Opportunity Machine celebrates permanent home in downtown Lafayette

The Opportunity Machine, an incubator for start-up businesses, has a new, permanent home in downtown Lafayette.

Dignitaries, including representatives of the Opportunity Machine, the Lafayette Economic Development Authority and Downtown Development Authority, celebrated the new location with a ribbon cutting Friday.

LEDA purchased the building at 314 Jefferson St. for $1 million in 2019. It formerly housed Knight’s/Lee’s Furniture Store then Karma Nightclub.

The 22,000 square-foot building was renovated to provide community workspace, private desk space, private offices, conference rooms, training rooms and other amenities to help start-up businesses get off the ground.

“Our goal isn’t to fill this space with small businesses and entrepreneurs,” Tom Cox, president and chairman of the Opportunity Machine board of directors, said Friday. “Our goal is to fill all of the office space in Lafayette by leverageing this center as a catalyst.”

The concept for the Opportunity Machine was born in 2009 at a LEDA retreat to help small businesses accelerate and grow the local economy, he said.

At the end of 2021, Cox said, the start-up center’s members and alumni companies had 629 full-time equivalent employees in Lafayette Parish, contributing more than $725 million to the gross domestic product in the parish. Since 2015, he added, Opportunity Machine members and alumni raised more than $40 million in investment capital.

One of the local businesses that grew with help from the accelerator program was Hampr, laundry pickup and delivery service in Lafayette. Founder and CEO Laurel Hess said the company just closed on a $5 million round of funding that she’ll use to expand the business nationally and bring more talent to Lafayette.

Many Opportunity Machine graduates with hundreds of employees have located their permanent offices in downtown Lafayette, growing the city’s economy.

“The Opportunity Center is critical to our growth,” Mayor-President Josh Guillory said. “The Opportunity Center is critical to our economy.”

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