indiana
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The Agency That Bought Back Its Independence
A Fort Wayne firm spent half a century learning that the most valuable media plan begins with a local problem. In 2022, two longtime insiders bought the agency and made that lesson the business.
The Bridge Was Easy. The Explanation Was the Hard Part.
C2 Strategic built a regional agency by doing the unfashionable work of making public projects legible - especially when the subject is a bridge, a toll, a crisis or a billion-dollar idea that cannot afford to be misunderstood.
Purdue has the patents. Now comes the hard part.
Purdue Innovates connects university inventions with licenses, founders and capital. Its most revealing work happens when a promising idea meets an inconvenient customer.
AgriNovus Indiana puts farm innovation on a longer clock
Seven-week contests gave young companies too little time. AgriNovus Indiana built a longer accelerator, linking farm problems, food science and the people who might turn an experiment into a business.
The Firm Indiana Built to Fund Its Own Future
For 15 years, Elevate Ventures has written the first check for Indiana startups from Gary to Evansville. In 2025, the state that helped create it started asking hard questions about the books.
Saoud Rizwan
Saoud Rizwan is the founder and CEO of Cline, an open-source AI coding agent that runs inside code editors like VS Code. He built the first version in June 2024, about ten days after Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Sonnet, as a side project for the company's Build with Claude hackathon. He didn't win, but the project caught fire online and Cline has since passed millions of installs and raised $32M in seed and Series A funding from Emergence Capital and Pace Capital. Before Cline, Rizwan was a prolific iOS and Swift open-source developer. His pitch is unusually blunt for the AI era: Cline captures zero margin on AI usage, shows developers exactly what each request costs, and lets them bring their own models.
Mit Jha
Dr. Mit Jha is the CEO of Quantum Corridor, the first inter-state quantum-safe commercial communications network in North America, running fiber from Chicago's 350 Cermak data center to Hammond, Indiana. A Purdue-trained PhD in transportation systems and former MIT research associate, he spent two decades structuring mega public-private-partnership infrastructure deals as a Managing Principal at Keystone Global before turning that dealmaking discipline toward building a quantum internet backbone across the American Midwest.
Quantum Corridor
Quantum Corridor is a Midwest network-infrastructure company building North America's first inter-state, quantum-safe commercial fiber backbone. Its live coherent optical network links Chicago to Northwest Indiana with 40 Tbps capacity and 0.274 ms round-trip latency, connecting quantum research labs, hyperscalers, data centers and defense partners. Formed in 2021 as a public-private partnership, it is extending the route toward Purdue, Indianapolis and the Crane naval research base.
Nick Huber
Nick Huber is the founder of the Sweaty Startup brand and creator of Bolt Storage, a self-storage private equity firm managing 68+ facilities across 11 states. A Cornell track athlete turned anti-Silicon-Valley entrepreneur, he built a $25M+ net worth by 34 through boring, service-based businesses - self-storage, offshore staffing, and cost segregation - while preaching contrarian gospel to 820,000+ followers across social platforms.