Louisiana has struggled to become a high-tech hub. Can it become a key outpost instead?

Ted Elliott wasn’t planning to build a technology business in Louisiana.

He’d spent his 25-year tech career on the West Coast and in 2018 became CEO of Copado, a software firm. But in 2021, after surviving a serious battle with cancer, he decided to move to New Orleans, his mother’s hometown and the place where she had retired.

“When we thought I was dying, my wife asked me, ‘What do you want to do if you’re not going to recover?’ and I said that I wanted to be close to my parents,” Elliott said during a recent interview. “When I was recovering, she said ‘Why do we have to wait to die to be near your parents?’”

His move got him thinking about whether New Orleans might be a good spot to build a new Copado outpost. In the world of remote work, employees could live anywhere. He could get direct flights to the West Coast and to the company’s headquarters in Chicago. Trips to New York, Washington and Atlanta were also faster than from his former home out west, and connections to Europe were easy enough. He researched state tax incentives for tech businesses, and in 2024 he made his first local hire.

The company now employs 13 people in New Orleans and Elliott plans for that number to hit 25 by the middle of the year.

In many ways, Copado is a new poster child for the types of tech companies — and tech jobs — that are arriving in the Pelican State.

Since the pandemic, the state’s economic boosters have hoped that the rise of remote work would bring a torrent of tech workers, attracted by the warmer weather and Louisiana’s vibrant culture. A flood of software engineers never arrived (and many companies have started to call back remote workers), but some smaller companies are seeing the value of a Louisiana outpost, even if many employees are still based elsewhere.

In addition to Copado, California-based video game testing company DAQA announced last year that it is opening a testing facility at The Beach at UNO that it hopes will employ up to 20 people. 360 Insights, a brand-marketing software provider with offices in the United Kingdom and Canada, moved its headquarters from Delaware to New Orleans and is working its way toward hiring 50 Louisiana-based employees. Excella, a Virginia-based tech firm founded by a New Orleans native, opened a local hub in 2022.

None of the firms are making massive investments. The combined payrolls are just a fraction of the workers promised by previous high-profile deals designed to lure out-of-town tech companies to Louisiana. In 2013, then Gov. Bobby Jindal was on hand to celebrate GE Capital’s move to New Orleans and a promise of 300 jobs. Then, in 2017, global IT company DXC Technology negotiated a state incentives package to bring 2,000 workers to Poydras Street in New Orleans. Neither deal panned out, with GE closing down and DXC falling far short of its hiring goals.

Copado, along with Excella and some other firms, are starting much smaller. But they plan to grow.

“There’s an opportunity here,” Elliott said. “I’m trying to run dark, get it done and then pop out of the woods so no one will know how we pulled it off.”

That’s music to the ears of economic development groups like Greater New Orleans Inc. and Louisiana Economic Development that hope to boost the state’s more than 20,000 tech jobs.

Data from GNO Inc., the region’s economic development nonprofit, shows that the gross regional product for the tech industry in Louisiana rose from $4.3 billion in 2020 to around $4.8 billion in 2024. But that’s far short of tech towns like Austin or Boston.

New Orleans didn’t make a 2024 list of the top 50 tech talent markets in the country — led by San Francisco, Seattle and New York — and it didn’t earn a mention on a separate list of the country’s top 10 fastest-growing tech hubs.

“When looking at the investments in cities like Boston, New York, and San Francisco, New Orleans entrepreneurs receive significantly less venture capital,” said Rob Lalka, director of the Albert Lepage Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Tulane University. “But even compared to other ‘Rise of the Rest’ cities like Nashville, Raleigh-Durham, Salt Lake City, and Denver-Boulder, there’s still a significant gap.”

“The data show we still have work to do,” he added.

‘Can’t shake’ New Orleans

Ted Elliott and Burton White, the founder of Excella, are connected to New Orleans in different ways.

Elliott grew up in San Francisco, but as a kid he made annual visits to his mother’s hometown.

White, meanwhile, lived in New Orleans full time until he left for college in the late 1980s. After graduation, he moved to Washington, D.C., to launch his software career. He always assumed he’d come home, but it wasn’t easy.

“If you opened up the classifieds in D.C., there’d be seven pages of tech job ads,” he said. “At home, there’d be seven ads total.”

After White founded Excella, a software consulting company, in 2002, it made even more sense for him to stay on the East Coast, but he maintained ties. He mentored entrepreneurs through the Idea Village, a nonprofit startup accelerator, after Hurricane Katrina.

“Like many who leave, I’ve always had a passion for the place,” he said. “I can’t shake it.”

Excella, which has more than 300 employees in about 40 states, works on a wide variety of projects, from helping the federal government detect Medicare fraud to targeting promotional campaigns for hotel chains.

Until recently, that work was performed in D.C. Then the pandemic opened up new possibilities.

“Suddenly it didn’t matter where our folks lived,” White said.

Two years ago, Excella established a Louisiana “talent hub” based out of The Shop and The Nieux. Its 13 employees are concentrated in New Orleans, where White said there are unique advantages.

“It’s an interesting scene steeped in the creativity of a city that has such a rich culture,” he said. “Technology solutions benefit from diverse perspectives.”

Austin Gaspard, leader of Excella’s Louisiana hub, said the company spent tens of thousands of dollars over the last two years sponsoring grassroots organizations and events, including Black Tech NOLA and Agile NOLA.

“We wanted to put Excella in the middle of where all the tech people are,” said Gaspard, who cites the state’s 25% digital media tax credit as key to making the investment worth it. And he said the company isn’t “regionalizing” its salaries, meaning comparable employees get paid the same wherever they live.

“We didn’t come into Louisiana to undercut the market,” he said.

Elliott believes the southeast is primed for industrial growth, which will create more technology jobs in the state and region. The recently announced Meta data center in north Louisiana is a sign of what could be ahead, he said.

“To build something in California requires 84 permits to get permission to think about it,” he said. “It’s very difficult to do anything.”

But Elliott said there are barriers to attracting tech talent.

“People think it’s a lower cost of living but all of a sudden you get hit with the insurance costs,” said Elliott, who is learning in real time how to build his company’s Louisiana outpost.

“We haven’t figured it out yet, but this is a great place to experiment,” Elliott said. “There’s not a lot of people actually paying attention to what we’re up to, so we can play around and figure out how we make this work.”