After 16 years operating as a consulting business for the manufacturing and distribution industries, downtown-based SaberLogic changed gears and raised $2 million for a new business venture.

“Over the years, we have seen a lot of the same problems with our clients over and over again,” SaberLogic CEO Adam Ellis said Monday. “Like a lot of entrepreneurs, you kind of think, is there a way that I can solve this problem in a much bigger way?”

Ellis, 39, said his Main Street company is offering a mobile applications development platform, Bezlio, which allows a company’s employees to use any smartphone device to access their data in real time without having to remotely sign onto on-premise software systems.

Ellis said that sometimes the best computer software for a particular company is not cloud-based, but has to be installed on the company’s network, and many times does not include an app for mobile access.

“If you are sitting at your desk all day long that is not a problem,” Ellis said. “You can just jump into your different screens, you can go in and out of different systems. The problem gets to be when you are not sitting in front of your computer all day.”

The Bezlio app was released in January 2017.

Ellis said SaberLogic, which started with four employees and now employs 25, attended the 3 Rivers Venture Fair in Pittsburgh last year.

“It is sort of like speed-dating for investors,” Ellis said. “You have exactly three minutes to pitch your company to investors.”

The company was able to walk away from the conference with a term sheet, meaning one of the potential investors expressed interest in the Bezlio app.

“That was a really big deal for us and really what it meant was kind of validation from these VCs (venture capitalists) that we were onto something, and we started down the process of really locking up the rest of the investors,” Ellis said.

The Cleveland-based company JumpStart Inc. is SaberLogic’s lead investor, with other investors from around Ohio and Chicago getting the company its seed money, Ellis said.

Read the full story at The Gazette.