PROVIDENCE – One of Rhode Island’s brightest startup technology firms, Andera, was recently sold to Bottomline Technologies, a publicly-traded financial software firm based in Portsmouth, N.H., for $44 million plus stock, creating a new high-water mark for the state’s emerging technology sector.

The sale also served as a boon to the Slater Technology Fund, one of the early investors in Andera, whose $750,000 investment was now worth more than $3 million when the acquisition closed, according to Slater officials.

“This is the most exciting time that I can remember in Rhode Island over the last few years,” Andera founder and CEO Charlie Kroll told ConvergenceRI in an interview last week. “I’ve seen more startup activity in Rhode Island than we’ve had in the last 10 or 15 years.”

Kroll, who is still a few years under 40, began his entrepreneurial career working out of his college dorm room when he was a student at Brown University, starting a boutique web development firm in 1999. In 2000, he rolled that company into a new startup, Andera, perfecting a streamlined way to open new banking accounts online.

A catalyst for Andera’s success was the USA Patriot Act, which legitimized electronic identity verification as an alternative to traditional paper methods, according to Kroll. Andera was able to create a vendor solution to capitalize on the market need in the financial industry.

The sale was announced on Monday, March 31, and by early Thursday morning, when ConvergenceRI met with Kroll, Bottomline Technologies’ new corporate logo was already painted behind the reception desk, and a Bottomline employee was going over new protocols with Andera’s receptionist.

The décor – with a pool table, a ping pong table, and the Beatles’ lyric, “All Together Now,” a company slogan painted on one of the walls in the wide-open office expanse on the second floor of 15 Park Row, will certainly change. But Kroll wanted to make clear that the company’s presence in Providence would be continuing. “We’ve been clear that this office isn’t going anywhere, the employees aren’t anywhere. This will become a significant location for Bottomline,” he said.

ConvergenceRI: Where does Rhode Island’s innovation ecosystem go from here?
KROLL: The large number of startups has really created an entrepreneurial community that didn’t exist before. The number of startups you have in Rhode Island today measure in the dozens and dozens, some of which have become successful and started to grow.

If you look at companies like Andera, ShapeUp, Swipely, Teespring and Nabsys – I’ve just named five companies, but collectively, those five companies have probably 400 employees.

Those 400 employees are relatively high-wage, high-skilled jobs that are paying two- to three times the median salary in Rhode Island.

It’s the equivalent of 1,000 jobs, right here in Providence. And, that’s just for those five companies. I don’t think people in Rhode Island realize that.

You’ve then got dozens of companies that have started up in the last few years which will reach that same level of scale, so it won’t be long before we see a thousand-job equivalent become the two-, three- and four-thousand job equivalent, moving the needle.

I liken the 1,000 jobs equivalent to a full office tower right in the middle of Providence. It’s as if we’ve filled up the Superman building.

ConvergenceRI: Why haven’t people in Rhode Island understand that?
KROLL: I don’t think a lot of people in Rhode Island realize that. For a long time, the question has been: we hear about all this activity, but where are the jobs? Where are the results?

And the reality is that the results are there today.

ConvergenceRI: Has the paradigm changed? Are new metrics needed?
KROLL: I think the numbers are just starting to become meaningful in the traditional data [metrics]. In terms of jobs created, I just named 400 jobs from five companies that didn’t exist five years ago.

And, the compensation for those jobs are way above the market [median], so that they act much bigger than they are. You’re going to start to see those numbers get bigger and bigger.

At some point, by traditional measures, just by the number of jobs in this sector of the economy, those will start to be more meaningful. You don’t have to create new metrics to see them.

Up until recently, the results haven’t been there. So, the perception has not caught up with the reality, but I think that’s beginning to change as companies start to scale up.

I don’t think we need new metrics; I think the traditional metrics work just fine. The number of jobs created, the salaries, the numbers of dollars raised in outside investor capital.

You look at the companies: Teespring just announced $20 million in venture financing; Swipely has raised more than $10 million; we’ve raised $20 million; ShapeUp is up over $10 million.

These are substantial amounts of venture capital coming into the state from out of Rhode Island. It’s a big part of the reason why you’re seeing so much scale – and the companies are doing something useful with that capital to grow.

ConvergenceRI: Allan Tear at Betaspring has changed his model a bit to focus on firms that don’t fit into the venture capital business model, seeking to create funds for follow-on financing for startup firms in food and design that are driven in large part by talent. Do you see the need for such follow-on funding in the technology sector?
KROLL: Not every business is appropriate for venture financing. Venture financing is not necessarily a badge of honor or a stamp of approval.

There’s nothing wrong in not being a business that is not appropriate for venture capital. There are plenty of successful businesses that don’t need – or don’t want venture capital. It’s not a value judgment.

The company I was talking about before are the companies that have raised venture capital and been very successful in doing it.

Allan is uncovering a segment of the economy that has growth potential but is not necessarily venture backable. That’s a very good thing.

There will be just as much economic activity coming out of food and design as from traditional high-tech companies that are raising venture capital. It’s a different segment of the economy, but at the end of the day, there’s no reason why it can’t have just as big an impact on the economy.

ConvergenceRI: Through your work at Andera, how do you see people’s behaviors changing in the new digital world?
KROLL: The Internet has gone through a few chapters over the last 15 years. The first was the browser era, where people on their desktops and laptops were able to take and transform the physical world into the online world. The development of that happened relatively slowly, though it felt faster at the time. From 1995 through 2005 or 2008, you started to see things begin to move online.

What’s happening now is that mobile is taking over the second wave, and the shift from desktop to mobile is happening much faster than the shift from offline to online. Just over the last three years, we’ve seen our share of user traffic go from 2 percent mobile to 30 percent mobile when people are applying for a new bank account or opening up a new checking account.

Two years ago, 2 percent were doing that on mobile devices. Today, 30 percent of people are doing that on mobile devices, and that number is growing by four percent every quarter. By next quarter, that number should be 34 percent.

You don’t have to be too creative to see that number getting to 50 percent and beyond. The shift is happening much faster than before and it’s impossible to ignore.

ConvergenceRI: Have you looked into changes now happening within the health care sector and the change in health IT?
KROLL: Health care’s not a space I’ve spent any time looking at. But health care, I think, is similar in a lot of ways to financial services. I believe in both cases, they tend to be five to 10 years behind where the industry is. There’s a lot of paper still in both financial services and in health care. You’ve started to see things beginning to move to electronic records. In both cases, there’s so much room for improvement. That’s where the opportunity is right now.

ConvergenceRI: What are your future plans? Are you planning to take some time for yourself? Are you reading anything?
KROLL: I’m going to be here for a little while longer. I’ve promised to be here through the transition, to make sure things come together smoothly. Then I’ll take a little time off. I haven’t had anytime to read; I’ve been reading a lot of legal documents recently.

ConvergenceRI: What do you think is missing from the current innovation ecosystem in Rhode Island?
KROLL: We’re still relatively early in the cycle. We need time to percolate. The thing you need most to build up to scale from where we are now is talent, a deep pool of talent, like what you have in Boston and San Francisco.

You don’t come out of school with talent. The kind of experience you need to build an ecosystem comes purely from having been through it before. We’re starting now to see it with Andera coming full cycle, being acquired by a public company. When you start seeing more circulation between companies, at that point, you will really begin to see the talent pool deepening and bring the conditions with it for a much more dynamic market.

ConvergenceRI: Are there investments in infrastructure that are needed?
KROLL: There’s a gap in early stage financing in Rhode Island infrastructure. For companies that are at the very beginning, with a couple of co-founders and a presentation, there’s capital for them – Betaspring and angel investors who will write checks for very early stage ideas.

There’s also capital for later stage ideas for Andera and other companies like us – out-of-state capital coming in when you have maturing companies that are growing rapidly.

But for that middle stage, there’s still a gap here that Slater has been filling.

But Slater has limited resources, and there’s not enough capital [sources] that can write that six-figure check – not the five-figure check, not the seven-figure check, but that six-figure check. That’s what holding a lot of companies back that could cross the chasm and reach [the market].

ConvergenceRI: How important was Slater to your success?
KROLL: Slater was critical for us. Slater came in at a time when no one else was willing to back us. Slater put substantial capital in us at the time when we really needed it the most.

That investment took seven years to pay off for them. Over time, it created good paying jobs, really creating the foundation for where we able to take this company. And, seven years later, it created a good return [more than $3 million].

You can’t rush these things. They’ve made a lot of investments over the years. Some of which are going to pay off for them. We just have to be patient. I’m a big supporter of the Slater model. I’ve seen it work for us.

I think that the six-figure investment is really the biggest gap we have in Rhode Island. And Slater is in a perfect position to fill it.

ConvergenceRI: What advice would you give to the candidates running for governor in 2014 in terms of economic policy and what kinds of investment the state should be making?
KROLL: I think education has got to be the top priority. It’s a long term bet for people who grow up here, but it’s also a short-term bet for companies who need talent and have a hard time recruiting talent when there’s no place to send their kids. So that’s got to be on the top of the pile.

ConvergenceRI: No place to send their kids to public schools?
KROLL: Yeah, public schools. That’s got to be at the top of the pile. Most candidates appreciate that.

I don’t’ think the funding gap is as important. I think they should find a way to allocate more money to maintain Slater, or some vehicle like Slater.

Frankly, from my perspective, and I’ve said this before, I think the emphasis on taxes and regulation is overblown. For companies like ours, and startups in the technology economy, it’s low on the priority list.

ConvergenceRI: And talent?
KROLL: Invest in the school system. Most of our employees live locally. We don’t’ relocate a lot of people here. We have an office in New York where we have some of our technical team, in Manhattan. But most of our employees are here. They typically live in a 20- to 30-mile radius.

I view this a long-term evolution. The local area has strong talent, but it’s a pretty shallow pool. As you start to see more companies grow up and succeed, you’ll start to see more circulation between those companies, people moving from Andera to Swipely, and from Swipely to ShapeUp, and from ShapeUp to Teespring. That circulation will create a comfort area for new people coming to the area. They’ll know that their options are not limited.

It’s a key ingredient in creating the ecosystem, but it takes time to percolate.