Like most of the Midwest states we cover on our pages, Indiana’s story this year wasn’t about one narrative. It was a stack.
At the top we have the big institutions including Eli Lilly, Indiana University and Purdue doing what big institutions should be able to do best: turning scale into leverage.
In the middle, there are the smaller local companies and startups trying to turn that leverage into product, jobs, and momentum… without pretending the rising cost of power, labor, and time doesn’t exist.
And underneath it all are the less glamorous layers: the talent pipeline, the grid, and the social infrastructure that decides whether a business owner stays, leaves, or comes back.
This is a snapshot of the year in Indiana as told through the pages of StartMidwest. Here are the five themes showed up again and again.
1. Life sciences keeps pulling the state forward
If you want to understand Indiana innovation in recent years, health care and life sciences are a good place to start. Although other states in our region also overindex in this field, Indiana has the advantages of some notable institutions forming the base layer.
The most obvious examples include Eli Lilly and Indiana University. In our story on their expanding clinical trial access and clinical trial innovation we talk about moving faster, reaching more patients, and making Indiana a place where research and delivery don’t live in separate worlds. “Indiana has everything it takes to build a best-in-class system for clinical trial innovation: world-leading science, statewide health systems that reach patients where they are, and a community that believes in turning discovery into better care, ” said Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks in the story.
That same logic showed up in Indianapolis with Indiana’s OneHealth Innovation District: a bet on human, animal, and plant health along with development and manufacturing in the one place, not as three disconnected sectors.
And later in the year, the IU LAB Lifetech Accelerator (with Plug and Play) pointed at the next step: turning research strength into more life sciences startups, more venture capital interest, and more repeatable company-building infrastructure.
The common thread here in Indiana innovation is aligning early with partners who may also be a clear buyer. That includes hospitals, patients, insurers, major employers, and global partners.
2. Universities produce talent. They also need to hold it
Every state says that their universities are a talent engine, or something like that. Our Indiana stories this year were more specific: universities as the engine and the retention strategy.
Indiana University crossing $1 billion in research and development spend is one of those milestones that matters beyond bragging rights. It’s a signal to industry, funders, and future staff members that IU is playing the long game - and expects the state to benefit from it.
In the story, IU President Pamela Whitten put it in terms that connected research to jobs and outcomes: “help us deliver medical breakthroughs, develop workforce pipelines and partner with industry to turn ideas into impact.”
The phrase “workforce pipelines” is basically a cleaned up version of what every governor, every State House committee, and economic development group ends up arguing about: how do you build a talent pipeline that doesn’t just export graduates?
You saw the same dynamic in West Lafayette, where Purdue and Google expanded AI research and education initiatives. The point isn’t that all the cool kids are “doing AI” so let’s get on the bandwagon, the point is that AI is becoming table stakes across sectors Indiana already cares about. Purdue President Mung Chiang put it plainly when talking about another of the school’s initiatives, its AI summit, covering “how AI is rapidly becoming a critical part of health care, manufacturing, farming and defense.”
Call it best practices, call it competitiveness… damn, call it survival. In any case, Indiana’s universities are trying to do more than teach and are pushing to anchor the local startup ecosystem.
3. Artificial intelligence is showing up in operations
There is a lot of chatter about artificial intelligence as if it’s a lifestyle. In states like Indiana this year it showed up more like plumbing: if it works, it should disappear into the process.
You can see that shift in two very different stories.
Firstly, the aforementioned institutional move of Purdue and Google, focused on research and education: the upstream side of the pipeline.
Second, Indiana Farm Bureau Insurance partnering with Akur8 shows the downstream side, where AI lives or dies by whether it makes teams faster, decisions clearer, and pricing more defensible.
Indiana Farm Bureau’s Brian Poole described the appeal in terms that any operator or actuary should recognize when he said that Akur8’s “transparent, intuitive outputs make it easy to share insights with stakeholders”
Then there’s the future of mobility angle, with Arrive AI’s plan to add about 40 new jobs in Indiana, including AI scientists and software engineers, tied to autonomous delivery networks and “smart mailbox” infrastructure.
As time goes on and we all learn how to implement AI constructively, stories like these demonstrate how it shouldn’t be viewed as a replacement. Locally, it’s being layered onto industries Indiana already has - insurance, logistics, health care, manufacturing - as a way to keep local companies nationally and globally competitive.
4. The physical layer: power, magnets, and scaling
If you want to talk about innovation without sounding like a politician or a brochure, you have to talk about constraints. The clearest constraint is electricity.
Indiana made a bold move that has since been followed elsewhere, when the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) approved a proposal from Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) to create a subsidiary entity called NIPSCO Generation LLC, or GenCo. This is an electrical spinoff designed to serve data centers in Northern Indiana and was a response to what we called “surging demand for artificial intelligence and cloud computing.” The idea, according to a statement by NIPSCO that we quoted in our story, was to “shield NIPSCO’s existing retail customers from costs associated with serving new data center customers.”
That’s a tension we see across the region encapsulated in one sentence. Indiana wants the tech hub wins: the investment, the jobs, the spillover. But the rising cost risk is real, and it can land on small businesses and households fast.
Another physical-layer story was industrial: a rare-earth magnet production effort tied to ReElement in Fishers, including a plan to refine and recycle materials used in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and high-efficiency motors.
Whether or not you notice the details, the pattern is familiar across the region: rather than be an assembly line state, try to own pieces of the supply chain that the country needs.
5. The ecosystem story (as told by us)
We’re guilty as anyone of talking about innovation and entrepreneurship in any state as a single-city story. Our Indiana contributors kept widening the frame for us this year.
Sebastian Penix’s “Ninety-Two Counties, One Story” made the point bluntly: the state’s economy isn’t one narrative, and the people building businesses aren’t all chasing venture capital.
He followed that with his “WTF is an Ecosystem anyways?” a story that didn’t romanticize. It treated the entrepreneurial ecosystem as a system with inputs, dependencies, and failure modes, just like a living breathing… ecosystem: “entrepreneurship, like nature, is ruthlessly dependent on conditions you can't fake.”
That idea echoes through a lot of what we talk about on our pages, and it showed up consistently in our Indiana stories: you can’t fake a talent pipeline, you can’t fake affordable power, and you can’t fake the social trust that makes introductions and pilot projects happen.
The talent question got its own direct treatment in “Indiana: How Do States Keep Their Talent?” by Mollie Kuramoto of High Alpha. It’s hard to read that piece without seeing the implicit challenge for anyone working policy from the Indiana Statehouse: make staying feel rational, not sentimental.
And then there’s the cultural layer that many of us understand instinctively. In “Beyond the Parade,” Sebastian argued that “homecoming” shouldn’t be viewed as nostalgia, but as a mechanism for reinvestment.
Indiana’s 2025 story, as we covered it, wasn’t about huge breakouts for local startups. It was a year of systems thinking: the research base, connected to industry, applying AI where it pays for itself, and don’t pretend infrastructure is optional.
And if there’s one thing the year kept repeating across all the states we cover, it’s this: building a nascent startup ecosystem isn’t about vibes. They’d heavy, considered, difficult work.
To conclude, below are the fundraising stories we shared in the Hoosier state in 2025. See you in 2026, Indiana.
Luster raises $3 million venture capital for sales teams
Ove Therapeutics raised a $5.475 million Series A
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