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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe buzz around artificial intelligence is at a fever pitch right now—and that looks like a business opportunity to Indianapolis-based startup Stellar.
Stellar is a service company that helps customers integrate generative AI and other technologies such as large language models and machine learning into their businesses. The company formed in February and officially emerged from stealth mode this week.
The company’s team of founders includes Zach Linder of Indianapolis, who serves as chief operations officer, and Brett Flinchum of Mountain View, California, who serves as CEO.
Stellar was formed on the hypothesis that non-Silicon Valley businesses in a range of industries were going to need help understanding how to implement AI into their operations, Flinchum said. “Business leaders are reading about generative AI every day. They’re seeing all about everything going on, they’re seeing product companies announcing all the time. I see leadership from a board level and from the [corporate] level kind of putting pressure on the organization: ‘Hey, are we getting left out? How do we play it?’”
Flinchum said that business hypothesis has proven to be true. In fact, it only took about a month after launching for Stellar to land its first customers.
Linder and Flinchum met about 10 years ago, when Flinchum became a customer of Apparatus Inc., an Indianapolis-based technology services company where Linder worked at the time.
Apparatus was acquired by Massachusetts-based Virtusa Corp. in 2015 for $34.2 million. In 2017 Linder was on the founding team of human resources-tech firm Canvas Talent Inc. Flinchum was an early investor in Canvas, which went on to be acquired by San Mateo, California-based Jobvite Inc. in 2019. (Jobvite has since relocated its headquarters from California to Indianapolis.)
Originally, Stellar had envisioned that its core customers would be large companies operating in health care, pharmaceuticals, financial services, manufacturing and other industries, because AI could help those companies analyze the huge amounts of data they generate. But Stellar has also found traction among startups, Linder said.
“It’s too late for [large companies] to build their business from the ground up with generative AI in mind,” Linder said. “They can go back and retrofit, but new companies can start that way. And so how do we go help new companies go build that?”
One such customer is Unitus, a startup founded by Matt Baggott of Carmel. Stellar is building Unitus’s software platform, which helps members of a company’s sales team be more efficient in their search for potential customers. Unitus is still refining its platform and expects to begin earning revenue in October.
Baggott’s background is in sales, not software development, and he said Stellar’s assistance has been invaluable. “They are AI experts with a capital ‘E.’”
Currently, Stellar has a core team of six employees and about 15-20 contract workers, bringing the total headcount to between 20 and 25. About half of the entire team is Indianapolis-based.
Linder said Stellar is starting with a small group of employees with the idea of hiring additional employees from its pool of contractors over time. Whenever possible, Linder said, the company would like to hire locally. “We want to have our growth, or a large part of our growth, come from Indianapolis.”
Editor’s note: While Zach Linder was on the founding team for Canvas, he was not a co-founder. This story has been updated.
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