Indianapolis tech startup Stellar lands $2.7M in seed funding
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Stellar Technology Services Inc., an Indianapolis-based startup that helps clients incorporate artificial intelligence in their operations, has closed on a $2.7 million round of seed funding.
Indianapolis-based Ground Game Ventures led the round, with participation from Indianapolis-based Elevate Ventures.
The funding round, announced by Stellar this week, closed late last year.
The seed round was oversubscribed, meaning that it attracted more investor interest than anticipated. Stellar had originally expected to raise $2.5 million in the round, said co-founder and Chief Operations Officer Zach Linder of Indianapolis.
Stellar’s founding team also includes Brett Flinchum of Mountain View, California, who serves as CEO.
Launched in February 2023, Stellar designs and builds solutions to help clients integrate generative AI, large language models and machine learning into their operations. It also helps clients assess their readiness for AI and identify ways in which they might best use the technology.
The company serves both business and nonprofit clients, including Indianapolis-based mechanical contracting firm R.T. Moore, Indianapolis-based nonprofit Orr Fellowship (no relation to this author) and Indianapolis-based real estate technology startup Dwellane, among others.
“We believe that AI doesn’t need to be hard, and we’re trying to make sure that we’re enabling our customers to take that first step into their AI journey,” Linder told IBJ. “Our whole premise is, ‘How do we build custom-tailored AI solutions to meet the needs of the particular customer?’”
Stellar now has 12 employees, eight of whom live in the Indianapolis area and four of whom live elsewhere and work remotely. The company also has about 15 contract employees.
Linder said Stellar plans to use its seed funding to add jobs in sales and marketing, talent acquisition, data engineering and research and development—though it hasn’t set a number on how many people it will hire.
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 also found traction among startups, Linder said.