Powering innovation

As CEO of Elebase, Inc., Jen Frandsen is looking ahead to the new ways her product can power innovation.

Elebase is a software development platform that provides a complex “back-end” solution, enabling developers to create powerful applications quickly and easily.

“I really like just pushing the edge of what’s possible and seeing what kind of innovative, interactive websites and apps people are coming up with as a result of what they’re able to do with our platform,” Frandsen told the Pilot. “I think beforehand people had ideas about what they could do, but being able to put that together in an efficient way that costs not a lot of money was prohibitive, so now we’re enabling that and I think it just allows for more innovation and creativity and hopefully it allows tech expansion as well.”

Elebase comes out of a reorganization of Whitefish-based Old Towne Creative, which Frandsen and her husband John started in 2007 as a creative services agency. Frandsen was recently named CEO, and John is Chief Product Officer.

Austin Saucier and Noel Whelan are Elebase’s other two partners.

The platform is already powering new applications around the world.

Last month the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization launched its new world heritage travel site at an event in Paris.

Powered by Elebase, the site links together world heritage sites across Europe in English, French and Chinese, helping users to not only locate the sites but also link multiple sites together and find other places of interest during their travels.

Elebase provides the back end of the website, storing and delivering all content and files and allowing for user accounts for hundreds of people across Europe. The site also uses extensive interactive maps to help people locate the heritage sites.

“It was meant to drive visitation between countries via the world heritage sites,” Jen Frandsen said. “A lot of people that go to Europe visit one site or another and don’t really travel throughout Europe a lot. So this was a way to promote to those people that there’s more to Europe than just one or two key places, this is how you get to those places and here’s some others you might also enjoy.”

The platform is also being used to power www.VisitMaine.com, which was awarded best Travel Website in the United States by the U.S. Travel Association last year.

While still in private beta and not yet publicly available, Elebase is already used by 32 businesses, including www.ExploreWhitefish.com.

As a platform, Frandsen said Elebase grew out of a content management system Old Towne Creative had built for a specific product years ago. Clients liked the system, however, and a few years ago the Frandsens started rebuilding the platform as the main focus.

As a content management system, Elebase handles complicated back-end services for web and mobile applications, enabling developers to build their software faster.

The time saving enabled by the platform is key, Frandsen said.

“It’s reducing development time and costs for organizations or teams. So a developer can start working on the front end of their application without having to do any of the back end work, so it’s saving them sometimes as much half their development costs and time. That can be really significant for large projects,” she said.

“So it’s doing that in a market space that’s worth as much as $100 million,” John added. “It’s taking things that used to take a long time and cutting that in half.”

The company was a featured presenter at the Early Stage Montana Statewide Showcase in Bozeman last month, which gathers together public and private organizations that are working to create and grow high-paying jobs in Montana with a focus on technology businesses.

Right now Elebase lives in the Frandsens’ home office, but the company is starting to raise capital and hopes to build their business out in the Valley as soon as they can.

Jen Frandsen said the goal of $900,000, to be raised through angel investors and venture capital firms, would enable them to hire staff and grow quickly.

“Ideally we raise our $900,000 and that begins to go to work early next year for the first quarter. And then from there, it’s really focusing on growing Elebase as quickly as we can. That means a lot of sales and marketing, bringing on talented engineers and salespeople and building out our team,” she said. “I think by five years we’ve got several hundred people working for us, according to the plan. So hopefully that means we’re finding a place to grow Elebase here in the area and finding talented people to come work with us.”

For more information, visit https://elebase.io/.