What's Going On in Indiana

The returns nobody could find

In September 2021, Elevate Ventures, then run by chief executive Chris LaMothe, told the state's economic development committee that it had made "larger than normal returns," and proposed taking some of that money to start a new fund of its own. The state said yes to $25 million. Nobody asked to see the returns first. DOCUMENTED What the state has provided over the years is about $184 million, and what it has paid Elevate to manage it is about $54.6 million, a fee IEDC's own staff worked out at as much as 7.51 percent against an industry standard of two, per Indiana Insight, which cites internal IEDC correspondence we have not seen. The same newsletter reports that on January 23, 2025, before the return reconciliation the state had written into the deal as a condition, Elevate moved the $25 million into the account of a for-profit blocker corporation called 21 Fund Growth Fund LLC, and that about $52.5 million of cash returns sit in bank accounts Elevate manages, none of it returned to the state. REPORTED Then the $15 million surfaced on Elevate's own books. Its 2024 tax return, filed in November 2025, six weeks after the forensic review, shows a $1.6 million operating loss and a $13.6 million rise in net assets, bridged by a single unexplained line: prior period adjustments, $15,445,645. Other assets went from $2.2 million to $20.3 million. The same return lists a Delaware corporation called 21 Fund Growth LLC at Elevate's address, which Elevate says it does not control, with no transactions reported between them. DOCUMENTED LaMothe stepped down the next year. Christopher "Toph" Day took over in July 2022, stood beside Governor Eric Holcomb and Commerce Secretary David Rosenberg in May 2024 to announce the fund, and signed the side letter that November. REPORTED

What the state was buying, meanwhile, is on Elevate's own tax return. In 2024 Indiana paid it $6,500,004 under IEDC contracts. It paid ten people $2,784,223. It granted $903,708 to Indiana organizations. It lost $1,577,282 on the year. Payroll took forty-nine cents of every dollar it spent; grants took eight. It spent more on travel and advertising together than a third of everything it granted. Ten people were paid three times what Elevate granted to Indiana organizations. DOCUMENTED

Those people, and the entities around them, are not hard to list, because Elevate lists them itself. Seven entities share one suite at 1 Virginia Avenue in Indianapolis. Six are Elevate's own, including the general partner of the state's fund. The seventh, 21 Fund Growth LLC, is reported as related to Elevate and is the only one for which Elevate names no controlling entity at all. Related, at Elevate's address, controlled by nobody named, and structured as an LLC taxed as a corporation, which is what a blocker is. The return does not say what it received. The $25 million is reported to have gone into a company with almost that name. DOCUMENTED The state's business registry fills in when that company came to exist. It was formed in Delaware on November 19, 2024, nine days before the Thanksgiving week in which the side letter was signed, and it registered in Indiana on January 8, 2025, fifteen days before the money is reported to have moved. Its whole filing history in Indiana is the registration itself. DOCUMENTED

Four years later the state's own forensic auditor went looking for them and found that Elevate Ventures had never tracked which pot of public money funded which investment, or what any investment had earned. DOCUMENTED It had never delivered the audited fund statements its loan agreements required since 2011. DOCUMENTED The new fund the $25 million would seed was built to pay two of Elevate's own subsidiaries a management fee and twenty percent of the profits, and two Elevate executives had carried interest in it written into their offer letters. The auditor found no evidence the state was told. DOCUMENTED Elevate, it turned out, owned 55 percent of the state fund it managed, and had told the U.S. Treasury it had no financial interest in it. The auditor's word for that statement was "inaccurate." DOCUMENTED

Then the returns were tested the only way that counts. In August 2025 the state called a $17.2 million loan. Elevate paid $12.9 million and stopped. It offered to cover the rest out of 21 Fund returns. IEDC's senior vice president for entrepreneurship, David Watkins, wrote back that Elevate, under Day, "in its current state, will be unable to fulfill any of its current or future obligations." DOCUMENTED The state's own audited books, signed that December, record it plainly: the Indiana Angel Network Fund note, $15,023,131 fully drawn, due August 2, in default by written notice August 5, now accruing at 8 percent, and $33.4 million of the state's loans to the 21 Fund already written down as unlikely to come back. The word Elevate appears twice in 48 pages. DOCUMENTED

What the audit found, and where it went

Governor Braun had frozen Elevate's funding in April 2025 and ordered the review after allegations of imprecise accounting, questionable pay, and unspent public money not returned. REPORTED The review came back in October with 45 findings: thirty entities where an IEDC insider had a potential conflict, one of them disclosed to anyone who mattered; lavish travel; and, on Elevate, a governance vacuum that "increased the risk that state and federal funds were being used in a manner that was inconsistent with their stated purpose." DOCUMENTED

Day's Elevate announced it had been cleared. DOCUMENTED The governor's office said the findings, "including any potential ethics violations," had gone to the Inspector General. Democrats asked the attorney general to investigate and recover the money. DOCUMENTED A week later the governor said he was satisfied. REPORTED The Inspector General's public reports page, as of the first quarter of 2026, does not mention Elevate or IEDC. We asked. OIG officials answered, the day we asked, that the office never says whether it is investigating anything and does not waive confidentiality for its reports, citing the statute. The statute says the records "may" be kept confidential, and that the governor can authorize their disclosure in the public interest. The governor who ordered the review has not. DOCUMENTED And since this year the office publishes no investigative reports at all: nine in 2025, none in 2026, by a policy change its new inspector general made after a legal-risk review. That is not about Elevate. It means that unless someone is charged, nobody outside will ever read what the referral found. REPORTED The loan default has no public resolution. Nobody has been named. In March 2026 Elevate said the Growth Fund was going ahead after all, and that it now wanted $150 million. DOCUMENTED In June 2026 the IEDC board and its audit committee met in public. Their slide decks, 29 pages, do not mention Elevate, the partnership, the default, or the review. Conflict-of-interest compliance was on the agenda of both. DOCUMENTED The commerce secretary through all of it, David J. Adams, was replaced in July. DOCUMENTED

The pivot

In April 2026 the same agency committed $15 million from the same 21st Century Fund to Iron Nation II, a venture fund run from Israel for startups expanding into the United States, as the state's share of a $60 million program called Iron Nation-Indiana, with former congressman Luke Messer as its Indiana partner. DOCUMENTED In September the program placed its first company, an ag-biotech firm called IBI Ag, with a state incentive package on top and a quote from the new commerce secretary in the press release. DOCUMENTED The announcement came during a three-day Indiana-Israel summit that kicked off, in the words of Elevate's own chief executive, "with Iron Nation at Elevate Ventures." The manager whose loan the state is still trying to collect hosted the fund the state moved its money to, the week the first deal closed. DOCUMENTED

The secretary's company

The new commerce secretary is Chuck Goodrich. He took the job on July 13, 2026 and kept his other one: president and CEO of Gaylor Electric, one of the largest electrical contractors in the country, which he has run since 2014. He said he and the state had spent six weeks "separating duties," with screenings at both. IEDC's own records show Gaylor holds $1.5 million in that agency's tax credits and state contracts including at the Statehouse. DOCUMENTED He acknowledged Gaylor took over $1 million in IEDC credits in 2024 and said he assumes it will "submit just like every other company" for more. DOCUMENTED

Gaylor builds data centers. It won a 2025 industry award for a confidential one worth over $20 million, and its website says data centers are "integral" to its growth and that it "cannot publicly showcase" who they are for. DOCUMENTED Indiana has roughly $14 billion of announced data center construction, incentivized by the agency Goodrich now runs. REPORTED Asked in late August whether any deal had touched his company, he said: "We've not had a conflict yet." The screen that would catch one hands the matter to the IEDC president, Josh Richardson, who by the agency's own description serves under him. DOCUMENTED DOCUMENTED

What we think is going on in Indiana

Here is our reading, stated as opinion and stated plainly. The chips carry the documents and the falsifiers; the reading is ours, and we say at the end how it could be wrong.

Indiana built a conduit. Taxpayer money goes into the 21st Century Fund. The fund's private manager declares returns nobody can trace, and when the state finally asks for its loan back, the returns are not there. ANALYSIS The audit that finds the conflicts, the hidden executive interests, and the untracked money is sent to an inspector general who publishes nothing, the governor closes the book within a week, and eight months later the agency's own board deck does not contain the word Elevate. ANALYSIS DOCUMENTED Then the same fund exports $15 million to a venture firm managed from Israel, which imports startups that draw more Indiana subsidies, one more layer from any auditor in Indianapolis. ANALYSIS Those startups, and the state's AI and data-center push, create demand for electrical infrastructure, and the commerce secretary who approves the incentives runs the contractor that builds it, for clients he will not name, under a screen he designed and his subordinate operates. ANALYSIS

Public money goes out untraced at one end and comes back as private revenue at the other. That is the shape the documents make, and it is why we call it a conduit rather than a coincidence. ANALYSIS

And there is the arithmetic. Three fifteen-million-dollar figures sit in this case, in three documents, inside twelve months: the $15,023,131 note the state's own audit shows fully drawn and in default, the $15,445,645 that appears on Elevate's 2024 books as an unexplained prior period adjustment disclosed six weeks after the review, and the $15 million the state committed to a fund run from Israel in April. No document we hold connects any two of them. We are not saying they are the same money. We are saying nobody has reconciled them, and the public is entitled to see it done. ANALYSIS

In our opinion, the Elevate findings were buried. The state's auditor found undisclosed executive interests in a fund seeded with $25 million of untraceable public returns and referred it to an inspector general who has published nothing, and the governor, per the Indianapolis Business Journal, declared himself satisfied within a week while the loan default stayed open. The effect is that the findings were referred into a process that has produced nothing public while the political layer declared the matter closed. ANALYSIS And in our opinion the commerce secretary's arrangement is built in a way that lets him profit from the data-center boom his agency subsidizes: his company builds data centers for clients it will not name, holds his agency's tax credits, intends to apply for more, and his recusal screen is run by his own subordinate. He says there has been no conflict. On this structure there cannot be a visible one. If Gaylor's client list shows no incentivized project since July 13, 2026, we will say so on this page. ANALYSIS

We are not claiming a fact the documents do not show, and we are not claiming to know intent. What we are claiming is that the innocent version now requires every link in this chain to be an accident that happened to run in the same direction, and the state has published nothing that would let anyone check. What we are still chasing is listed below, and so is exactly what would prove us wrong. LEAD LEAD LEAD One more question sits between this case and the OpenAI case on this site: both pass through Tel Aviv in the same summer, Indiana's money into Iron Nation and OpenAI's most dangerous tests into a vendor called Irregular. We have found no document that connects the two, and we say so. LEAD

What we do not know

There is an innocent reading of each piece, and it is worth stating. Ledger reviews do not find crimes because they do not look for them. Inspector General ethics matters often close quietly. A governor accepting an audit he ordered is ordinary. Iron Nation is a public program with named managers and private money beside the state's. Goodrich disclosed everything, takes a dollar a year, and, per WIBC's account, had his screen cleared by the governor's office and the Inspector General. Every one of those may be true, and the whole picture may still be exactly what it looks like. The documents that would settle it are the return reconciliation, the Inspector General's disposition, the loan file, and Gaylor's client list. None is public. We asked all six parties named here to correct us, in writing, on September 8. One answered. DOCUMENTED