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Tech Topics In This Article: Atlanta workforce, venture capital
San Francisco-based Ditto, a startup building mobile databases with built-in edge device connectivity, just announced a massive $82 million Series B funding round with a $462 million post-money valuation. But beyond the impressive funding numbers, there’s another key takeaway for the Southeast: Ditto is focused on growing in Atlanta.
“Atlanta is a big part of Ditto’s story. We have major customers like Chick-fil-A and Delta here, so we wanted to make investments in hiring local talent. As we started scouting locations for an office, Atlanta won over DC, Raleigh, and Austin when evaluating all our company’s needs,” CEO and Co-Founder Adam Fish told Hypepotamus. “One of the biggest drivers was recruiting from Georgia Tech and all the nearby universities, who have top-tier engineering talent rivaling the likes of Stanford, MIT, and Harvard. This felt like an incredible opportunity to leverage our relationship with Georgia Tech and others and embrace all that the city and state has to offer.”
Ditto currently has 15 employees based in Atlanta, but Fish said that the company could “see our employee headcount double or more this year.”
Fish added that Ditto anticipates growth opportunities in transportation, retail, Point of Sale (POS), Industrial/Manufacturing, and Defense industries. These industries are looking for ways to ensure that edge devices and deskless workers can connect, sync, and operate wherever they are located, “no Wi-Fi, servers, or cloud required,” according to a press statement.
Ditto’s edge-sync platform allows apps to store, sync, and process data anywhere.
“The traditional approach to edge software was to deploy edge servers, maintain software on these servers and extensive network systems like WiFi. At remote locations, companies are essentially trying to shrink data centers or cloud infrastructure. What our customers tell us is that this is extremely costly – both to acquire all the hardware, and more importantly, to maintain it,” Fish told Hypepotamus.
“Imagine your local fast food restaurant chain. If they’ve added in additional servers and built out WiFi networks in all their locations, when something goes wrong, no one on-site is equipped to fix it. This restaurant is required to have costly technicians available, which as one customer described it, leads to a situation like whack-a-mole,” he added. “Ditto’s unique edge-native solution transforms this challenge. Instead of chasing ever more costly hardware and maintenance to achieve edge capabilities, we allow companies to leverage the mobile devices their field workers already have. We replace hardware with software – a no-brainer choice.”
What Investors Are Saying
Ditto’s Series B round led by San Francisco-based firms Top Tier Capital Partners and Acrew Capital. A mix of existing and new investors — including Thomas Tull’s U.S. Innovative Technology Fund (USIT), True Ventures, Amity Ventures, Fundrise, Friends and Family Capital, Advance Venture Partners, and Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ) — also joined the round.
“True generational solutions are rare, but I believe Ditto has built one. They recognized a widespread enterprise challenge– unreliable connectivity for deskless workers and edge devices has been limiting advances in edge computing,” said Om Malik of True Venture Partners. “Their incredible growth is proof of the game-changing impact Ditto’s edge-native architecture has on major enterprises.”
