Following a rebrand earlier this year that saw IT consulting firm CG Infinity double down on its innovation program with a new innovation lab, that effort has brought its first venture to fruition.

The Plano-based firm has spun out its first startup with IgniteConnex, an enterprise integration and automation platform. The new startup will aid businesses in their digital transformation efforts, 

“We’ve got a pipeline of things we’re looking at, but this was the first one that made sense to spin out,” Rob Palacios, IgniteConnex’s president and co-founder, told Dallas Innovates.

‘You shouldn’t have to redo all of your infrastructure’

Focusing first on the financial services and energy/utilities industries—areas of expertise for the CG Infinity team—IgniteConnex serves as a low-code, drag-and-drop platform to connect and integrate a business’s legacy technology. It will do that with new digital tools, helping to automate workflows and back-office tasks.

Palacios said the goal is a build a product suite of solutions on top of the platform, based on customers’ pain points. The first of those is IgniteOpen, a tool that helps financial services clients allow their customers to virtually open new accounts, with the goal of aiding those institutions to reach more individuals and businesses.

“Our mantra behind this is you shouldn’t have to redo all of your infrastructure—let’s leverage the investments you’ve made in technology and stitch that together to really bring a superior customer experience without having to redo your entire back-end infrastructure,” Palacios said.

Origins in pandemic need

The idea behind IgniteConnex began around 2020, when the pandemic accelerated businesses’ adoption of new digital tools and workflows. Businesses were coming to CG Infinity for Salesforce and other implementations, but often without any sort of integration platform to aid in the process. Leveraging CG Infinity’s team of around 300—which is split between the U.S. and India—a group led by IgniteConnex co-founder and CTO Sebastian Labrador began working on an in-house solution that would later become the spinout startup.

“What happened with the pandemic is it forced the acceleration of [digital transformation]. It became not just a luxury to have a digitally enabled back office and integrated back office—it became a necessity,” Palacios said. “And at the core of all digital transformation is integration. If you can’t stitch systems together that you already have investments in, it’s really hard to transform the environment and automate things.”

IgniteConnex launches, CG Infinity rebrands

Even before its establishment as an independent company around the beginning of this year, IgniteConnex says it had already amassed nearly 200 users. Palacios added that IgniteConnex was spun out to draw a distinction between its focus and the consulting focus of CG Infinity.

Not long after IgniteConnex was formed, CG Infinity—formerly Cyber Group—rebranded in an effort to reflect its expanded areas of focus and offerings in a move that also included investing in a new 33,000 square-foot headquarters and innovation lab.

CG Infinity also has offices in Houston, Albuquerque, Little Rock, and New Delhi.

A ‘whole backlog of ideas’

Looking ahead, Palacios said IgniteConnex will seek to expand its offering of digital products, adding that it could look to take on outside funding or enter into joint venture efforts to aid in its expansion.

“By having CG infinity’a integration partner, we can take it anywhere we need to and we can build the full suite of technology consulting services to go along with the platform to service our customers’ needs,” Palacios said.

For CG Infinity’s part, Palacios said the firm has a “whole backlog of ideas” that it’s “prototyping” and “experimenting” on. While not getting into specifics, he said those efforts will likely focus on CG Infinity’s core areas in the financial services and energy/utility space. The company will also look to expand efforts horizontally into areas like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data and analytics—areas where CG Infinity sees itself as having the biggest potential to help its customers.

“Being able to go into each of our customers’ environments and say, ‘We have a solution for this pain that you are experiencing right now within your organization, this can be solved’—and to be able to bring to bear a tool and a great pricing model for that customer—is a really a rewarding experience,” co-founder and CTO Labrador told Dallas Innovates.

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