One of the region's fastest-growing privately held companies is moving to accommodate a major workforce expansion.
eBlu Solutions will move from its current offices at 118 E. Main St. to the 15th floor of Waterfront Plaza in Downtown Louisville, owned by the Al J. Schneider Co. The new offices — split between the west and center towers and connected via a pedway — total about 20,000 square feet, more than doubling eBlu's current office footprint.
In an interview Wednesday, co-founder and CEO Mark Murphy told me eBlu has been over capacity in its current space for some time, and was getting by with having a hybrid schedule for its 117 employees, the majority of whom are in Louisville.
eBlu, which offers a single-portal software solution to verify benefits for specialty medications, has been scaling rapidly since 2021 when it raised more than $11 million in a Series A fundraising round. At the start of 2021, the company had 63 employees and grew to 84.
That trajectory has continued this year, as it has hired 33 people since the start of the year.
Now, with the new space, eBlu expects to add 82 new jobs, which Murphy said is a conservative estimate.
"We are not over-promisers," he said. "Our goal is to exceed whatever is we say we're going to do, so we wanted to be really conservative."
From startup to scale-up
eBlu was founded in 2012, after co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Kim Farley recognized issues with the manual, largely analog system used by health care practices and pharmaceutical companies.
"It's a very old, outdated model, which is still is used today," she said. "I was thinking of a way how we can do this electronically, and started sketching out what that would look like."
Farley, whose background is on the payer side for health plans like Blue Cross and Blue Shield, said she didn't understand why the process hadn't already been digitized, and broached the idea with a pharmaceutical company she was working for on reimbursement issues.
Later that same year, Farley connected with now eBlu co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Nathan Fornwalt, via KiZAN Technologies, an IT company. Together, they worked to build out the minimum viable product (MVP).
But it had to be more than just an MVP, Farley said.
That's where Murphy came in. In 2013, Farley moved into the rheumatology practice Murphy managed, working to develop eBlu's software, while also doing the billing for the practice.
"We all worked our side hustle — eBlu. We had a job we had to get paid for in the day and eBlu on the side," Farley said.
The co-founders eventually made the leap into full-time entrepreneurship after their experience with XLerateHealth, a Louisville-based accelerator program, in 2016. Two of XLH's co-founders, Bob Saunders and Jackie Willmot, challenged eBlu's founders to go all in.
"We were bootstrapping the company all along," Murphy said. "We believed that what we were doing was on the right path. If you do the right things, for the right reasons, things work out in the end."
In 2017, eBlu got its first bit of revenue. The founders reveled in that initial traction, but until recent years, they still had to do rock-paper-scissors to see who was going to buy the next computer monitor, Farley said.
The company was cash-flow positive by the time the founders decided to seek outside capital in 2020. Murphy said they considered angels, venture, institutional and even investment banks in that process, before accepting investment from Chicago-based OCA Ventures and co-investors Cleveland-based Mutual Capital Partners and Brentwood, Tennessee-based FCA Venture Partners’ Health Innovations II fund.
"There are two pieces to raising capital: the actual money itself, but then there's also the connections and benefits those investors can open up," Murphy said. "We tried to be very thoughtful about who we went with."
And the timing was right, too, as eBlu needed the funding to have the staff in order to capitalize on opportunities in the market. In fact, the company operated in stealth mode for some time to fend off a bit of the rapid organic growth it was seeing until it had the scale in place to service those clients.
That scale up happened quickly. In 2018, when eBlu moved into its Main Street office, it has about a dozen employees. Four years later, that workforce has grown to the 117 employees it has today, currently operating on the third and sixth floors of the building.
The new space is more densely laid out, Murphy said, noting that there's opportunity to expand outside of the 15th floor if the company needs additional room.
"What's brought us this far is our focus on a niche and understanding that we need to do that well and we need to continue to innovate in that niche," Fornwalt said. "There are other opportunities we have to grow what we do and who we do it for, but it's this balancing act.
"We've got to maintain the core — we can't lose sight of what's made us strong and has gotten us here — but growing to add the capabilities that the market is looking for in our space is our next chapter."
eBlu Solutions will be recognized as a Louisville Business First Fast 50 company next month. Its 2021 revenue was $5.8 million.
The company ranked at No. 189 on the Inc. 5000 list this year with a 2,769% three-year revenue growth.
