce. By the time he left Salesforce, Miller had worked his way up to the position of director of software engineering for the company’s Journey Builder product. Miller went on to be a co-founder of Indianapolis-based tech startup MetaCX, working alongside fellow Salesforce alum Scott McCorkle.