Originally posted by IBJ on June 13, 2025. Read original press release here.

Wisconsin-based startup accelerator Gener8tor is shifting its conference strategy this year to hosting one large gathering in Indianapolis rather than a handful across the U.S., a move expected to expand networking opportunities among investors and entrepreneurs.

The reimagined event, called Bolt, is set to take place Oct. 1-2 at Victory Field, bringing together founders, investors and corporations in a variety of industries from across the Midwest and beyond.

The event replaces Gener8tor’s previous OnRamp conferences.

OnRamp’s manufacturing and agriculture events had previously taken place in Indianapolis. Gener8tor’s other OnRamp events last year focused on insurance and financial technology, health care, and education and workforce development. Those gatherings took place in St. Paul, Minnesota; Birmingham, Alabama; and Minneapolis, respectively.

“We decided to combine all of that power, all of that network, into one conference in Indianapolis in 2025,” said Sarah Louise, managing director of Gener8tor conferences.

Louise said Gener8tor made the change based on feedback from previous attendees who said they had interest in—but not always the budget for—attending more than one of Gener8tor’s industry-specific conferences.

In previous years, Louise said, each OnRamp gathering has typically drawn 200 to 300 attendees. For Bolt this year, the goal is 750.

This year’s focus areas will be slightly different—they will still include manufacturing, agriculture, health care and insurance/financial technology, but instead of education and workforce development, the fifth focus area will be the topic of resilience.

The consolidation makes sense to Katie Birge, the Indianapolis-based vice president of platform for Chicago-based investment firm M25. M25 invests in Midwestern-based tech startups; it has a portfolio of more than 75 companies in a dozen states, including Indianapolis-based Authenticx Inc., Trava Security Inc. and several other Indiana-based firms.

“For me, this is an obvious next step for [Gener8tor] that takes it to a grander scale,” Birge said of the format change.

She said M25 has attended some of Gener8tor’s industry-specific conferences and has found them to be good ways to meet a large number of startups—potential M25 investment targets—during a single event. She anticipates that M25 will also attend Bolt.

As was the case for the OnRamp events, Bolt’s main focus is on fostering connections between startups and the investors and corporations that might want to do business with them.

Bolt will continue to host “matchmaking” sessions, which are curated one-on-one meetings between startups and potential investors. The goal, Louise said, is to recruit 75 investors as hosts of these sessions, which are called lightning rounds, and to set up at least 10 meetings for each host.

But some of Bolt’s other programming components will be a little different than OnRamp’s, Louise said.

Specifically, she said, Bolt is moving away from panel discussions in favor of what Gener8tor is calling hot takes. Scheduling details and speakers are still in the works, but the goal is to present 50 short talks of five to seven minutes each.

Louise said Bolt is also planning for five keynote speakers and a handful of fireside-chat-style talks in which a speaker has a conversational interview with a second onstage person.

Bolt might also include a few panels, Louise said, but “our main goal is: No boring panels.”

IEDC sponsorship

One thing that won’t change is the Indiana Economic Development Corp.’s sponsorship.

In a three-year agreement signed in 2023, the IEDC agreed to act as OnRamp’s title sponsor, providing $200,000 per year for each of the two Indianapolis-based gatherings. The full agreement, which totals $4.8 million and runs through June 30, 2026, also includes IEDC funding for seven Indiana-based gBETA programs per year—business accelerators for early-stage startups in a variety of industries.

Now, the $400,000 the IEDC previously provided to the two Indianapolis OnRamp events will go toward Bolt.

“The IEDC’s goal is to support Bolt as it furthers its mission to connect more founders to corporate innovation teams, potential buyers and investors to ultimately create more opportunities for Hoosier entrepreneurs to start and grow their businesses,” IEDC spokeswoman Erin Sweitzer told IBJ via email.

The agreement with Gener8tor was fully funded in the 2023 fiscal year, Sweitzer said.

This means the IEDC’s sponsorship remains in place despite the ongoing uncertainty around the economic development organization’s role under the administration of Gov. Mike Braun.

In April, Braun expressed concerns about a lack of transparency and potential “impropriety” at the IEDC. Last month, the Governor’s Office said it had hired Carmel-based FTI Consulting to conduct a forensic audit of the IEDC and its affiliated entities.

Competing or complementing?

Bolt will not be the only cross-industry event taking place downtown this fall.

Rally, which was created by Indianapolis-based Elevate Ventures in 2023, returns to the Indiana Convention Center for its third annual event Sept. 24-25, just one week before Bolt. (Rally was previously held in August, but organizers moved the date so as not to conflict with back-to-school activities, Elevate Ventures previously told IBJ.)

Rally, which bills itself as a cross-sector innovation conference, is designed to spur Indiana’s entrepreneurship and innovation economy by bringing together entrepreneurs, investors, educators and others from a variety of industries. Rally’s programming is built around six individual topics, which it calls innovation studios: agriculture and food, hardtech, health care, software, sports tech, and entrepreneurship.

About 3,000 attendees took part in Rally each of its first two years.

The IEDC provided financial support to Rally both years: $1.75 million in 2023 and $1 million in 2024. To date, the IEDC has not committed money toward this year’s event. Elevate Ventures declined to publicly comment on whether it thinks Rally will be impacted—either negatively or positively—by the fact that Rally and Bolt are a week apart in the same city.

Louise said Bolt and Rally are different enough that they’re not direct competitors.

Bolt is a smaller event focused mostly on Gener8tor’s existing business network, Louise said, and “We’re hyperfocused on making these connections between the startups and the corporations and the investors that are in the room,” she said.

Rally has a wider focus on innovation and entrepreneurship. Its lineup includes five pitch competitions offering up to $1 million to each of five winners. It also features national-name keynote speakers who this year will include venture investor and television personalities Kevin O’Leary and Molly Bloom, the competitive-skier-turned-underground-poker-ring-leader on whose life the 2017 Aaron Sorkin film “Molly’s Game” was based.

Geoff Zentz, the senior director of innovation at Indianapolis-based AgriNovus Indiana, said cannibalization is a risk when two similar events happen in quick succession. But he doesn’t think that will happen with Bolt and Rally.

“I actually think they work really well in concert,” Zentz said. “I think there’s clearly room for both.”

AgriNovus is a Central Indiana Corporate Partnership initiative that works to boost the state’s agbioscience sector.

Before joining AgriNovus in 2022, Zentz was at Gener8tor, where he was managing director of the firm’s gBETA program. GBETA is a seven-week business accelerator for early-stage startups, and Gener8tor currently runs multiple gBETA programs in Indiana, as well as across the country and internationally.

In 2023, Zentz said, Gener8tor held its agriculture-themed OnRamp conference immediately before that year’s Rally event, and he said the two events complemented each other well.

AgriNovus is named as a sponsor of both Bolt and Rally, and Zentz said AgriNovus is encouraging the startups that it works with to participate in both conferences.