CUSTOMER STORY
How Louisiana Economic Development Built One Front Door to Every Major Project in the State
A state agency with no structured way to connect local businesses to incoming megaprojects partnered with Supplier.io to build a statewide supplier directory in about five weeks — now connecting 3,828 Louisiana businesses to $260 billion in investment, including projects from Meta and SpaceX.
Our existing businesses, small, medium or large, should have the first crack at winning that work and growing alongside that transformational investment.”
Louisiana Economic Development is the state agency responsible for economic development across all 64 parishes and eight regions of Louisiana. Chris Cassagne, Senior Director, Louisiana Growth Network, Louisiana Economic Development, describes the agency’s work as a three-legged stool. One leg recruits new industries into the state. A second retains and expands the businesses already there. The third supports small business, entrepreneurship, and innovation, and it’s the leg Cassagne and Stephanie Hartman, Manager, Small Business Services at Louisiana Economic Development, help lead, overseeing the small business team and Source Louisiana.
Since the start of 2024, more than $260 billion in new investment has been announced in Louisiana, including SpaceX’s $100 billion Starbase Louisiana project, the largest single investment in the state’s history.
The Challenge
Before Source Louisiana, there was no framework for connecting Louisiana businesses to the projects landing in the state.
The same pattern repeated with every announcement. LED would issue a news release about a company coming to Louisiana, and the phones in the small business office would start ringing. Every business in the state wanted the same answer: how do I get my foot in the door with this company? Getting that answer meant tracking down the business development project manager who had recruited that particular company, then figuring out how they wanted to handle it — forward information? Provide a contact? Point to a portal? Run a pre-qualification process?
LED wasn’t short on data. It had economic driver lists, certification lists, and records of companies that had engaged with the agency in one way or another. What it didn’t have was a single, consolidated directory of Louisiana businesses with their capabilities attached, which is exactly what incoming projects kept asking for. Hartman notes this isn’t a Louisiana-specific problem: agencies at the state, county, and city level tend to hold the same scattered lists and face the same requests when a company with a local sourcing commitment arrives.
The timing made it acute. The administration that took office in 2024 had rebuilt the state’s business development function, and investment was arriving at a scale Louisiana had never seen.
The Turning Point
The catalyst was Meta.
In 2024, Meta announced a $10 billion data center in Richland Parish, a rural area of northeast Louisiana. LED sat down with Meta to talk about local sourcing, and Meta’s answer was direct. They wanted to source as much locally as possible, and they wanted LED to hand them the list.
That request exposed the gap. “We have a lot of lists, but we don’t have the list. We don’t have the centralized, aggregated list of all the companies in Louisiana that can do X, Y and Z,” said Cassagne.
Cassagne and Hartman immediately started interviewing vendors. They selected Supplier.io, pitched the concept to the secretary, and expected roughly three months to build it. The secretary took it to the governor and came back the next day; the governor wanted a press conference announcing the partnership the following week. “From first conversation to launch date, it can’t have been more than four to five weeks,” said Hartman.
That timeline held because Supplier.io’s implementation team moved with LED at every step: white-labeling the platform, configuring the backend, and building toward a launch date that kept moving up. Source Louisiana went live on September 16, 2025, announced by Governor Jeff Landry from LED’s office.
When they register in Source Louisiana, they also become visible on the broader Supplier.io profile and to all of the folks subscribing to and licensing your database. It came as a natural best solution for us.”
The project that asked for the list now runs on it
In July 2026, Meta expanded its Louisiana investment from $10 billion to $50 billion, building out a campus it calls Hyperion. When it announced the expansion, Meta coordinated with the three general contractors working on the project, and Cassagne said they pointed all of them at Source Louisiana. “They’ve adopted Source Louisiana as their preferred vendor and subcontracting platform. They exclusively use it to identify the Louisiana businesses they want to plug into opportunities.”
Advice for Others
Cassagne has one main piece of advice for another state agency considering something similar: the platform is the smaller half of the job. The larger half is getting every organization that touches businesses in the state saying the same thing. Chambers of commerce, trade associations, and regional economic development partners all need to be pointing people to the same door. “Early on we had to make sense of the marketing campaign and get our messaging aligned. Once we got to that point, it was kind of like we’re off to the races.”
He measures the result by how businesses now arrive. Referrals used to come from regional economic development organizations. Increasingly, they now come from other business owners who won work through the directory and then told a peer to register.
Hartman adds an internal counterpart to that external work. She said it’s imperative thatSource Louisiana is raised inside LED at the start of project conversations, positioned to incoming companies as something Louisiana offers them, instead of a time-consuming request made of them late in the process. “It’s not a tack-on at the end where we’re trying to chase people down to use this tool.”
We had something very particular in mind when we approached Supplier.io, and the team was fantastic in making the Louisiana use case work, from the white labeling to the back-end configuration and all the nuances involved.”
The Result
One year after launch, 3,828 Louisiana companies are fully registered in Source Louisiana, and coverage is effectively statewide: more than 100 registered companies in each of the state’s eight regions, and at least one in 63 of 64 parishes. LED has issued 30 Explorer Advanced licenses to announced and prospective projects, and buyers have run roughly 16,500 searches against the directory since launch.
Two of the state’s highest-profile projects are now among its heaviest users. Meta’s three Hyperion general contractors run their subcontracting exclusively through Source Louisiana, and SpaceX received directory access six weeks before its Starbase Louisiana announcement.
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