For many startups, working in a garage is step one to getting off the ground.
For Tampa-based Edgility, a health tech company quickly gaining traction across the country, it's the next step in rapid growth.
"When we lived out in California, we worked out of coffee shops and now we’re expanding," said Heather Holland, Edgility's co-founder.
She and her husband and fellow co-founder Balaji Ramadoss came across what they assumed to be an old auto mechanic's garage in their neighborhood walks around Tampa.
"We walked by it a lot and thought on the outside it was beautiful, we just were not sure about the inside, but it looked like it could be a garage or someplace we can really work from," she said. "It just called our name and we just had to have it."
The space did in fact turn out to be an auto mechanic's garage from the 1950s. The co-founders bought the 1,100-square-foot space at the end of 2020 and renovated it to become Edgility's headquarters, also known as its Innovation Lab. The company moved into the space officially this month.
"We spent time in California and New York and Cleveland, but we want to put a marker in Tampa," Ramadoss said. "We want it to show, 'This is where we’re located, this is innovation for what we do.'"
The company provides a health care system to improve gaps and delays in information flow, but it was during the novel coronavirus pandemic that the pair saw Edgility take off. Holland and Ramadoss released three toolkits specifically to act as a command center and help address coronavirus-related challenges.
"Covid shined a bright light on a focus on what we’re doing; hospitals particularly saw inefficiencies that were magnified," Holland said. "So this is the year where it's like, 'OK, we need this [space].' It's been building and it's the right time and place."
The headquarters houses four employees, allowing for Covid-19 precautions and distancing. The space is less used for taking meetings and more to flesh out the innovation happening within the company. Different zones can be set up, Ramadoss said, allowing for testing throughout.
"What is unique to the space is what we do here," he said. "We use this 1,100-square-foot space into pods of research areas, where we specifically use science — like, 'Here’s where to do imaging research. Partition it off and figure out it how to translate that to a hospital setting.'"
The co-founders acknowledge that with the company's fast growth, they will likely outgrow the space by the end of the year.
"It's not just about providing technology, it's transforming health care," Ramadoss said. "When you look at 2021 at that angle, this is the most exciting year we've ever had."
Check out pictures of the flipped space above.
