LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — A five-year-old e-commerce startup with a large presence in Louisville is eyeing an initial public offering “sooner than later,” according to its CEO.
And Louisville — already the largest office for Cupertino, California-based Inxeption Corp. — could eventually become the headquarters of the company, Inxeption co-founder and CEO Farzad Dibachi told WDRB News.
The company’s continued growth “means very good thing for Louisville, because we’ve decided that we definitely want to use this as a base,” Dibachi said Monday.
Inxeption on Monday celebrated the opening of its office on the 29th floor of PNC Tower in an event with Gov. Andy Beshear and Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer.
The elected officials were eager to applaud the addition of six-figure tech jobs downtown, which is still reeling from office vacancies and employees having made a habit of working from home.
“It’s no secret that downtowns all over America are like, ‘What are we gonna be, after the pandemic? What’s the work-from-home balance? What’s the going-to-the-office balance?’” Fischer said during the Inxeption event. “So this is really good and important announcement.”
Inxeption offers “a cloud-based digital commerce software platform” that helps businesses buy and sell from each other, such as when a firm needs to order or supplies or to book cargo space. Dibachi said Inxeption aims to be the Amazon or Uber of business-to-business commerce.
Inxeption employs about 55 people at its Louisville office, Dibachi said. Inxeption employees on average earn about $135,000 annually, he said. Dibachi said that would be typical of Louisville-based employees because it’s the company biggest office.
The company occupied the entirety of the long-vacant floor at PNC Tower a couple of months ago after setting up in initial office in the Germantown neighborhood in April 2021.
There are lots of empty desks in the new space, a sign of the company’s plan to reach 200 employees within 3-5 years.
Inxeption has raised about $300 million in capital and its most recent funding round was based on an implied valuation of $3 billion, Dibachi said.
Inxeption’s headquarters is in Cupertino, the home of Apple and other tech companies, but Louisville is its largest office in terms of employees, Dibachi said. The company also has offices in Atlanta and Chicago.
Dibachi said it makes more sense for a business focused on industrial customers to be located near industrial activity, as opposed to the West Coast.
“From the first day, we did not have the notion that we are going to have a Cupertino or Silicon Valley headquartered company,” he said. “Because industrial commerce really has nothing to do with Silicon Valley, right? Certainly, you need to have people who know how to write code. But that talent is now pretty worldwide … The companies that are in the Midwest, here in the middle of the country, are definitely our customers. Being close to your customer is always a positive.”
Inxeption’s connection to Louisville is its Chief Commercial Officer, Josh Allen, who joined the startup in 2020 after seven years at XPO Logistics and was its first Louisville-based employee.
Backfilling downtown office space
Inxeption is a welcome addition to PNC Tower, which is about 40% vacant, according to real estate listings.
The vacancy rate for high-quality “Class A” office space in the Central Business District was nearly 24% as of the April-June quarter, according to real estate brokerage JLL. Brokers consider a vacancy rate of 8%-10% to be normal in a healthy market.
Corporate consolidation and technological changes had reduced the demand for office space in Louisville’s downtown in the years prior to pandemic, which then accelerated those trends.
Louisville’s largest corporate headquarters, Humana Inc., gave up several floors in PNC Tower in 2019 as the company reconfigured and consolidated space.
But leasing activity is picking up and the owners of downtown’s marquee buildings are making investments in amenities to lure tenants, according to JLL broker Doug Owen, who represents PNC Tower.
“Companies like Inxeption looking to attract people to an urban environment,” he said.
