indianapolis
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Venture Logistics and the expensive art of moving empty space
A truck can arrive on time and still waste money. Venture Logistics sells manufacturers a more demanding proposition: fix the network that sent it.
The Ad Agency Where the People Making the Work Own the Place
Hirons sells advertising, public relations and digital strategy. Its more interesting product is alignment: the people doing the client work also own the company.
The Agency That Makes Boring Things Matter
Borshoff built a forty-year Indianapolis institution by doing an unfashionable thing very well: making utility notices, corporate risks and civic institutions feel consequential to ordinary people.
The Agency That Made a Drywall Corner Interesting
Miller Brooks has spent four decades finding the human drama inside tankless water heaters, drywall corners and sanitation carts. The trick is not making boring things loud. It is discovering why the right person should care.
The Agency That Begins Before the Logo
A 15-person Indiana agency has built a business around an unfashionable idea: the clever part comes after the listening. Its best work shows what happens when research, language and execution remain in the same room.
The Indianapolis Agency That Put a Price Tag on Creative Work
JDA Worldwide sells the usual agency ingredients - brand, PR, digital, media - with an unusual insistence on showing the arithmetic. Its best case studies read less like a mood board and more like a scoreboard.
High Alpha Wants to Make Starting Up Less of a Solo Act
The Indianapolis venture firm pairs startup builders with investment capital. Its $125 million fourth fund puts a decade of company-making experience behind a deceptively simple bet: founders can move faster with a team already beside them.
The 123-Year-Old Private Equity Firm That Starts Planning the Exit on Day One
HKW reviews more than 1,000 opportunities a year, then applies a four-team system to the few it buys. The unusual part is not the funnel - it is that the exit team gets involved as soon as the deal closes.
The Venture Studio That Put Brand Strategy on the Starting Grid
Droplight sells founders a pit crew, not a slide deck. Its bet is that capital, operations, creative work and motorsport can run as one engine for brands that need traction beyond paid media.
The Startup Factory Hiding Inside Corporate America
Alloy Partners takes the things big institutions already have - customers, expertise, capital and distribution - and turns them into startups built outside the corporate machine. Now it is testing how much faster that factory can run with AI agents on the floor.
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.
The Company That Buys Software It Never Plans to Sell
A permanent home for ERP software companies. While private equity flips manufacturing software every four and a half years, Mirador buys the businesses its customers keep for a decade - and keeps them too.
Eli Lilly and Company
The company that mass-produced insulin now runs on a molecule that helps people lose weight. Inside the 150-year-old Indianapolis drugmaker that became a trillion-dollar bet on metabolism.
Sharpen
The Indianapolis contact-center company that bet on the phone call - and is now teaching it to answer itself.
JD Finish Line
JD Finish Line is the North American athletic footwear and apparel arm of UK-based JD Sports Fashion plc. Founded in Indianapolis in 1976 and built into a national sneaker chain under the Finish Line name, the business was acquired by JD Sports in 2018 for about $558 million. It sells premium multi-branded athletic footwear, apparel and accessories through Finish Line stores, Finish Line shop-in-shops inside more than 450 Macy's department stores, a growing fleet of JD-branded stores, and the finishline.com e-commerce platform. As of 2025 JD Sports is retiring the standalone Finish Line mall banner in favor of the JD nameplate while keeping the Finish Line brand alive inside Macy's.
Bloomerang
Bloomerang is an Indianapolis-based software company that builds a complete giving platform for nonprofits, combining donor management (CRM), online fundraising, and volunteer management into one system. Founded in 2012 on the insight that nonprofits were losing the majority of first-time donors, Bloomerang centers its product on donor retention and relationship-building rather than one-time transactions. It now serves more than 24,000 small and mid-sized nonprofit organizations.